When Aquarium Drunkard began in a Venice Beach apartment in 2005, I had no plan beyond sharing the records I loved. Twenty-one years is long enough for a personal project to become a habit, a vocation, and something like a way of life. AD blew out 21 candles last week, and to mark the occasion, I’ve gathered a selection of features, series, and broadcasts that became part of the fabric of Aquarium Drunkard along the way.
Over the years, Aquarium Drunkard became home to a loose constellation of fellow travelers — listeners, archivists, broadcasters, and seekers who helped shape the site into something larger than a single editorial voice. What follows is a trail through some of the sounds, conversations, and recurring obsessions that continue to animate the project 21 years on. | JG
Founded by Manfred Eicher in Germany in 1969, few record labels have cultivated a more cohesive identity than ECM. Across three installments, Aquarium Drunkard’s guide to ECM surveys a catalog marked by sonic space and aesthetic rigor, moving from jazz and improvised music to contemporary composition and beyond. A collection of entry points, the series offers multiple paths into “The Most Beautiful Sound(s) Next to Silence.”
Dead Notes: What began as a conversation about fandom with graphic designer Daryl Norsen soon became Dead Notes, Aquarium Drunkard’s column tracing the Grateful Dead through live tapes, solo detours, audience recordings, radio broadcasts, parking-lot ephemera, and the endless circulation of stories, bootlegs, and half-mythic moments surrounding the band. Part field report, part ongoing conversation, the series moved freely between archival excavation, personal reflection, and the strange ways the band’s music continues to evolve through listening, collecting, memory, and communal obsession.
Kicking off in 2010, the Lagniappe Sessions series gives artists room to step outside their own catalogs, turning up left-field covers, deep-cut tributes, strange strays, and unlikely reinterpretations. Over time, the sessions have become a parallel history of AD itself, revealing the records, influences, and private enthusiasms that sit just beyond the margins of an artist’s official work.
Abstract Truths: An Evolving Jazz Compendium: Sparked by a 2016 conversation with record collector and music supervisor Zach Cowie, Abstract Truths began with a simple premise: invite musicians, DJs, writers, and collectors to share a handful of jazz records they love. What followed was an ongoing survey spanning spiritual jazz, weird fusion, modal, hard bop, free improvisation, jazz-funk, and beyond, with contributors sharing the records that have stayed with them over the years, revealing new corners with each return.
Through Videodrome, Eric Hehr explores the shadow archive of moving-image culture: underground films, neglected documentaries, public-access oddities, experimental works, and other overlooked artifacts that exist beyond the usual contours of film history. Guided by intuition rather than canon, the column uncovers unexpected correspondences between disparate works, tracing imagery and ideas that continue to linger in the collective imagination decades after their creation.
Born during the early days of the pandemic, the Aquarium Drunkard Picture Show transformed the site’s listening ethos into a half-hour audio-visual broadcast, weaving together music videos, VHS bleed, found footage, animation, archival fragments, and oddball detritus. Created in collaboration with animator Mark Neeley, the series occupied a space somewhere between late-night public access television, underground video collage, and freeform radio, transmitting from the hills of Glassell Park and creating its own channel for the weird times and strange signals of the era.
Beginning as an offshoot of Aquarium Drunkard’s original 2005 radio show, the Transmissions podcast has taken many forms over the years, from freeform audio collage to its current incarnation hosted and produced by Jason P. Woodbury. Along the way, it has become an essential part of the AD ecosystem, encompassing longform interviews, documentary projects, live recordings, All One Song, Tyler Wilcox’s Neil Young series, and J. Kelly Davis’ sprawling oral history of Sunburned Hand of the Man, No Way Out. Whatever the format, the series remains rooted in the same spirit of inquiry that has guided Aquarium Drunkard from the beginning.
Celtic Guru: Van Morrison In The 80s: Penned by James Rooney, our Celtic Guru series traces Van Morrison’s 1980s drift through mysticism, Celtic soul, devotional repetition, and late-night inwardness. A run of records that moved further and further from ‘rock’ convention into a private spiritual language entirely his own. From Common One through Irish Heartbeat, the series reconsiders one of the most divisive stretches in Morrison’s catalog as one of its deepest and most rewarding.
