They've collaborated in various configurations over the past several years, but "Flood and Fire" is the first new offering from the guitar-drums duo of Steve Gunn and John Truscinski since their 2012 classic Ocean Parkway. A welcome return, to say the least. The tune (drawn from become a member or log in.
Last year, Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter Kayla Cohen released Open to Chance under her Itasca banner. In his review for Aquarium Drunkard, Tyler Wilcox admitted the temptation to call the album's slow burning, psychedelically-tinged folk rock "the perfect autumn soundtrack," noting the album would sound just as good in the spring or summer. And he's been proven right. As the seasons have passed, Open to Chance has continued to reveal and offer new beauty.
On the occasion of her current tour with Dylan Golden Aycock and Lake Mary, we caught up with Cohen to discuss the dreamlike nature of her songs, and the current cultural moment that finds young artists synthesizing disparate influences into a cohesive, subtle new whole.
Aquarium Drunkard: Open to Chance was one of my favorite albums of 2016. Have you started working on a new record?
Kayla Cohen: I’ll get totally into [the process] and get pretty far, and then take a couple of weeks off, and basically start over. That’s happened a few different times. It’s been slow, but I don’t think there’s any rush with anything.
AD: You worked with a full band on Open to Chance. Are you planning to do that again?
Kayla Cohen: I’ll record with a full band, but [for now] I’ve been working on it by myself.
AD: On Open to Chance, the word “dream” appears often. Is dream logic something you seek out in your own music?
Kayla Cohen: I think it’s part of music for me, just in general. The dream world is where you can access symbols that don’t necessarily make linear sense, but that can be really evocative. Lyrically, that’s perfect. That’s what you want. When I was working on that record, I feel like the dream world was more of a thing I was working with in a way that’s more hazy and mirage-like than I’ve been thinking about it now. I’ve been reading a lot of poetry centered on dreams. For example, this one poet, William Ferguson: the way he uses the dream vocabulary is more straightforward, serious, and concrete. That’s something I’m discovering now. But dreaming...that’s super fertile ground. And it’s easy too: you can just be like, “I have a night, now I’m going to drink some weird tea and go to sleep and see what happens.”
AD: I like that idea of dreams as a laboratory for songs. Do you have pretty vivid dreams?
Kayla Cohen: [Laughs] Yeah. I have phases where they are and they aren’t. But if the waking world isn’t providing you with the kind of inspiration you want, you can go to bed and see what happens, too.
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Lagniappe (la ·gniappe) noun ‘lan-ˌyap,’ — 1. An extra or unexpected gift or benefit. 2. Something given or obtained as a gratuity or bonus.
Earlier this year Ultimate Painting's Jack Cooper slid us an early version of his new solo album, Sandgrown. At nine tracks we were immediately drawn to its sparse, tranquil, yet personal offerings inspired by his hometown of Blackpool off the coast of England. The effort finds Cooper waxing nostalgic about his time growing up on the Fylde Coast and the cast of characters that come with living and working in a seasonal resort town. Often compared to the Velvets, Sandgrown finds Cooper acknowledging other influences including Terry Allen and The Grateful Dead, mixing them with the experimental textures of John Cale and Robert Wyatt. More on that, from the artist, below.
Jack Cooper :: Blood Dries Darker (Woods)
Woods have a special place in my heart because my wife and I are both big fans and we always listen to them together. I first saw them in 2008 in Manchester and it's been a pleasure seeing them so many times since then. This is my favourite song of theirs and although they never really play it, Jarvis dedicated it to my wife and I last time they played London. It's a pretty perfect song.
Jack Cooper :: Lubbock Woman (Terry Allen)
Terry Allen's Lubbock (On Everything) was a big influence in this solo album of mine. The framework of writing about a town or place opens up a world of possibilities. I've been writing about Blackpool since I lived there but the idea to do something centered on that was really inspired by this record and Watertown by Frank Sinatra. The words and the delivery is all about Terry, so it felt weird singing them. I scrapped the idea 4 or 5 times, before thinking 'fuck it'... it's a great song.
Jack Cooper :: For A While (Frank Sinatra)
Frank Sinatra's Watertown is just the most melancholic, downbeat, comforting record I've ever heard. It's his best album and his finest acting performance. Again...the delivery and words are all about him but I gave it a good shot. My friend Phil Anderson recorded some piano for me...it's blown out and weird.
