Transmissions :: Mark Stewart (The Pop Group), Stephen Mallinder (Cabaret Voltaire), Eric Random (The Buzzcocks)

This week on Transmissions, a post-punk roundtable with Mark Stewart of The Pop Group, Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire, Eric Random (The Buzzcocks, Nico). On Mark’s latest album, VS, they team up for “Cast No Shadow." How did post-punk hit their respective places? What role did regionalism play in the music’s development? These three join us for a freewheeling hour of discussion and deconstruction—talking about the VU, German cosmic music, black magic, and more . . .

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Revelators Sound System :: Revelators

Recorded during 2020-2021, these freak outs from MC Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger and Cameron Ralston of Spacebomb, offer avant-funk and gospel grooves, heady minimalism, Kosmische Muzik, and dubby ambiance in apocalyptic times . . .

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Ennio Morricone: Sans Mobile Apparent (Bande Originale du Film) / Freddie Hubbard: Music Is Here – Live at Maison de la Radio, Paris 1973

Over the past half decade the Paris based label WeWantSounds has released some of our most favorite reissues in a number of genres: Spiritual Jazz, Soul, Japanese Experimental Pop, Japanese Free Improvisation and Arabic Music. The label’s two most recent reissues (Ennio Morricone's Sans Mobile Apparent (Bande Originale du Film), and Freddie Hubbard's Music Is Here – Live at Maison de la Radio, Paris 1973) maintain the high quality record collectors have come to respect and expect . . .

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Spacemonkeyz Vs. Gorillaz :: Laika Come Home

All mouths will be fed. Twenty years ago next month saw the release of Laika Come Home, a complete and total transfiguration of Gorillaz s/t debut as remixed in dub. Spacemonkeyz (dj Darren Galea) is the controller, and the results are nothing short of sublime. At times haunting, at times ethereal, the dozen tracks absolutely float featuring limber contributions from the likes of U Brown, Tina Weymouth and Terry Hall. Not unlike Bill Laswell's ambient-dub interpretation of the Bob Marley catalog, Laika is the rare instance of a remix album feeling as essential as the core material . . .

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Isaiah Collier & Michael Shekwoaga Ode (I AM) :: Beyond

The Art Ensemble of Chicago’s expression, “Great Black Music: Ancient to the future,” is a program for life and not a mere slogan. It reminds us that we cannot move forward without reference to the past; that we must respect and respond to our elders. On their duo album Beyond, released under the moniker I AM, saxophonist Isaiah Collier and drummer Michael Shekwoaga Ode invoke two of the heaviest albums in the Free Jazz canon: Interstellar Space, by John Coltrane and Rashied Ali, and Duo Exchange, by Rashied Ali and Frank Lowe.

While it echoes the past, Beyond is . . .

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Alice Coltrane :: Live At The Berkeley Community Theater 1972

This is a bootleg, make no mistake! But however you hear it, you gotta hear it (perhaps over on YouTube?). A major addition to the Alice Coltrane canon, this soundboard recording features the pioneering musician and her incredible band (Charlie Haden on bass, Ben Riley on drums, Aashish Khan on sarod, Pranesh Khan on tabla and Bobby W. on tamboura and percussion) journeying fearlessly across the astral plane. Four tracks, fours sides! Tons of AC’s intense organ hijinks – how did she get that crazy sound . . .

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Sá & Guarabyra :: As Canções Que Eu Faço

During the 1970s, Brazilian luminaires Sá, Rodrix & Guarabyra invented what they called "rural rock" as a mixture of anglophone folk rock and música caipira (an umbrella term for the Iberian-descending, acoustic-guitar-based musics from the countryside of Brazil). In 1974, Rodrix dropped the band and Sá & Guarabyra continued as a duo, detaching themselves even further from conventional MPB and going simultaneously more regional, towards genres like sertanejo de raiz and xote, and more pop, towards the esoteric country ballads of Van Morrison or JJ Cale . . .

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Wednesday Knudsen :: Soft Focus – Volumes One And Two

Wednesday Knudson describes the glowing set of tracks on her new LP, Soft Focus, as “ambient.” That’s true, to an extent, but that genre is widely used as a label and has grown a messy head of hair lately. Recorded in spring of last year, right around the time most of us felt remotely safe popping our heads out of our pandemic quarters, the Soft Focus recordings capture a musician treating her terrestrial tones with a newfound appreciation . . .

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Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard On Dublab :: June 2022

Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard returns for four hours of freeform melodies and modulations this Sunday, June 19, airing this month from 7-11 PM Pacific, following a series of special Juneteenth broadcasts. Up first is New Happy Gathering with an hour of psychedelic dub, drum machine funk, outsider art-rock, subterranean techno-punk, and more. Then Range and Basin, featuring meditative drifts, far-out synth scapes, desert rock, and psych pop. Then, Doom and Gloom from the Tomb offers a mix of sunset sounds from the first half of 2022 . . .

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Wagner Tiso :: A Igreja Majestosa

Legendary composer and arranger Wagner Tiso is one of the most underrated figures in Brazilian music history. Tiso led the Clube da Esquina scene in the 1970s, and although his name is scarcely mentioned in international guides to the movement, his maximalist aesthetics and chamber music influences are deeply engraved in all of Clube da Esquina releases . . .

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I’ve Been Born a Million Times, But I Am Never Dead: Jim Sullivan (1972)

It was 1972, and Jim Sullivan needed a hit. The 32–year–old singer– songwriter had played around Southern California in any pub or bar that would have him, filling venues with an outsize presence limited to not only his tall stature but also his massive voice. He’d released U.F.O., a privately–pressed, spectral masterpiece in 1969, but the record’s psychedelic folk sound had failed to find an audience, even with a seasoned cast of Wrecking Crew players providing credible backing . . .

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Jeff Tweedy :: On Wilco’s Cruel Country

On Wilco's Cruel Country, Jeff Tweedy takes a dazed look around. He joins us to discuss why it felt important to cut the new album live, the influence of the Grateful Dead, and what it feels like to inhabit Yankee Hotel Foxtrot 20 years later . . .

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The Running Kind: David Cantwell on Merle Haggard

David Cantwell is a critic and journalist, and co-author (with Bill Friskics-Warren) of Heartaches by the Number: Country Music’s 500 Greatest Singles. Last month, he released a revision of his book on Merle Haggard, which originally appeared in 2013. The Running Kind: Listening to Merle Haggard is, as Cantwell writes in his introduction, “not a biography.” Instead, it’s his critical history of Haggard’s performing life and studio work. He joins Aquarium Drunkard to discuss . . .

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

Sunshine soul. 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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Shintaro Sakamoto :: Like A Fable

Fall once again, dear friends, into the warm waters of Shintaro Sakamoto’s musical universe. Ever the maestro of mellow groove, Like A Fable is Sakamoto’s first album in six years, the fourth in a string of idiosyncratic solo albums that include Love If Possible, Let’s Dance Raw, and How To Live With a Phantom, each propagating their own infectious mixture of sly funk, exotica, disco, and deft songcraft . . .

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