On its recent self-titled lp, Tucson-based psychedelic collective Trees Speak terraform long stretches of the 1-10 that carves through the Sonoran Desert into a cosmic autobahn. Led by visual artist Daniel Martin Diaz -- whose work has been featured in Low Rider Magazine and Juxtapoz and comprises a large-scale installation at Sky Harbor Airport -- Trees Speak incorporates work from players known for their work in groups like become a member or log in.
Transcendental free sitar music led by Arjun Kulharya of Atlanta, GA. Layered with analog synthesizers, acoustic guitars, flute and tabla, Naan Violence's expansive sonic palette feels at once organic and untethered. Cosmically and spiritually in line with forebears such as Sun Ra and Ravi/Ananda Shankar, Kulharya's work also finds itself of a piece with fellow chromatic travelers and contemporaries such as Bitchin Bajas.
Naan Violence :: Breakfast With The Sirens
For heads, by heads. Aquarium Drunkard . . .
Only the good shit. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by its patrons. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support.
To continue reading, become a member or log in.
Having long ago stepped out from behind the shadow of his iconoclast father, Seun Kuti has kept the fierce independence and self-determination that are a hallmark of his family name, and kept the band his father created together now more than 20 years since his passing.
Kuti’s latest release, Black Times addresses a myriad of issues confronting his native Nigeria, Africa as a whole, and the world beyond. He is unafraid to infuse a precise and clear political message into his music, while simultaneously using the platform of the music of afrobeat itself as an outlet of creative dialogue. AD caught up with Kuti at his studio in Lagos, Nigeria.
Black Times by Seun Kuti & Egypt 80 feat. Carlos Santana
Aquarium Drunkard: You've worked with Robert Glasper on these last two records - can you speak a bit about his role within the record, as well as what you see the role of production being in your music?
Seun Kuti: You know, for me, the production process is separate from the music - because it's mostly live. The production of the music starts during composition. You know, you write melodies, the right tones for the instruments. You know, Glasper adds the final touches in post-production, working on the solos, working on the sounds of the instruments. There are new ideas and we try to incorporate them. So yeah it's always in a stage of production. It's a building process -- even when we mix sometimes I'm doing shit.
Only the good shit. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by its patrons. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support.
To continue reading, become a member or log in.
Our weekly two hour show on SIRIUS/XMU, channel 35, can be heard twice every Friday — Noon EST with an encore broadcast at Midnight EST. Ty Segall is the selector, sitting in with Justin for the full two hours. Segall's new lp Freedom's Goblin is out today, everywhere.
SIRIUS 509: Jean Michel Bernard — Générique Stephane ++ Ty Segall - Every1's A Winner ++ Matching Mole - O Caroline ++ Kevin Ayers . . .
Only the good shit. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by its patrons. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support.
To continue reading, become a member or log in.
Farewell to the Hip Priest himself, Mark E. Smith, who fearlessly led The Fall through 40+ years of uncompromising, visionary work. A total original, his methods as a bandleader were extreme (just ask any of the dozens who count themselves among Fall ex-members), but the results speak for themselves. The one constant over the years was Smith's unmistakable voice, spitting out a seemingly endless litany of words, ranging from the surreal to the satirical, from the profane to the oddly beautiful . . .
Only the good shit. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by its patrons. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support.
To continue reading, become a member or log in.
Ezra Feinberg’s Pentimento and others is an album that demands you shut your eyes and submit to the drift.
Sometimes a title doesn’t tell you anything useful about a record. Other times, it’s a clever nod to what the listener might expect to hear — or even an instructive suggestion of how they should attempt to hear it. A term borrowed from art history, a pentimento is “an alteration in a painting, evidenced by traces of previous work.” The word is also Italian for repentance. All of which is . . .
Only the good shit. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by its patrons. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support.
To continue reading, become a member or log in.
Charlotte Gainsbourg is in no rush. Her latest, Rest, is only the singer and actresses' fourth album in 20 years.
Composed over a long, six-year stretch that found Gainsbourg moving to New York and processing the death of her sister, Kate Berry, who died in 2013, the album both memorializes the lost and embraces those who are still here. Working with producer SebastiAn, and collaborators like Owen Pallett, Connan Mockasin, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo of Daft Punk, and Paul McCartney, the record marries pulsing electronic disco and personal confession. It marks the first time Gainsbourg has largely penned the lyrics herself, and tellingly, it feels like her most accomplished and intimate work to date.
AD caught up with Gainsbourg from New York to discuss the album's genesis and stepping behind the camera as a director for the first time.
