Homespun mysticism, where the plainest of elements combine into woozy revelation. Pedal steel, just by its nature, has an otherworldly vibe, but there’s a glow of alternate reality in the guitar picking, too, and a hint of the supernatural in the echo-sheathed vocals . . .
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Black Sabbath's “Planet Caravan” is one of those songs that feels like you can move in like an apartment, rearrange the furniture, and make it your own. Expanding upon his 2016 Eno project, Plays Music For Airports, guitarist Chris Schlarb assembled an improvising ensemble to reconstruct a canonized song and write an original piece for its b-side . . .
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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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On Education & Recreation, the Australian quintet digs into the laidback ethos of breezy coastal funk. Like a 70s surf soundtrack with drum breaks, the twelve pieces assembled for their third record finds Surprise Chef charting the ebb and flow of tidal groove with an added emphasis on the need to get up and move . . .
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His tenth full-length, Heartmind at times feels like a representation of Cass McCombs’ own wandering mindset. While the album’s eight songs vary in tone and style, they all seem to hold a common thread, whether lyrically or musically. It’s an album that McCombs couldn’t have intended to make precisely, as to direct himself toward it, would’ve been to betray his own ambitions . . .
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This week on Transmissions, Chris Forsyth returns to discuss the gleaming power pop and avant-rock of his latest, Evolution Here We Come. Featuring members of Tortoise, Garcia Peoples, the Sun Ra Arkestra, and The Dream Syndicate, it bounds forward with guitar-driven exuberance and sparkle . . .
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The king of the universal delta returns. In the world of Open music there is no greater force than Mike Cooper. Stepping back from the free-folk jazz that made him an icon in the seventies, Cooper has spent the second half of his career exploring the near infinite routes his National Tri-Cone Resonator can conjure. Forbidden Delta Planet Blues presents yet another exemplary expedition into the labyrinthine pockets of improvised sound that Cooper navigates so well . . .
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Born in 1944, the French singer Alain Kan has been missing for 32 years, 4 months and 16 days. Last spotted in April of 1990, at the Rue de la Pompe metro station in Paris, Kan left behind a body of work aesthetically indebted to contemporaries Bowie, Reed and Bolan. For a taste, slide into the glam inspired mood piece "Nadine, Jimmy & Moi", via Kan's debut LP, 1975's Et Gary Cooper S'Éloigna Dans Le Désert . . .
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In a longform, career-spanning conversation, Tim Kinsella of Cap'n Jazz, discusses the Gimme Altamont project with Jenny Pulse, writing "systems" instead of songs, acting, and more . . .
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Like his former collaborator and wanderer compatriot, Michael Hurley, Ralph White enters the realm of the Avant-Garde in his manipulation of the traditional structure of folk music—pushing it to the frontier where familiar meets experimental. White shows no signs of settling down at a ripe young 70 years of age. In fact, he has hit the road, leaving Austin for the wilds of communal living in Arizona. As the title cut implies, we can expect Ralph to further manifest that wandering spirit, outset for “just a story and a song . . .
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In the liner notes of Cass McCombs’ tenth full-length album Heartmind is a rambling paragraph that hides within it a depiction of the creation process: “If I direct myself, I betray my direction, so I keep walking..” McCombs seems to be telling a story about caroming about the streets of San Francisco, but it’s also something akin to a lost Oblique Strategy. Within the album’s classic run-time of 8 songs and 43 minutes is a genuine attempt at avoiding betraying direction and attempting to understand more of the world around us . . .
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It doesn’t get any realer (or un-realer) than this. Promised Land Sounds finds Ras Michael and the Sons of Negus levitating somewhere between a Grounation drum ceremony and an acid test. It’s a hypnotic, disorienting, and deeply dubbed out live set that’s every bit the spiritual successor to Ras Michael’s dread opus, Peace and Love—Wadadasow, or the Lee Perry produced Love Thy Neighbour . . .
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“Bobo Germaine”—the closing track off Zirihi Bony Castro’s 1980 debut album, aptly titled “80”—is a serene comedown from the preceding twenty-eight minutes of dizzying high-life & funk-infused soukous off the Ivory Coast. The Sunday morning to the record’s previous Saturday night, if you will, finds Castro in balladeer mode, falling soberly in line with an achingly pensive organ, before a mournful sax cracks open the interlude, topping us off with an extra layer of the smooth . . .
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More than four decades into it, punk gentleman Tav Falco is still on the road, still tapping into flowing channels of primal rock & roll. Fresh off last year's release of Club Car Zodiac, he's united The Panther Burns for the "Rogue Male" tour, and plotting a course through the U.S. Ahead of the shows, Jared Artaud of The Vacant Lots/Alan Vega Archive caught up with Falco to discuss his recent work, relationship with Alex Chilton, and the fractured state of the union . . .
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Check the treads and fill up the tank, here's a top track for your next asphalt-adventure inspired playlist. "Highway 10 Blues", the new single from T.J. Masters' Guma project (and closing number on forthcoming album, Workingman’s Guma), is a dust-ripping psych-country blast . . .
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