Linda Smith :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview

Linda Smith The AD InterviewPosted on

Linda Smith started recording cassettes at home in the late 1980s, painstakingly writing out simple parts for voice, guitar, bass and percussion, laying them down on a four-track, dubbing them onto cassettes and selling them by mail order to a handful of admirers—many of them also DIY musicians. ow, following its 2021 compilation Till Another Time: 1988-1996, Captured Tracks has reissued Smith’s two exquisite mid-1990s cassette recordings, Nothing Else Matters and I So Liked Spring . . .

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Aquarium Drunkard Book Club :: Chapter 28

Book ClubPosted on

Welcome back to the stacks. It’s Aquarium Drunkard’s Book Club, our monthly gathering of recent (or not so recent) recommended reading. In this month’s stack: the communal effort that has made up NYC’s varied music scenes over the decades, Thurston Moore’s epic memoir, Haruki Murakami, the poetry of Oswell Blakeston and the hallucinatory, existential odyssey that is The Apple in the Dark . . .

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Organic Pulse Ensemble :: Zither Suite

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Those recurring zither glissandi sound like toybox miniatures of Alice Coltrane’s celestial harp. But interestingly, while the opening “Zither Suite” commences with a clutch of spiritual jazz signifiers—a lovely, tentative bass melody, warm piano chords, rain stick clatter, some hand drums, and a searching flute solo—the track takes a sharp turn around the three-minute mark . . .

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Nora Brown :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview

Nora Brown The AD InterviewPosted on

Nora Brown has been playing old time music since she was six years old. She came up in the folk scene surrounding the Jalopy Theatre, the headquarters of traditional music in New York City. Gearing up for a European tour this spring, she spoke with AD about the banjo, the vibes of old time music, listening to your elders . . .

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Weather Report :: Internationales Musikforum, Ossiach, Austria (July 1971)

Weather ReportPosted on

Grateful Dead archivist Dick Latvala referred to tapes from 1968-70 as “primal Dead.” And while I know Jerry was never a fan of this sort of music (he dismissed the first wave of fusion as “state-of-the-art music-school music,”) I’m going to go ahead and call this show a slab of “primal Weather Report.” In fact, this is as a primal as it gets, being, by all accounts, the band’s earliest recorded performance . . .

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Real Estate :: Daniel

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It’s an ironclad law at this point, a logical theorem: every Real Estate record is good, and every Real Estate sounds like Real Estate, because Real Estate is good. But Daniel, their latest, is a wonder in more ways than one . . .

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Ruth Goller :: SKYLLUMINA

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Ruth Goller first toyed with detuned bass lines, chiming harmonics, and swells of choral vocals on her 2021 debut, Skylla. For its sequel, SKYLLUMINA she’s joined by a squadron of drummers. On opener “Below my skin,” Sons of Kemet/The Smile’s Tom Skinner somersaults around the tubs, echo effects trailing his tumbling brushed fills. Much of the album remains in this mystical, nearly ambient space, such as “She was my own she was myself” featuring Goller’s International Anthem labelmate Bex Burch . . .

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Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview

Chief Xian aTunde Abjuah The AD InterviewPosted on

During his 2020 live album Axiom, Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah (formerly known as Christian Scott aTunde) states that he and his band are “reevaluating what we're playing and why." The result of that process can be heard on 2023’s Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning. Dedicated to his grandfather Big Chief Donald Harrison Sr. of the Guardians of the Flame and his uncle, renowned saxophonist Big Chief Donald Harrison Jr. of the Congo Square Nation, the songs on are a change of direction for Chief Adjuah in terms of both sound and subject matter . . .

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The Aquarium Drunkard Show: SIRIUS/XMU (7pm PST, Channel 35)

SIRIUSPosted on

Pulp jazz. Via satellite, transmitting from northeast Los Angeles — the Aquarium Drunkard Show on SIRIUS/XMU, channel 35. 7pm California time, Wednesdays.

34.1090° N, 118.2334° W . . .

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Abdallah Oumbadougou :: Amghar – The Godfather of Touareg Music, Vol. 1

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Back in the ’80s, there were only two major Tuareg guitar bands. One of them was Tinariwen from Mali, the other was Takrist Nakal from Niger. And the leader of Takrist Nakal was named Abdallah ag Oumbadougou.

Now, for the first time, a compilation of his songs is being released on vinyl by Petaluma Records. The two-LP set features songs from Oumbadougou’s albums along with outtakes and demos. It’s the sound of guns and dust, of mudbrick buildings baking in the heat, of the mosque at twilight . . .

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Transmissions :: Scientist

Podcast ScientistPosted on

Incoming transmission from Hopeton Overton Brown, better known as Scientist. As a protege of dub pioneer King Tubby, Scientist represents dub’s third generation—at least that’s how his 1981 collaboration with Tubby and Prince Jammy, First Second, and Third Generation, puts it. These days he’s living in Los Angeles, where he joined host Jason P. Woodbury for this all-new episode. Prepare to cover a lot of ground, as we move from his origins at Channel One and Tuff Gong to divine messages, run-ins with Lee "Scratch" Perry, aliens and angels, simulation theory, his suspicions about . . .

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Jessica Pratt :: Life Is

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Jessica Pratt returned last week with a delicately stunning new tune called “Life Is,” the first taste off her forthcoming new album, Here in the Pitch. The track, which has been on serious repeat, finds Pratt orbiting a Blossom Dearie-like sphere—its big 60s girl group backbeat, staccato strings, and kaleidoscopic production accompanying her on an existential carousel . . .

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Chet Sounds :: Changes Happen To Everyone, Everywhere

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His sophomore outing, Chet Sounds' Changes Happen to Everyone, Everywhere, released this past fall, is a vibrantly slinky and saturated musical trip that rolls along the bayou and floats amongst the cosmos in equal measure. Performed, produced, and mixed by the Australian-based Chet Tucker in a shipping container on his family’s property in the Sutherland Shire, the album takes a lo-fi glossy and groove-laden trip across 70s-am pop, yacht rock, private press outsider folk, library funk, and Rundgren-esque psychedelia . . .

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Juana Molina :: Forfun

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A hypnotic energy courses through Juana Molina’s 2019 EP, Forfun. The story goes that the songs here were reimagined from an improvised set Molina performed in 2018, after her instruments and pedals were misplaced in transit to a festival. Stripped of almost all of her bells and whistles, she more than compensated, conjuring frenetic new sounds . . .

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Atlantis Jazz Ensemble :: Celestial Suite

Atlantis Jazz EnsemblePosted on

Out jazz has always had thing for lost continents. Sun Ra had Atlantis. Don Cherry had Mu. Miles gave us both Agharta and Pangaea on the same day. Even Lee Morgan’s most adventurous record has us searching for new lands. “There are,” said Sun Ra, “other worlds they have not told you of.” And jazz often obliquely advanced its social and political critique of contemporary America by conjuring secret and unknown civilizations—beneath the oceans or beyond the stars.

As such, Ontario keyboardist Pierre Chrétien and alto saxophonist Zakari Frantz had to know they were tapping into the . . .

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