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AD Presents: Talk Show / In Conversation With Jess Rotter

Jess Rotter Talk ShowPosted on

Los Angeles: Tomorrow night, Wednesday May 30th, Aquarium Drunkard presents the first installment of TALK SHOW, an intimate series of conversations surrounding on the worlds of music, art, film and beyond. Our first guest is artist Jess Rotter discussing her work in illustration, design, music + inspiration and forthcoming projects. Join us.

8pm. Free, open to the public at Gold Diggers in East Hollywood. Records and revelry to follow . . .

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Kamaal Williams :: The Return

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“Return from what?” you might ask.

Kamaal Williams, a.k.a. producer Henry Wu, was once a.k.a. one half of Yussef Kamaal, an excellent jazz duo with Yussef Dayes that released one nearly perfect album in Black Focus, and then flamed out almost as quickly as it formed. That album was released all the way back in November 2016, but to hear Williams’ joyful playing with a new trio under his own name, you’d think he’d spent the last eighteen months in exile.

Even so, much of . . .

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Wooden Shjips :: V.

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Wooden Shjips, the bay-area quartet led by Moon Duo’s Ripley Johnson, release their fifth album, V., via the stalwart Thrill Jockey Records today. As the shadows cast begin to lengthen out here on the east, this new disc’s heavy dose of warm shoegaze psych is a more than welcome companion. Embodying the psychic spectrum of a nighttime desert drive, a lost weekend in the valley . . .

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Ryley Walker :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview

Ryley Walker The AD InterviewPosted on

Catch Ryley Walker one day, and he may be forecasting his future as a bald, ponytailed guitar shredder; catch him another, and he's sketching out a scene from the mid-2000s, scheming to pick up a book of pop theology and some blog rock. But somehow, his new lp, Deafman Glance, makes space for the whole of Ryley, a young dude whose early records felt like lost Britfolk artifacts, but whose ubiquitous social media presence feels pretty damn modern.

A proggy, intricate, and often deadpan chunk of jazz-folk, it's also Walker's most personal record, one that finds the singer/songwriter opened up in unexpected ways, obsessing over debt, bus fare, and the lack of a master plan. "It's not very fun/Being a fun person," Walker sings on "Can't Ask You Why," and then as if acknowledging a tendency for overthinking, adding "And I can hear you sigh."

Recently, AD caught up with Walker on the road, to discuss how Chicago influenced the new album, honing a poetic voice, and why saying "stupid" things online can be a folk-rock boon.

Deafman Glance by Ryley Walker

Aquarium Drunkard: In the notes that accompanied the release of Deafman Glance, you wrote about how making it stressed you out. How do you feel about it now?

Ryley Walker: Like any other paranoid, fucked up artist, I loathe what I do one minute and love what I do the next. I like it, yeah.

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

SIRIUSPosted on

Our weekly two hour show on SIRIUS/XMU, channel 35, can now be heard every Wednesday at 7pm PST with an encore broadcasts on-demand via the SIRIUS/XM app.

SIRIUS 522: Jean-Michel Bernard — Genérique Stéphane ++ Tinariwen — Tenere Taqqim Tossam ++ The Ify Jerry Krusade — Everybody Likes Something Good ++ Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson — Lovin’ You ++ Fatback Band — Goin’ To See My Baby ++ We The People — Function Underground Darondo — Let My People Go ++ Los Issufu & His Moslems — Kana Soro ++ Moses Dillard — Tribute To Wes ++ Clarendonians . . .

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Some For Dudu :: A Dudu Pukwana Companion

Dudu Pukwana MixtapesPosted on

“If he plays a gig in some club, it’s the talk of the town for the whole year. Who can afford to pay for so much entertainment?… Well, for those who do not know Dudu Pukwana, he is the heaviest of the heaviest alto saxophone players and for many of us coming from South Africa… THE TEACHER. Go on doing the BOOGIE Bra Dudza.” — Joe Malinga (liner notes, One For Dudu)

Here now, “Some For Dudu,” a celebration and glance at Pukwana: the teacher, the exile, the saxophonist, the front man, the . . .

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Posted on Dudu Pukwana Mixtapes

Buck Curran :: Morning Haikus, Afternoon Ragas

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On his second solo album, Morning Haikus, Afternoon Ragas, guitarist Buck Curran assembles a set of peaceful Takoma-style guitar instrumentals, custom built for thoughtfulness and calm. Best known for his work with the psych-folk duo Arborea, Curran currently resides with his family in Bergamo, Italy, and this sublime lp finds him reflecting on familial spirits. Dedicating the album to his children Shylah, Liam, and Francesco, Curran devotes the first half of the album to carefully composed ballads . . .

