Posts

Alejandro Escovedo :: On Echo Dancing and His Counterculture Roots

On paper, journeyman songwriter Alejandro Escovedo's latest album Echo Dancing is a career-spanning look back at his song catalog. In actuality, the record is something more radical—a reimagining that embraces scuzzy electronics, minimalist electric blues, and dubby vocal effects. He joins us to discuss it, dig into his counterculture roots, and share which member of the Velvet Underground "scared the shit" out of him . . .

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Shackleton and Six Organs of Admittance :: Jinxed By Being

Opposites attract in this unexpected collaboration between dubstep pioneer Sam Shackleton and out-folk innovator Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance. Yet the oddity itself is very beautiful. Shackleton’s music has never sounded so warm and present. Chasny’s work has never seemed visionary and forward looking. They meet somehow in a middle that no one foresaw, and it is a strange and lovely place . . .

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Aquarium Drunkard :: 2024 Mid-Year Review

Time flies. As we're halfway through 2024, enter our first-ever midyear review to accompany our annual favorites list. As always, our list is unranked and unruly—not "complete" but featuring more than enough to get you started. Let it blurb . . .

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Rich Ruth :: Water Still Flows

Like his previous album, the COVID-era 2022 masterpiece I Survived, It's Over, Nashville multi-instrumentalist Rich Ruth's new album Water Still Flows is absolutely audacious in its musical fusions and amalgamations. This one is a woozy kaleidoscope of spiritual jazz, post-rock, chiming minimalism, Berlin school synth sequencers, metal and drone. It is entirely possible that it shouldn't work, but somehow it does . . .

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Suzanne Ciani :: Buchla Concert At Galeria Bonino New York, April 1974

With this recording of Suzanne Ciani's 1974 live Buchla concert at Galeria Bonino in New York, Finders Keepers adds a new touchstone to the obscure history of modular synth music (and to the crucial part female artists have played in it). It also throws light into the deep connection between experimental sound design and the new age music that Ciani later represented, a connection that is not at all restricted to Pauline Oliveros or, later, Laraaji and Eno. In this release, the complex drones of electric sequencers form soft, shapeless tapestries with an almost religious ease . . .

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Blue Eyed Soul :: You Ain’t No Weight

Originating as a lounge duo in Brooklyn, organist and arranger Norman Marcelle and vocalist Lynn Marshall recruited Lynn’s sister Deedee on drums to lay down You Ain't No Weight in 1980, calling themselves Blue Eyed Soul and casting a lo-fi blaze of private-press, left-of-center soul, gospel, and r&b. While reissued digitally in 2019 via Numero Group’s From the Stacks series, much more detail about the album or group appears scant, its relative quiet existence belying its odd and awesome singularity . . .

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

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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Zachary Cale :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview

Like most of us during the dog days of the pandemic, Brooklyn singer-songwriter Zachary Cale found himself adrift, searching for inspiration in thoroughly weird times. He found it in a Red Hook art studio, where a piano sat, mostly unused. Cale’s primary instrument is the guitar — you can hear his expert playing all over his previous records. Composing on piano wasn’t his usual mode. But during those long nights in Red Hook, songs started to come . . .

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Transmissions :: Phil Manzanera (Roxy Music)

This week on Transmissions, guitarist Phil Manzanera, who joins us to discuss his latest project, a memoir called Revolución to Roxy. Writing about his childhood in revolutionary Cuba, his lifelong fascination with music, and his collaborations and run-ins with people like Brian Eno, David Gilmour, Robert Wyatt, and more, Manzera reveals his Zelig-like status as one of art-rock’s most creatively pivotal figures. He joins us to discuss it all . . .

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Dirty Three :: Love Changes Everything

Twelve years on from their last album together, Warren Ellis, Mick Turner and Jim White reconvene in a sprawling improvisation of tidal force, six cuts or one, depending on how you look at things. The tracks flow one into another like water running through sluices, inexorable and boundary-less. It’s as if, once started, the Dirty Three couldn’t stop until they had exhausted themselves . . .

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This Place Don’t Make Sense To Me No More: Bob Dylan’s “Street-Legal”

Street-Legal is loud and brash and ugly. There’s a little stink to it, no question. But it reveals the world from which it hails in ways unlike any other Bob Dylan record. It is the primal scream of a man and his nation confronting a future of diminished horizons. It is white diamond gloom and destruction in the ditches. It is a seminal document of bad vibes . . .

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Richard, Cam And Bert :: Somewhere In The Stars

Richard Tucker, Campbell Bruce, and Bert Lee were regulars though not exactly superstars in the 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene. They played as often for change, outdoors in Central Park as at the best known downtown venues, and they made just one album, Limited Edition, in 1970, long out of print until a digital reissue in 2014.

Indeed, Tucker is now best known for his creative partnership with his wife at the time, Karen Dalton. This collection of early, unreleased material includes the original recording of “Are You Leaving for the Country,” which Dalton covered memorably on her 1971 album . . .

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Anastasia Coope :: Darning Woman

Citing influences such as 80s art-rock, Trish Keenan, Brigitte Fontaine, medieval choruses, church choirs, 50s harmony groups, and more, Coope almost sounds something like coalescing into Nico fronting early Animal Collective. Her deep, hypnotizing chant-like singing leads warbled, gossamer folk into an air of surreal stream of consciousness – her self-looped vocals, guitar, and sparse piano lines echoing against themselves in spectral delight, building cavernous choral fantasies where the tiresome realities and expectations of everyday life fold in on themselves . . .

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Levek :: Look A Little Closer

... other songs evoke The Zombies, and others yet Talk Talk. Solar and lunar at the same time, the ebbing, scarce light of Levesque's fingerpicked guitars comb into a dense honey dough. It's like he produced the ethnological recordings of the music of a group of divine beings from an 1980s fantasy B-movie . . .

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Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard :: June 2024

Freeform transmissions from Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard on dublab, airing every third Sunday of the month. This month features Tyler Wilcox's Doom & Gloom From The Tomb with a selection of semi-summery sounds new and old, followed by Chad DePasquale's New Happy Gathering with a mid-year halftime report of favorite 2024 digs. Sunday, 4-6pm PT . . .

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