Jack Cooper :: Black Peter (Grateful Dead)
I'm not too sure why I chose this apart from being a huge fan of the Grateful Dead. Robert Hunter was on fire around this time...such rich, interesting imagery and narratives. I really can't think of a better lyricist, and around this time in particular.
Jack Cooper :: Big Louise (Scott Walker)
Most of these songs I'll class as misses, in that they're all so hard to do justice too. The vocalists are way too singular and this one in particular I've included just for the hell of it. The phrasing and way he sings is so incredibly complicated. I couldn't even begin to get right. I've listened back to all of these at some point and become to self conscious about even submitting them (laughs). I guess there's something liberating about taking a shot at something and just going with it.
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Continuing to effortlessly distill the sounds and traditions of Southern Appalachia, the British Isles, and the rolling ranch land of their rural Saskatchewan home, second cousins Kacy Anderson and Clayton Linthicum return with The Siren’s Song. Their fourth long-player and second with a backing band - this time comprised of their touring outfit, Shuyler Jansen (bass) and Mike Silverman (drums) - production of the album was helmed by Jeff Tweedy and recorded in Chicago at Wilco’s Loft studio.
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For the follow-up to 2016's The Rarity of Experience, sprawling, expansive double LP, Chris Forsyth and his Solar Motel comrades take a more spare/skeletal path. For one thing, Forsyth handles all the guitar work on become a member or log in.
Last year’s Imaginational Anthem: The Private Press, was one of the best compilations in quite some time, bringing to light a host of extremely obscure guitarists from the 1970s and 1980s – players who lurked in the considerable shadows of Fahey, Basho, Bull and Kottke, but still . . .
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There's been no shortage of national focus on Arizona of late. The president showed up, there was trouble; our disgraced former sheriff slithered back into the headlines; and a federal judge ruled racism as the main factor in a ban on ethnic studies in Arizona schools. From the outside, Arizona likely seems like a land of extremes, of extreme ideologies and extreme heat. And it is that, but for those of us listening with our ear to the ground, those extremes extend to artistic vitality and spiritual growth. From the dusty cowgirl songs of Billie Maxwell to the blistered soul of Eddie & Ernie, from the exoticism of the Sun City Girls to the fried psychedelia the Meat Puppets, from the proto-freak folk of Black Sun Ensemble to the cosmic crush of Destruction Unit, Arizona has always harbored strange musical aberrations.
The Old Arizona was weird, but so is the new. Two stalwart examples of this New Weird Arizona? Tucson combo the Myrrors and the Phoenix-based Sunn Trio. Recently, the bands released new LPs, titled Hasta La Victoria and Sunn Trio, respectively.
Their connections are more than geographical; Sunn Trio arrives via Sky Lantern Records, the label run by Nik Rayne of the Myrrors, which has released music by like-minded explorers Eternal Tapestry, Dead Sea Apes, and Kikagaku Moyo. And even though Hasta La Victoria, released by the psych-leaning Beyond Is Beyond Is Beyond label, finds the Myrrors playing an entirely discrete combination of Krautrock, ambient, and drone than Sunn Trio’s Middle Eastern/free jazz/bizzaro excursions, it’s clear a psychic connection ties the groups together, a unity that exists despite vastly different sonic frameworks.
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Our weekly two hour show on SIRIUS/XMU, channel 35, can be heard twice every Friday — Noon EST with an encore broadcast at Midnight EST.
SIRIUS 492: Jean Michel Bernard — Générique Stephane ++ Rosebud - Interstellar Overdrive ++ Talking Heads - I Zimbra ++ Gal Costa - Relance ++ Lee “Scratch” Perry - City To Hot ++ Ekambi Brillant - Africa Africa ++ Tom Tom Club - L'î‰léphant ++ Omni - Afterlife ++ Medium Medium - Hungry, So Angry ++ Talking Heads - Seen And Not Seen ++ Vivienne Goldman - Private Armies Dub ++ Maximum Joy - Let It Take You There ++ Atlas Sound - Recent Bedroom . . .
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Come for the drums, stay for the humid washes of Cameroonian fuzz. Originally released in 1975 via Ekambi Brillant's Africa Oumba lp, "Africa Africa" has been resurrected of late by the Paris based Africa Seven imprint. Dig in, as the track appears on both African Funk Experimentals 1975-1982 and volume one of the label's ongoing African . . .
