Mid-October approaches, and the owls are not what they seem. The best records belong to a particular hour, season, or state of mind. The soundtrack to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me seems to exist just beyond all three, somewhere between the last light and whatever waits after dark . . .
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Jazz grip. Booker Stardrum’s work spans solo recordings, electronic experiments, and collective improvisation. In 2026, he’s released his fourth solo album, Close-up On The Outside, alongside new records with Play Time, OOPS!, Silk Fence, and SML. We spoke with Stardrum about his compositional process and the challenges and possibilities of working across so many different musical settings . . .
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No one is making music quite like PAINT, the project of musician and Allah-Las guitarist Pedrum Siadatian. If a song title can be prophetic, it's "Illusion of Voice" here, in which the vocals of real and hypothetical cast of ensemble characters and collaborators weave through a shadowy labyrinth full of twists of surrealistic transparency. From police blotter audio soundscapes to warbled poetry reads, fourth record Whip of an Ear is an obtusely captivating listen and one of the prolific musician's best offerings yet . . .
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Piero Umiliani’s Il Corpo is the sound of something beautiful beginning to sour. Released in 1974, the soundtrack finds the Italian composer in familiar aesthetic territory, where jazz, funk, psychedelia and library music bleed into one another. Sunny music for shady people, it embodies the anything-goes spirit of Italian library music, spinning a parallel film from grooves, fuzz and atmosphere . . .
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Hippies, Thugs, and Heroes finds guitarist Richard Thompson sounding as savage, lyrical, and eloquent as ever. This week on Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions, we're pleased to welcome Thompson back to the show. If you dig Transmissions, there’s a pretty solid chance that you already know that he's one of the founding fathers of British folk rock, known for his work with Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, his former wife Linda Thompson, Nick Drake and others . . .
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Beefheart & McQuinn’s Midtown Downtime arrived earlier this year as a ten-song distillation of folk-rock’s softer, more unhurried pleasures. Think. close harmonies, crisp arrangements, and an easygoing, J.J. Cale-like sway. For their Lagniappe Session, William Murray and Winter McQuinn turn to three favorites from their record collections: Danny O’Keefe’s “The Road,” Mark Fry’s “Song For Wilde,” and Heron’s “Lord & Master.” Spanning road-worn singer-songwriter fare and the pastoral reaches of British folk, the selections share the qualities that animate the duo’s own work . . .
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Fog lifting off San Francisco’s Victorian rooftops, twelve-string guitars catching the morning light, and the ghost of a California that exists somewhere between memory and myth. A curated sampler spanning Skygreen Leopards’ 2001–2014 catalogue, tracing Glenn Donaldson and Donovan Quinn’s journey from lo-fi jangle-psych fragments to sun-dappled pop reveries—an overlooked gem of the Bay Area underground, steeped in eucalyptus hillsides, coastal haze, and the strange, enduring magic of the West Coast . . .
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For a fleeting moment in the early-to-mid 90s, ambient house consummated the perfect synthesis of dance music groove and cosmic expanse. Emerging from the chillout rooms and the afterparties at the margins of club culture, ambient house cultivated the psychedelic elements of the rave scene into an altogether more atmospheric direction. The scene produced a handful of genuine superstars in the Orb and the Future Sound of London, but beneath these, there lies a whole galaxy of trippy, pulsing electronica to traverse. Here are a few hours to get you started . . .
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Chicago guitarist Brett Sova slips further from psychedelic overload and closer to new wave song structure in this fifth full-length. This second album with a full band—Sova himself, plus bassist Jeremy Freeze and drummer Josh Johannpeter—layers clean, warbly guitar texture with sawtoothed bass, sounding, at intervals, like a brighter, more optimistic Wipers . . .
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No blueprint. Filmed by West German television in November 1970 at the Karussell der Jugend festival in Soest, this 84-minute document captures CAN with Damo Suzuki, Michael Karoli, Irmin Schmidt, Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit, still exploring the possibilities of a sound that didn't quite resemble anything else. Repetition, interruption, groove and collective instinct. More than half a century later, the footage preserves the band before their influence had been mapped and their sound codified, when the music was still mutating in real time . . .
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Part folk record, part pagan fever dream, The Wicker Man’s soundtrack is so steeped in sex, fertility, ritual and ancient melody that listening to it feels like stumbling upon something unearthed rather than recorded. Paul Giovanni’s songs create a world that feels simultaneously ancient and entirely invented—warm, earthy, erotic and communal, and perhaps all the more unsettling for sounding so beautiful . . .
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A proper trip inside the Hawkwind mothership. This 2007 BBC documentary traces the band’s journey from the Ladbroke Grove underground through Space Ritual, Lemmy’s tenure, and their collision of rock, psychedelia, science fiction, and counterculture. Featuring interviews with Lemmy, Nik Turner, Michael Moorcock, Stacia and other Hawkwind alumni, it’s a window into a band where free festivals, naked dancers, cosmic poetry, motorways, and very loud amplifiers all somehow occupied the same universe . . .
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In an album as lyrically economic as the startlingly beautiful Cyano, the latest solo release from Emily A. Sprague—familiar to many as the thoughtful anchor of indie-folk outfit Florist—even the few words we’re given can feel like lifelines. “We have to take care of ourselves” is one such arresting declaration. That reminder of self-preservation runs through Sprague’s ethereal ambient work, where emotion is conveyed less through narrative or explanation than through the feeling embedded in her evocative melodies . . .
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Broadcasting from northeast Los Angeles — the Aquarium Drunkard Show on SIRIUS/XMU, channel 35. 7pm California time, Wednesdays.
Uruguay. United States. Senegal. England. France. Ghana. Brazil. India. Egypt. Jamaica. South Africa. Japan. Italy.
34.1090° N, 118.2334° W . . .
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Few bands have aged like Teenage Fanclub. On their thirteenth record, the everlasting Scottish outfit embraces more of a soft focus on acoustics while maintaining their patented lilting and jangly elixir. Full of their unwavering and clear-eyed harmonies, the perceptive Do Not Dare To Dream continues TFC's path of challenging the tired notions of "reinvention" when the formula is this scientifically cathartic . . .
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