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Tortoise :: Touch

TortoisePosted on

It’s been nine years since the last full album of new music by Tortoise. 2016’s The Catastrophist feels like it came out a lifetime ago. But any doubt that time or distance has diminished the long-running outfit should be dismissed by a new album Touch, which demonstrates that, despite a nine year interval, Tortoise can be counted on for music which is unpredictable and exhilarating . . .

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Nala Sinephro :: The Smashing Machine Original Soundtrack

Nala SinephroPosted on

Nala Sinephro might not be the first name you’d think of when it comes to wrestling-movie soundtracks, but the emerging ambient jazz star’s work for Benny Safdie’s biopic has plenty of force. Her brief but evocative score uses her familiar tools – harp, synths, sax, occasional percussion – to create an atmosphere of tumultuous reflection and serenely ominous potential. In its tenderness and ambiguity, it traffics in a different sort of destruction . . .

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

SIRIUSPosted on

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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Posted on SIRIUS

The Lagniappe Sessions :: Cochemea

Cochemea Lagniappe SessionsPosted on

Cochemea Gastelum returns with his second Lagniappe entry following up his session from 2021 covering Big Star and the legendary Cuban band, Irakere. This latest installment finds the NYC based multi-instrumentalist and arranger on the heels of his third LP, Ancestros Futuros, released last month via Daptone Records. For his encore session, Gastelum pays tribute to his southern California roots covering War's "All Day Music," and Flip Your Wig era Hüsker D . . .

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Posted on Cochemea Lagniappe Sessions

Transmissions :: Pam Grossman

Pam Grossman PodcastPosted on

Welcome back to Transmissions, a weekly podcast series from Aquarium Drunkard. This week on the show: Pam Grossman, host of ⁠The Witch Wave⁠ podcast and author of a new book, ⁠Magic Maker: The Enchanted Path to Creativity⁠. This show, at its core, is about the relationship between magic and art. What do we mean by magic? Let’s turn to Grossman's book for a helpful take. She writes that magic is quote, “a way of shifting one’s entire mode of being in the direction of Creative Force and interacting with it…When magic is working properly, there is . . .

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Posted on Pam Grossman Podcast

Adeline Hotel :: Watch the Sunflowers

Adeline HotelPosted on

An electric keyboard shimmers as guitars carve indolent arcs of jazz-adjacent sound in “Dreaming,” the vocals barely over a whisper. A string orchestra starts up in the chorus, as Dan Knishkowy murmurs the question, “Am I dreaming?” Fair point. The sound envelopes like a technicolor reverie, cool, removed and satin-y smooth. It’s more akin to quiet storm soul or the fusion-touched jazz rock than the Americana you may have come to expect from Adeline Hotel . . .

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Radio Free Heaven: A Mix Inspired By Philip K. Dick and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

MixtapesPosted on

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, Philip K. Dick’s underappreciated final novel, is framed by death. It begins with a singularly famous death—the assassination of John Lennon in 1980—and follows the reverberations of that event backward in time to the San Francisco Bay Area of the late 60s and 70s, where Episcopal Bishop Timothy Archer is in the midst of a crisis of faith. The book is a characteristically Dick-ian smoothie of thematic contradictions: sacred/popular, surreal/mundane, historical/fictional, faith/gnosis . . .

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Posted on Mixtapes

Tom Zé :: Estudando o Samba

Brazil Tom ZéPosted on

Estudando o Samba is the pinnacle of Tom Zé's tendency to use music as an intellectual statement and practical pedagogy. The title of the tracks, with a few exceptions, are monosyllabic onomatopoeias that refer to a Brazilian prosody, a gestural way of talking. The cover, produced by Zé himself, shows a barbed wire shaped like an ocean wave—-perhaps in reference to a twisting of the image of Brazil promoted by samba . . .

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Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard :: October 2025

Radio Free Aquarium DrunkardPosted on

Freeform transmissions from Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard on dublab. Airing every third Sunday of the month, RFAD on dublab features the pairing of Tyler Wilcox’s Doom and Gloom from the Tomb and Chad DePasquale’s New Happy Gathering. This month, Chad kicks things off with a crunchy leaf mix of folk, gospel & soul, and Tyler follows it up with some sad & beautiful tunes from this year and yesteryear. Sunday, 4-6pm PT . . .

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Posted on Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard

Fairport Convention :: Royal Festival Hall, 1969-1970

Fairport ConventionPosted on

Fairport Convention got together in 1967, and somehow managed to cram several lifetimes into the next couple years. Lineup changes, horrible tragedies, stylistic shifts — and of course, a heap of inarguably classic albums. Listening into live recordings made at London’s Royal Festival Hall from the spring of 1969 through the winter of 1970 gives us a hazy-but-remarkable glimpse of the ever-evolving group as they fearlessly fused dusty folk with pure electricity . . .

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Phil Yost :: Bent City

Jazz Phil YostPosted on

... Bent City is a spectral album unfolding a multi-tracked mirror house of sonic fantasias, with each wondrously bizarre corridor becoming an entire dimension unto itself. It’s a mesmerizing work of “sound-on-sound” composition, Yost’s intricate method of weaving home-recorded tape loops together, which allowed him a canvas for improvisation á la Sandy Bull, using “various combinations of soprano saxophone, flute, electric guitar, bass, maracas and tambourine . . .

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Posted on Jazz Phil Yost

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

SIRIUSPosted on

Aural crudités. 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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Posted on SIRIUS

Transmissions :: The Cosmic Tones Research Trio

Cosmic Tones Research Trio PodcastPosted on

This week on the show, the Portland-based group of Roman Norfleet, Harlan Silverman, and Kennedy Verrett, aka The Cosmic Tones Research Trio. “Cosmic” is a term that has, thanks to critics and writers, become a little overused. Practically every indie rock band or country-based singer/songwriter with an effects pedal employs “cosmic” touches these days. But as this spiritual jazz trio explains, each of us contains our own cosmos . . .

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Posted on Cosmic Tones Research Trio Podcast

Songs Belong to Everyone Who Can Sing Along :: Craig Finn on Always Been

Craig Finn The AD InterviewPosted on

The cover of Craig Finn's latest solo album, Always Been, directly nods to Randy Newman's 1977 lp Little Criminals. Shot in the same location, on the West 7th Street overpass over the I-110, it presents The Hold Steady frontman posed exactly as Newman is on his classic album. And like Newman's songbook, Always Been is filled with character studies, a cast of people who aren't quite sure what to make of their lives and the directions they've taken. It also arrives with a book of short stories, Lousy With Ghosts. Finn joins us to . . .

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Posted on Craig Finn The AD Interview

John Maus :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview

John Maus The AD InterviewPosted on

Since the mid-2000s John Maus gained a reputation as an arcane conversationalist, whose public dialogues offered as much intricacy as they did enthusiasm, with a philosophical repertoire only matched by his own nervous body language. For this interview we plunged into the specifics of those discourses to try to trace the strange continuities between the continental thought and mystical traditions Maus is enamored with and the postwar pop sound his work inevitably comes to represent . . .

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Posted on John Maus The AD Interview