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Mic control, Jamaican DJ Winston Williams had it. Released last year as part of the latest excavation of Studio One's vaults, Radio Show finds the famed selector mc'ing two episodes broadcasted for the Jamaican Broadcast Corporation; 1977's Sounds of Young Jamaica and 1978's Soul, Power And Sound. While the pool of massive talent here is a given (Sugar Minott, Alton Ellis, Heptones, Burning Spear), it's Williams unmistakable cadence and delivery that warrant a second look. Unlike other mediums, I've always argued that the best radio feels alive, like magic, and the following is proof positive why.
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Lifted from a 1977 collection known as Discoballs: A Tribute to Pink Floyd, Rosebud was a French studio project featuring a number of notable players (composer Gabriel Yared, Magma's Jannick Top and Claude Engel), bent on reinterpreting eight Pink Floyd tracks in the vein of "disco". Emphasis on parentheses, as the results skew more toward early electronic music and the pulsing mutant polyrhythms of Talking Heads, rather than, say, Gloria Gaynor.
Forty years later, whatever the project's original intent, the end results . . .
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On Indiana power trio Cloakroom's new album Time Well, the band weds shoegaze's blurry impressionism to post-rock heaviness and a rootsy framework. It's a heavy record, but its heft is due to more than the thick layers of guitar. On songs like "Seedless Star" and "Concrete Gallery," singer Doyle Martin conjures a particular atmosphere with his airy vocals; listen closely, and the influence of country rock and blues emerges, woven deeply into the band's dream rock aesthetic. But that influence can also be heard explicitly -- see the band's cover of Songs: Ohia's "Steve Albini's Blues," in which the band inhabits the song of another heavy metal-leaning Indiana boy -- and Time Well's "Hymnal," which finds the band reworking the 19th century American spiritual "Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord)," imbuing the traditional song with space rock textures.
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Earlier this month marked the 10th anniversary of the departure of Lee Hazlewood from our plane, on August 4, 2007. In the decade since his passing, Hazlewood's music has been the source of no small amount of fascination. The focused attention on his work feels as strong as ever, bolstered by a series of reissues and retrospectives from Light in the Attic, the tremendous personal biography Lee, Myself, and I: Inside the Very Special World of Lee Hazlewood by Wyndham Wallace, and numerous covers and interpretations of his work.
But the final word, it seems, always belongs to Lee himself. Released shortly after his death, "Hilli (At the Top of the World)" remains a fitting tribute to Hazlewood. Recorded with Icelandic quartet amiina, known predominately for their work with Sigur Ros, the song featured Hazlewood reading lyrics written by Wallace, capturing a spirit of environmental wonder and beauty.
At the top of the world there’s an island
A place where the sun never shines
But the people don’t care
Because the snow over there
Is so bright that the sun’s in their mind.
The song was recently reissued digitally and as a limited 12" record in honor of its 10th anniversary, and precedes the reissue of amiina’s kurr. Haunting and quizzical, "Hilli (At the Top of the World") serves as a reminder of Hazlewood's playful spirit and singular voice. words/j woodbury
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There’s no shortage of Leonard Cohen live albums from over the years, but there's never been an official release from the man’s 1976 summer tour of Europe. This masterful two-hour Montreux set would do the trick nicely — backed by a versatile band, Cohen leans into his hits with a swagger worthy of Sinatra and offers up a handful of less-traveled tracks. You don’t really think of his music as particularly funky, but hey, it was ‘76 and disco was in the air; “Lover Lover Lover” and “There Is A War” are darkly comic boogies . . .
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Our weekly two hour show on SIRIUS/XMU, channel 35, can be heard twice every Friday — Noon EST with an encore broadcast at Midnight EST.
SIRIUS 491: Jean Michel Bernard — Générique Stephane ++ Gil Scott-Heron - Message To The Messengers ++ Sinkane - U’Huh ++ Gal Costa - Relance ++ Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy w/ Tortoise - Cravo î‰ Canela ++ Yoko Ono - Mind Train (AD edit) ++ Lizzy Mercier Descloux - Wawa ++ Yabby U - Conquering Dub (excerpt) ++ Serge Gainsbourg - Javanaise Remake ++ Brian Eno - No One Receiving ++ Faust - Just A Second (Starts Like That!) [excerpt] ++ Bitchin Bajas - Bajas . . .
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