Aquarium Drunkard: You worked on Rest over the course of a few years. Did you have a sense of ease about it?
Charlotte Gainsbourg: I felt comfortable. I felt that what I wanted to say [was] "I’ve got the voice I have." Of course, I was trying to push myself, because that’s always a goal. I was trying to surprise myself, but not trying to be someone else.
AD: When I learned about how much death and loss informed the lyrics of this record, I was prepared for it to be sort of a solemn, quiet album. But it’s not that at all. Did that contrast surprise you?
Charlotte Gainsbourg: Well, first of all, I didn't start the record mourning. I wasn't in that spirit because my sister was still alive. I started [by thinking] about subjects that were dear to me. Missing my father was part of that already. I knew I wanted to have electronic music as part of the record. What I was hoping for was to mix my voice -- [one] that’s not very strong -- with very strong music and to see if the combination would work.
And when my sister died, I was compelled to write about her and only about her. But I didn’t want the music to be suddenly sad. In order to be very personal and intimate, I needed something to give me a bit of a distance. I felt that through the music and the fact that it was so energized. And at the same time, it was part of the mourning and the grieving. That was what SebastiAn thought of from the very start, and that's why I asked him to come work on the album with me in New York. The decision to come here was, for me, a decision to be alive, to feel alive, which was not what I felt in France because it was too heavy to deal with my life before and the fact she wasn’t there.
Only the good shit. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by its patrons. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support.
To continue reading, become a member or log in.
Welcome to the January installment of Aquarium Drunkard’s recurring Transmissions podcast, a series of interviews and audio esoterica from Aquarium Drunkard. For our first episode of 2018, we explore three unique stories. First, we dive into the story of Ozma Records’ new reissue of the Voyager Golden Record. Launched into outer space in 1977 onboard the Voyager space probes, the Golden Record was a sort of cosmic mixtape, designed by a team led by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan as a representation of life, arts, and culture on Earth. We spoke to co-producer David Pescovitz of Boing Boing from his office at the Institute For the Future about how this new reissue allows us to more fully understand the scope of the Golden Record –and what it has to say to listeners today.
Then, we sit down with comedian, writer, and musician Tim Heidecker. Best know for his work on Tim and Eric Awesome Show – Great Job, Decker, and films like The Comedy, Heidecker is an extraordinarily busy guy: he recently finished The Trial of Tim Heidecker, a part of his meta-comedy saga On Cinema with Gregg Turkington – AKA Neil Hamburger. He’s also got a recent album out, Too Dumb for Suicide, a collection of songs about the president. We dive into his strange, sometimes confusing world.
And finally, we close out the show by shining a light on some of our favorite mixtapes from the Aquarium Drunkard archives, The End is at Hand collections, a four-volume series of super-obscure, often private press, outsider psychedelic guitar and folk music from the ‘60s and ‘70s centered around the Jesus People Movement. We’re joined by BlackForrestry – Josh Swartwood and Doug Cooper – who put these mixes together, to investigate the roots and feral faith of these “Jesus Freaks,” whose apocalyptic visions shimmer throughout these mixtapes – and whose faith still speaks to Josh and Doug.
Transmissions Podcast :: Voyager Golden Record/Tim Heidecker/Jesus People Music
Only the good shit. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by its patrons. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support.
To continue reading, become a member or log in.
(An oral history of Jack Logan's 1994 double album "Bulk", as told by Peter Jesperson, Peter Buck, David Barbe and Jack Logan.)
"I've got a song you need to hear" -- it's one of those phrases that tends to pique music lovers' interest, and it's a narrative thread that is woven into this piece. This is a story about great music, great writers, the passion art inspires, the endless links that exist between like-minded musicians, the siren call of a once sleepy Southern town, and the unassuming man at the center of it who would burn brightly for a minute before resuming the life of a musician with a day job who just does what he does because he loves it. It's the story of Jack Logan's Bulk. But it starts, in my case, with Moby Dick.
I'd joined a group at a local bookstore doing a year of reading of the works of Herman Melville and made friends with a guy named Will. He'd taken it upon himself to try and cultivate a musical playlist of songs that shared themes, broadly or directly, with Moby Dick. At one of our meetings he said, "You're a Vic Chesnutt fan, right? Well, I'm going to loan you this CD." The album, which was missing the first of its two discs, was Bulk by Jack Logan. Located just a few tracks into the second disc was the song "The Parishoners" which featured Chesnutt on guest vocals. It was a great song, but I was equally interested by a few things: first, that this was a 42-song double album; second, Chesnutt's presence on the album pointed to the potential for interesting connections; and third, it was a co-release of Twin/Tone and Medium Cool Records, both labels run at least partially by Peter Jesperson, he of Replacements-manager fame among other things. I ended up holding on to the CD so long that I scoured the internet and bought two complete copies of the record for a buck each - one to return to Will and one for me. This is where things got interesting.