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Catching Up With The Love Language

The AD Interview The Love LanguagePosted on

"I'm stoked, man. Back at work after so long."

This is Stuart McLamb of the Love Language, standing on an L.A. sidewalk having just emerged from a barber shop. It's a relatively new surrounding for the North Carolina native who took Huck Finn's advice about a year ago and lit out for the territories. The impetus for our phone call is the first new Love Language record in five years. Baby Grand will see the light of day August 3rd on Merge Records, and it marks a sizeable change in McLamb's surroundings.

AD spoke with McLamb about what he's been up to since 2013's Ruby Red, writing and composing inside a defacto hammock factory, the way album ingestion can affect your own art, and how the new album's title has its own cheeky fit in the universe of the Love Language. Check out the video for the first single, "Southern Doldrums," down below.

Aquarium Drunkard: This is the longest time that has elapsed between Love Language records. What's been going on and what lead to that long of a break?

Stuart McLamb: Well, it's always kind of been me writing and doing it. I think maybe I just got a little -- maybe not burnt out, but you shouldn't just churn things out to just do it. It needs to come from a spot. So it took a while for me to rediscover my passion and have songs pile up that I thought were good. I spent hours and hours making demos, and there was a lot of stuff I just didn't feel was honest or real and ended up just scrapping them.

That was the deal with the Love Language, but I did stay busy with several other things. Right after the tour for Ruby Red, I mixed a record by a Chapel Hill band called Last Year's Men. It was a great record and they put it out, but they'd started a punk band right after that and it never went that far. So I spent a long time working on that and then I had a band called Soon. That was a band I did that was a bit more of a heavy thing. Put that album out. I did a record with a project called Pretty Ponies. Maybe it didn't seem like it in the public eye, but I definitely felt pretty busy. It probably does appear that way to people who just know me from the Love Language.

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Posted on The AD Interview The Love Language

Daniel Lanois :: Venetian Snares x Daniel Lanois

Daniel Lanois The AD Interview Venetian SnaresPosted on

On their new collaborative album, Daniel Lanois and electronic composer Aaron Funk, better known as Venetian Snares, make for an unexpected "Canadian team." As a producer and solo artist, Lanois's work is dedicated to open, moody space; Funk, on the other hand, populates his soundworlds with near constant twitching and aggressive motion. But Venetian Snares x Daniel Lanois makes sense of this contrast, blending Lanois' slow motion, gospel-informed pedal steel with Funk's dramatic breakcore.

Often, the record recalls the soundscapes of Lanois' work with Brian Eno on 1983's Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, if that record's spacey ambiance had been punctuated by violent bursts of noise and rhythm. Employing a Miles Davis cut-up style, manipulating "yards" of live recordings, Lanois edited the album together. It's a testament to his restless creative drive and a daring listen. We caught up with Lanois in LA to ask how the strange team-up came about.

Venetian Snares x Daniel Lanois by Venetian Snares x Daniel Lanois

Aquarium Drunkard:  A few years ago, after recording an interview in your studio, you played us some of the music you were working with Venetian Snares on. I've been anxious to hear it since and it's turned out to be a wild record.

Daniel Lanois: Oh yeah, well we finally gave birth. [Laughs] It feels pretty good. I've been devoted to this for a while now, and I'll say to my friends, "By the time something comes out," by the time you get a release date from the label and all this, in a way, the creative peak has already happened. So I've actually moved on to some other work now, but hey, listen man, we're going on tour, Snares and I. I call [Aaron Funk] "Snares."

It's exciting. I feel like it's my first band. The  shows feel like, "Whoa, things are so psychedelic." I'm pretty thrilled about it because we can really pull this thing off live. He's really a master. We make a pretty good Canadian team.

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Posted on Daniel Lanois The AD Interview Venetian Snares

Mudie’s All-Stars :: Loran’s Dance

Idris Muhammad Mudie's All-Stars Reggae/DubPosted on

When a cover works. In this case, Mudie’s All-Stars Jamaican rendering of Idris Muhammad’s “Loran’s Dance.” I’m scribbling this on a train back to Tokyo after three nights haunting an array of Kyoto hi-fi kissas – mostly jazz, but not all. It was one of the latter, Rub A Dub, that turned me on to the below recording.