Then there’s Tyler Wilcox’s long-running, loosely assembled Guitar Soli and Bandcamping series, two ongoing surveys that cast a wide net toward the wilds of the fingerpicked guitar underground and the digital music store Bandcamp. With his ear pressed deep to the ground, Wilcox presents a canon beyond the standard canon, continually uncovering music that falls outside the usual pathways of discovery.
Warren Zevon once said, “We love to buy books because we believe we’re buying the time to read them.” Put your phone down! Book Club explores the printed matter that has informed the site’s worldview over the years, moving between music writing, fiction, memoir, cultural history, and harder-to-classify discoveries. Guided by curiosity, the series traces the books that continue to inform the site’s ongoing conversations and cultural detours.
Compiled by Tyler Craft, AD’s First & Last series explores the outer reaches of Japanese private press, uncovering near impossible-to-find folk, damaged psych, protest music, basement-pop oddities, and fragile home-recorded missives from the margins of the 1970s underground. Moving well beyond collector fetishism, the mixes trace a hidden musical landscape shaped by student unrest, Beatles aftershocks, little theatre culture, acid folk drift, and deeply personal visions pressed in microscopic quantities.
For 21 years, Aquarium Drunkard’s mixtapes have treated sequencing as a form of storytelling, gathering together private-press ghosts, dub dispatches, scorched folk, cosmic country, free jazz, soundtrack residue, late-night FM atmospherics, and half-forgotten frequencies from every corner of the globe. Collected over two decades, the mixes chart an evolving body of listening shaped by mood, season, memory, and the invisible threads connecting disparate sounds across time.
Our long-running AD Interview series treats conversation less as a promotional obligation than an opportunity for genuine exchange, giving artists the space to move beyond current projects and into the listening, influences, and experiences that shape their work. Over time, the interviews have become a defining part of the site itself: patient, unforced conversations where musicians appear not only as artists, but as listeners.
The Aquarium Drunkard Guide To Drag City Records: Published in 2019 on the occasion of Drag City’s 30th anniversary, this staff-curated guide surveys a catalog that has spent three decades charting its own course. Moving between foundational classics, overlooked gems, and impossible-to-categorize outliers, the roundup highlights 30 releases that illuminate the fiercely independent sensibility at the heart of the label’s identity.
Pastiche Beach: Back in 2018, around the opening of Gold-Diggers in East Hollywood, where I’ve been involved as a partner behind the scenes since the early days, we assembled a limited vinyl mixtape for guests entitled Pastiche Beach: 50 minutes of chopped-and-spliced California pop hallucination tracing the long shadow of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys through artists like The High Llamas, Panda Bear, Cornelius, Arthur Russell, The Apples In Stereo and beyond. Five hundred copies were pressed, each side sequenced as a single uninterrupted suite. The vinyl disappeared years ago, but following Wilson’s passing last summer, it felt like the right moment to finally make the digital version public. Sail on, sailor.
Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard, an offshoot of our quarantine-era pirate radio experiment, airs the third Sunday of every month on dublab. Chad Depasquale and Tyler Wilcox’s broadcast moves through spiritual jazz, psych, cosmic Americana, ambient transmissions, outsider cuts, and deep archival detours, shaped by instinctive sequencing and a shared sense of how records intuitively talk to one another. Two long-running heads tracing connections in real time, letting eras, moods, and geographies dissolve into the mix.
At first glance, our annual Year in Review offers a collective look back at the records that defined the previous twelve months. In the rearview, it’s something deeper. Part time capsule, part conversation, the series charts an evolving portrait of the sounds that caught our attention, stayed in rotation, and remained worthy of return.
Since AD’s inception, seasonal music has never functioned as mere backdrop. Over the years it’s become its own ongoing constellation: Jamaican Christmas sides, private press winter folk, faded radio broadcasts, Doug Sahm’s loose Thanksgiving gatherings, year-end transmissions, dusted-off holiday obscurities and other seasonal detours. Less tradition than atmosphere. Familiar songs and rituals re-emerging slightly altered, stranger around the edges, carrying the accumulated residue of longing, distance and time.
And on a personal note, working alongside editor Jason P. Woodbury over the years, I’ve watched his relationship to music become increasingly mystical. Not in any self-serious sense, but in the belief that certain sounds can genuinely alter consciousness, perception and emotional weather. Whether writing about ECM, desert psychedelia or deep dub transmissions, Jason consistently returns to listening as something deeper than consumption: a form of transport, a way of briefly stepping outside ordinary time.
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