Jack Logan :: The Parishioners
"His name popped up a number of times. I think R.E.M. was considering covering 'Female Jesus' for one of their flexi-discs. That's how it first became known to me. But I hadn't really heard him. And people around Athens would ask me, 'Well, have you heard Jack Logan?' And I'd say no and they'd kind of roll their eyes like, 'oh, boy, well, you're in for it. When you hear him it's all over." This is Peter Jesperson speaking to me over the phone while I'm trying, quietly, not to freak out. As someone who reveres the Replacements, Jesperson's place in their lore is not lost on me. His own story about his first time hearing Jack's music sounds like something you'd write out in fan fiction.
"I was driving down to Columbia, Missouri to see the first Big Star reunion - when Alex Chilton and Jody Stephens first got together with the guys from the Posies. I brought a whole box of cassettes with me, and somewhere along the line I'd stopped to get gas and was thinking about what to listen to next. So I said, 'Well, I'll throw one of these Logan tapes on.'"
But let's pause here a moment. Where did these tapes come from?
"I used to work at Wuxtry Records, and they just started having these Jack Logan cassettes." This is the voice of Peter Buck of R.E.M. talking to me over the phone from his home in the Pacific Northwest. "I was surprised how great the songwriting was. This sort of Southern vernacular lyrical poetry and Basement Tapes type music. It was right up my alley. I thought, man, this guy's actually pretty good." It was Buck who told Peter Jesperson, on one of his trips through Athens, that he ought to look Logan up. "I'm pretty sure when Peter Jesperson came to visit me it was 1990. [The cassettes were] the type of thing where you go 'well, that's pretty darn amateurish,' which I like. There was handwriting on them. They were just bottom of the totem pole as far as professional packaging goes. It was obvious they were home recordings. You just didn't expect songwriting of that caliber to appear in that way."
When you look at the tracklisting on the back of the case for Bulk, you're immediately thrown for a bit of a loop. In addition to a whopping 42 songs, the songs are divided up into 'sides' like a vinyl record; nine of them to be exact. There's a loose thematic connection to these sides. The opening foursome includes "Shrunken Head," "Love, Not Lunch" and "Female Jesus," all songs that revolve in various ways around women who are studied, loved and worshipped respectively. "Escape Clause," "Just Go Away," and the loping quasi-country of "New Used Car and a Plate of Bar-B-Que" make up part of the second side, a set of songs about running away, dodging danger (or not in the case of "Underneath Your Bed"), or maybe just getting out of a bad enough situation that you want to celebrate with dinner with all the fixins. You're starting to get the picture. These are shaggy dog stories in miniature.
On average, if you were told "wait til you get to track 11" by someone trying to sell you on an album, you'd probably scoff. But Bulk is the kind of polychromatic creation that belies its origins. Despite the record sounding in spots like it was recorded on a 2-track at best, the landscape of Logan's music is the creation of someone who clearly loves a lot of music and doesn't mind dabbling in all of it. Track 11 is "15 Years in Indiana," and that's where Peter Jesperson started his journey with Jack in that car going to Missouri.
Jack Logan :: 15 Years in Indiana
Only the good shit. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by its patrons. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support.
To continue reading, become a member or log in.
Our weekly two hour show on SIRIUS/XMU, channel 35, can be heard twice every Friday — Noon EST with an encore broadcast at Midnight EST. Today's show brought to you by the mind-meld of the collective AD brain trust.
SIRIUS 508: Jean Michel Bernard — Générique Stephane ++ Amen Dunes - Mika Dora ++ Canned Heat - Poor Moon ++ John Martyn - Over The Hill ++ The Skiffle Players - Coo Coo Bird ++ Cal Hand and Leo Kottke - They Only Moved The Stage ++ The Durutti Column - The Missing Boy ++ Aztec Camera . . .
Only the good shit. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by its patrons. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support.
To continue reading, become a member or log in.