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Posted on Idris Muhammad Mudie's All-Stars Reggae/Dub

Bola Sete :: Falling Stars

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Nestled at the end of a recent installment of Deerhunter’s weekly, and highly recommended, “Sunday Night Radio Hour” Spotify mix, was Bola Sete’s “Falling Stars.” Previously unknown to us, the expectations were for a pleasant strum of acoustic guitar. We love Sete’s guitar playing here, whether it be the jazzy bossa nova sway that he mastered with a classical touch, or the immaculate, serene sounds of openness . . .

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Michael Rault :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview

Michael Rault The AD InterviewPosted on

Michael Rault's new album, New Day Tonight, lends itself to repeated listens. It's not just that the Canadian musician continues to build on his distinctively retro-but-not-old sound, but the complexity and layering accomplished on the LP reveals something new with each listen. We caught up with Rault from his home in Montreal and got the lowdown on working hand-in-hand with Daptone and Wick Records, the long-but-fruitful gap between releases, and the fortuitous walk he took with producer Wayne Gordon to a Brooklyn music shop that ended up giving the record one of its signature sounds.

It's a New Day Tonight by Michael Rault

Aquarium Drunkard: Not to start too on-the-nose, but at times the record seems preoccupied with the dichotomy of night and day, and sleep in particular. Both in the title, some of the song titles, and the lyrics — and it’s even coming out on Sleepless Records in Canada… so to be frank, how do you sleep at night?

Michael Rault: Nothing particularly unusual happens to me when I sleep, I used to sleepwalk sometimes, I guess that’s unusual, but I don’t do that much anymore. I’ve always had this subconscious approach to writing music and writing songs — not to sound pretentious or like I’ve got any special method that I use, cause I don’t really. I tend to try to play things and come up with ideas and see what sticks without thinking about it too much. And then listening to what I sing, when I’m not really thinking about it, I start to see patterns and themes. Then I start to think more consciously and make sense of it without, maybe, making too much sense of it. I don’t want to kill it by organizing it too much.

I wrote “Sleep With Me” without really thinking about it at all. And it came together in a more cohesive way than most songs do. I think I sang the first verse and chorus and maybe second verse in pretty quick order. I didn’t think I was gonna make an album themed around sleeping, but the idea kept popping up in songs I was writing. As I started getting closer to finishing the album, I was coming up with a list of songs to concentrate on - I realized that sleep was a theme. I wrote a couple of more, consciously, about sleeping and dreaming to fill out the album. “Dream Song” was consciously written about it.

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Aquarium Drunkard Presents: Gospel Jubilee Vol. 2 — A Mixtape

MixtapesPosted on

Forcing someone to read a lengthy explication of the music found in the second installment of the Gospel Jubilee would only delay the experience of hearing — feeling — these heavenly, heavenly sounds. Over an hour of unbelievable falsettos, palpable bass lines, smoking–even Hazel-esque–guitars, fervid singing voices, chunky synthesizers, perfect drums, and much more . . .

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Ambient Explorations: Cool Maritime / Sam Gendel

Cool Maritime Sam GendelPosted on

Cool Maritime is the work of Sean Hellfritsch. A modular synth composer, he is the spouse of fellow modern electronic pioneer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, and shares her sense of ambient adventure in crafting exploratory soundscapes that reach beyond the tangible and into unseen worlds. His latest outing, Sharing Waves, due out June 1 via Leaving Records, is brought to life with shimmering ripples of aqua tones and a misty rainforest timbre. But the record expands beyond . . .

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Jennifer Castle :: Angels of Death

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“The fictional concept of death rears its head in so many of my songs, always on the periphery, or as a side note, or a reminder, a punchline or the bottom line, always sniffing around like a death dog. For once I wanted to try to put it in my center vision. In order to talk about death, I armed myself with the only antidote I know: writing. Is this a record about death or a record about writing? Hard to tell in the end. I began to think of poetry as time travel. I tried to write messages to the future.” — Jennifer Castle

Jennifer Castle's path has always been a patient one. Whether covering Bob Dylan  or channeling the energy of Laurel Canyon on her album  Pink City, an elliptical air defines her work. But she's never been more potent than on her new album, Angels of Death, a work that may well stand the test of time as a masterpiece.

Following a series of familial losses, Castle stares down mortality. It’s no small feat addressing the end, but what other choice does one have? The notion of grief — the shapeless act of processing and learning to live with loss — is tremendously and overwhelmingly intangible. Because as final as a loss may feel, the question always remains: Is anyone, or anything, ever completely gone? And though mourning brings moments of overwhelming despair, at other times, it opens our eyes to the present in a way they were previously closed to. And then there are the times when all these opposing ideas seem to act in concert. The middleworld, we hear Castle call it. That's where  Angels of Death lives.

Jennifer Castle :: Crying Shame

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