Out of print on vinyl since 1977, Bennie Maupin’s solo debut, The Jewel in the Lotus, makes its welcome return to the format this month via ECM’s Luminessence reissue series. A counterpoint to the playful funk of Hancock’s Headhunters, The Jewel in the Lotus swings the pendulum well beyond Mwansishi’s heady explorations into more earthy, deeply spiritual turf.
A true headphone journey and an aural balm for a world that’s spinning a bit too fast.
New Zealand’s cosmic jazz ensemble The Circling Sun comes forth with Orbits, the sequel to 2023’s Spirits and, like it, deftly serves up Yusef Lateef vibes on a platter. The group has all the irreverence and joy that makes spiritual jazz so compelling versus its more competitive, virtuosity-obsessed co-genres—especially when delivered by a group this numerous (an undectet!), you can almost hear the musicians having fun.
Released twenty years ago in 2005, The Campfire Headphase places a premium on self-exploration and reflection to recognize what has made the rest worthwhile–to marvel at the minute when the macro is just too damn much.
Waltz For Debby captures the symbiosis of the Bill Evans Trio beautifully — a live documentation of three musicians whose relationship with each other eclipses being bandmates for something far more powerful and cosmic. It’s the kind of confluence that happens once in a lifetime for most musicians, and that’s if they’re lucky. It’s the sound of stars aligning; it’s the sound of capturing lightning in a bottle.
I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away is the culmination of Hayden Pedigo’s Motor Trilogy, an album cycle documenting an unintended journey of becoming that has seen the guitarist step firmly into his own as a both player and composer, evolving from fingerpicking wunderkind to one of the foremost ambassadors of modern guitar soli. Pedigo sounds assured and perfectly at home here, his lithe picking at once deliberate and full of surprises, augmented with delicately arranged electric guitar, pedal steel, synth, and strings that imbue each micro-narrative with a pastoral psychedelicism.
If you’re wondering where to head after Dadawah and Heart of the Congos, this ain’t a bad next step. Man from Higher Heights is a roots reggae jammer shrouded in mystery. It’s potent brew of reverent nyabinghi rhythms, synth, brass, and sinuous fuzz guitar will elevate you above the heat and humid murk to your own higher heights.
When it comes to Stereolab, the fact that nobody else can make music quite like them should be justification enough for their return. Instant Holograms on Metal Film is a record for the faithful: stately, relaxed, flush with rhythmic and instrumental detail. To slip inside is to rejoin our previously scheduled program with minimum interruption.
From the archives of Micron Music, Every Mouth Must Be Fed: 1973-1976. A toppermost three year overview of the Kingston, Jamaica based label, the roots collection highlights selects from the likes of Joe Higgs, U Roy, I Roy, Tommy McCook, Junior Byles, King Tubby and others, featuring an effortless array of early reggae and dub.
Mario Cascardo’s first few records, under the moniker Mario Maria, already captured a charming kind of Brazilian ingeniousness: João Gilberto-like vocals and airy guitars were filtered and fused through an old, broken laptop. It was lo-fi in the truest sense: not as an arbitrary aesthetic choice, but as the creative result of a technical obliqueness at the frontiers of capitalistic development. Cascardo’s more recent releases as Atletas, like others from his label Municipal K7, provide even stronger evidence that lo-fi is now happening at the margins, where artists are using their own global displacement as blueprint for new musical imaginations.
Outré California. 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
Welcome to the very first episode of All One Song: A Neil Young podcast, presented by Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions. Join liner notes author, musician, and Shakey historian and Doom and Gloom from the Tomb host Tyler Wilcox along with an array of great musicians and writers discussing their favorite Neil Young song, diving deep into Shakey lore and getting personal about this amazing body of work. It’s a series for Neil heads by Neil heads. Up first? Steve Gunn, with a look at Neil’s epic fish daydream.
The Campfire Headphase is a “trip” record rather than a “psychedelic folk” record. Not quite the ”Ultimate Trip” of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey or the fuzzed out freakouts associated with the cemetery scene in Easy Rider, but the journey of a single person sitting by a fire and seeing where their thoughts lead them under some outside influence. The listener follows along, easing “Into the Rainbow Vein” and skimming along various observations, memories, and eventual realizations before coming out the other side with only a gradually-fading “Farewell Fire” left.
A new project from Adeline Hotel’s prolific Dan Knishkowky is always a welcome surprise, and here the guitarist/composer teams up with harpist and fellow Brooklynite Rebecca El-Saleh (Kitba) for a thrilling, improvisational affair. Finding a shared common ground over themes of “warm yet visceral” textures, the bridge between Knishkowky’s fingerpicking guitar and El-Saleh’s harp makes I’ll Send You A Sign register as a transcendent soundscape infused with a jolted yet serene Americana landscape.
It was just about two decades ago that Black Moth Super Rainbow pulsed and vibrated and vocodered into view, with the freak-electronic classic Dandelion Gum, a synth-blaring magical garden of day-glo delights. BMSR’s main proprietor has released music sporadically ever since, both under the Black Moth Super Rainbow name and as TOBACCO. So while it’s been seven years since the last BMSR album, Panic Blooms, there have been a slew of solo, beat-driven TOBACCO albums in the interim.
Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer follow their 2022 collaboration with Different Rooms, an ambient collage record that once again unites the worlds of cosmic jazz and modular synthesis. The result of their second encounter is another meditative electronic improvisation marked by a glossy timbre of bells throughout, as smooth and crystalline as a pool of soft pebbles.
Max Roach’s deep vision of the drums as a communicator of limitless expression permeates every corner of his pathways. Starting in 1970, his M’Boom percussion ensemble was a collective that brought together an array of African, Latin and all sorts of global rhythms. On this 1979 record, the ensemble explores all sorts of polyrhythms with original compositions from all of the expanded octet, as well as abstractly paying tribute to the likes of Charles Mingus and Thelonious Monk.
Outré California. 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
Sandro Perri is a patient excavator of musical possibilities. For the last three decades, the Toronto based musician has put out meticulously crafted toy adventures marked by hypnotic loops and heartfelt deliveries, in songs that feel refreshingly un-derivative and that carve a distinctive space in the landscape of contemporary experimental pop. What unifies the cerebral techno of Polmo Polpo, the imaginative funk of Impossible Spaces, or the seemingly infinite mosaics of the more recent records, though, is the piecemeal lacing of cell fragments by the game of restraint and discovery of his artistic research.
All One Song: A Neil Young Podcast is coming this summer from Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions, hosted by Shakey historian and superfan Tyler Wilcox. Tune in via the Transmissions feed starting Wednesday, June 25.
In June, the House of Representatives voted to eliminate all $1.1 billion in Federal Funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for the next two years. Mike Horn, who records as the cosmic ambient Seawind of Battery, is fighting back, raising money to support public radio and TV through this 19-track compilation. It’s a worthy cause, and you could justify the purchase strictly on philanthropic grounds. However, Save the Waves is also an excellent compendium of the current state of ambient, (mostly) instrumental psychedelia, topped up with contributions by Takoma-style pickers, experimental droners, slowcore dreamers and improvising guitar heroes. Don’t buy it because you should. Buy it because you want to.
Waltz For Debby captures the symbiosis of the Bill Evans Trio beautifully — a live documentation of three musicians whose relationship with each other eclipses being bandmates for something far more powerful and cosmic. It’s the kind of confluence that happens once in a lifetime for most musicians, and that’s if they’re lucky. It’s the sound of stars aligning; it’s the sound of capturing lightning in a bottle.