News of a new Yo La Tengo album is reason enough to celebrate. News of a great new Yo La Tengo album? Well, there ought to be a national holiday of some sort. The long-running band has just announced their 15th full-length, the daringly titled There's A Riot Going On (out March 16 on Matador), and you can check out four tunes from the record today. The LP is a world unto itself, but if you had to pick an analogue from the catalog, it would have to be 2003's Summer Sun. Recorded by multi-instrumentalist James McNew, Riot shares a certain sensibility with that effort, boasting spacious/spacey layers, tumbling rhythms and flickering balladry, all with the friendly ghost of Sun Ra overseeing the proceedings. There's also a notable lack of Ira Kaplan's signature guitar skronk. But as its title suggests, one thing Riot is not is placid. Even in its loveliest moments, there's a restless tension lurking beneath every note here, a perfect reflection of our restlessly tense times. More than 30 years into their unpredictable adventure, Yo La Tengo still captivate, inviting us back into their little corner of the world one more time. words / t wilcox
Only the good shit. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by its patrons. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support.
To continue reading, become a member or log in.
This coming week Michael Nesmith revives the spirit of the First National Band, the pioneering country-rock outfit he fronted from 1970 to 1971, for a series of shows in Southern California. Though best known for the knit wool beanie he donned during his two-season stint as a member of NBC’s The Monkees, Nesmith has worn many hats in his storied career in the arts, including label head, movie producer, author, VR impresario, and, arguably, inventor of the modern music video. This . . .
Only the good shit. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by its patrons. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support.
To continue reading, become a member or log in.
Witness — The End Is At Hand: Volume four. Similar to volumes 1-3, this homemade collection rounds up super-obscure, often private press, outsider psychedelic guitar and folk music from the 60s and 70s…all with the underlying theme of the Jesus People Movement.
01 Bakery- Trust In The Lord
02 The RFD- He Is Coming
03 Good News- Spirit
04 Father Daniel Berrigan- Kyrie
05 The Real Thing- No Songs Of Sadness
06 Maranatha- Deeper Than The Mighty Rolling . . .
Only the good shit. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by its patrons. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support.
To continue reading, become a member or log in.
George Harrison called his sprawling debut All Things Must Pass. Alvarius B. (aka Sun City Girls/Sublime Frequencies co-founder Alan Bishop) could've called his new similarly styled triple record/two-CD set All Things Suck Ass. Yeah, if you're looking for a blast of optimism in 2018, you might want to look elsewhere. Bishop's outlook on 21st century humanity is positively nightmarish. "Some prick called me a cynic / said I don't have any hope," he sings in "Dark in my Heart." "But I hope he croaks." Misanthropy might not be a strong enough term. Interestingly . . .
Only the good shit. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by its patrons. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support.
To continue reading, become a member or log in.
In his book The New Analog: Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World, Damon Krukowski of Galaxie 500 and Damon & Naomi casts a widescreen lens on the digital landscape, in search of the answer to the question "What elements of the analog world should we hang onto as we navigate the digital?"
He began writing about the subject with an article for Pitchfork in 2012, where he broke down the royalty rates of popular streaming services. But with his book and accompanying podcast, Ways of Hearing, Krukowski cracks the subject wide open, examining it from scientific, technological, sociological, and emotional angles. It's not a screed against progress; rather, it's an insightful and beautifully written investigation of music's true value. In a field of constant disruption, Krukowski holds up what might be worth preserving from the analog age, and how the "noise" of context adds to our understanding of, and connection to, the "signal" source of music itself.
Last month, before the winter break, Krukowski joined Aquarium Drunkard on the phone from Massachusetts to explore the radical possibilities of streaming music, the role of nostalgia in his writing, and the importance of the fight for Net Neutrality. Our conversation, edited and condensed, follows.
Aquarium Drunkard: Congrats on a great read. I picked up my copy at an independent bookstore, driving home from my job at an independent record store. So the questions you’re grappling with -- about what we might be losing as our culture shifts around us -- those are my kind of questions. In addition to purchasing music, I do stream, but this is not an “anti-streaming” book so much as it is a book asking some tough questions about how we stream. But let’s push that aside for a second and establish: What is your favorite thing about streaming?
Damon Krukowski: I use streaming a lot, too. I feel that all these ways of sharing information are useful and have their place in our lives...so long as we keep them open and accessible enough that users can determine how they place them in their lives, I think that they’re all positive. What is scary about streaming to me is not the medium [itself] but the corporate control of it. It’s becoming so centrally-controlled by giant corporations. I mean, the size of Apple, the size of the competition at companies like Spotify, it’s mind-boggling.
Only the good shit. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by its patrons. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support.
To continue reading, become a member or log in.