Sometime in the mid-1980s, John Zorn was hanging out in New York City’s East Village when he made a career-altering choice: to take in a hardcore show at CBGBs. The experience profoundly shaped his next album, the ultra fast, ultra brief Spy vs Spy: The Music of Ornette Coleman . . .
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West of Roan is a duo of Annie Schermer and Channing Showalter, two visual and performing artists, who share a love of old folk and myth, close harmonies, shifting drone and puppets. Though grounded in old, ancestral traditions—Celtic and Norse mythology, unadorned singing and the plangent tones of fiddle—the pair have resolutely avoided folk purism. “We’re pretty careful about performing traditional music,” Showalter explains.“ We think it through and we think about what we want to say about the song that we’re singing that’s not ours, and if we don’t feel like we really . . .
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34.1090° N, 118.2334° W . . .
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It’s just guitar, drums and vocals for the duration of the Glass Bead Band’s self-titled debut LP, but that’s more than enough — this is killer stuff, perhaps not unlike something you might’ve heard on Touch & Go back in the mid-90s. Matt Stadelmann’s declamatory vocals and elemental (but still highly melodic) guitar, Marshall Yarbrough’s rock-solid rhythms, hypnotic song forms that occasionally build into explosive moments . . .
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The Lemon Twigs on Todd Rundgren, Sean Lennon, Jonathan Rado of Foxygen and their latest album, A Dream Is All We Know . . .
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Ethan Iverson is a rare bird, a jazz musician who's just as adept at writing about the form as he is playing it. As a member of The Bad Plus, the recorded a series of adventurous albums with the trio between 2001 and 2016, incorporating covers of artists like Radiohead, Aphex Twin, and Pink Floyd along the way. In 2017, he departed The Bad Plus, turning his focus to albums like his new Blue Note outing, Technically Acceptable . . .
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Where do Nintendo 64 games, Russian poets, French filmmaker Chris Marker, and references to Goo Goo Dolls megahits collide? In the lyrics of The Neon Gate, the forthcoming album from Nova Scotian quartet Nap Eyes. Due out October 18th from the ever-reliable Paradise of Bachelors, the new album finds Nap Eyes expanding and taking new form . . .
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Drew Gardner steps out on his own with Cygnus A, leaving behind, at least for the moment, his longstanding partnership with Jesse Shepherd in Elkhorn, his free jazz-y improvisations with Flowers in Space (a trio with Andy Cush and Ryan Jewel) and his regular hippie psych collaborations with Jeffrey Alexander and the Heavy Lidders. No, he’s all by himself here, contemplating the vastness of space, one man in the cosmos staring upwards in wonder . . .
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Fran—the musical nom de plume of Chicago’s Maria Jacobson—returns with her first new piece of music since her hushed masterstroke, Leaving, one of our favorite albums from last year. On her new song “Television,” Jacobson drives a lilting, piano-led country ballad that conveys a distant, tilted domestic tranquility with a splash of barroom blues . . .
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As we so often find with the relics of the 1960s, Jim Glover resurfaced in the eighties with a private press disc. Released under the one-off Fang Records, No Need to Explain finds the songwriter in true folky form with just a man, a set of strings, and his words at the microphone . . .
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Through numbly whispered vocals and mushy mellow vibes, Alex Izenberg & the Exiles attempt to distill from 1970s radio rock the elixir of heartbreak and its philosophical innards, mindfully administering the pharmakon of despair here and there: inexorable solitude and oneiric unveilings of being; emotional parallaxes of all sorts; love as a function of time and time as a function of love; and the good old fear of death . . .
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On the occasion of his 66th birthday, Thurston Moore and his wife and creative partner Eva Moore drop in from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University to discuss collaboration and that time Henry Rollins grew out his hair . . .
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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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Hyperbole is near impossible when critiquing Heart Of The Congos, from the untouchable Lee "Scratch" Perry production to the unparalleled vocal harmonies, seamless flow and monumental influence on music within and outside of the realms of reggae. Yet it's also a record whose magic defies scrutiny. It is inscrutable, effervescent and like the ocean upon which the Fisherman toils, its beauty, power and impact shifts according to environmental factors and the mood of the observer . . .
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This week on a far-ranging episode of Transmissions: guitarist, folklorist, and all-around-top-notch thinker Daniel Bachman. A songwriter and composer from Fredericksburg, Virginia, Bachman first began releasing records under the name Sacred Harp, before adopting his own name for a series of finger-picked classics. In the years since, Bachman’s music has grown more and more experimental, and also, it’s become more directly informed by climate change. He joins us to discuss . . .
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