2017 is shaping up to be a great year for fans of Vic Chesnutt as New West Records is slowly re-releasing, in gorgeous expanded color vinyl editions, most of his albums originally released on the now defunct Texas Hotel label. Both Little and Drunk have been already been re-released, with become a member or log in.
Imagine dialing around on the radio and stumbling across this utterly fried live session from The Incredible String Band late one night in 1968. Transmitted via Bob Fass' legendary Radio Unnameable show, this is some seriously psychedelic free-folk, with Mike Heron and Robin Williamson delivering ecstatic visions and out-of-time tales. Rob Young, in his highly recommended Electric Eden, summed up the ISB best when he said the group “captured [the] elemental essence of music as an intimate rite in the . . .
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"You play that Blues Explosion album from last year a lot, so check this out." That was Rob Green, a guy I clerked with in an Athens, GA record store in 1995. The record CD he was referring to was Boss Hog's s/t second full-length. And like the Blues Explosion's Orange and Extra Width before it, the album quickly entered regular rotation with "knock my teeth out, make way for gold" becoming something of an . . .
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"...wild, grand, delirious, demonic, an uncontainable personality surging into sound," wrote Alex Ross in his January essay about Julius Eastman for The New Yorker. Though he died in 1990, Eastman's work has steadily amassed a following in the years since.
In 2016, the Frozen Reeds label issued his S.E.M. Ensemble recording of his composition Femenine. Featuring piano, reeds, violin, synthesizer, percussion, and mechanized sleigh bells (an invention of . . .
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Lagniappe (la ·gniappe) noun ‘lan-ˌyap,’ — 1. An extra or unexpected gift or benefit. 2. Something given or obtained as a gratuity or bonus.
Guitar journeyman Daniel Bachman returns with his second Lagniappe Session. Fresh off his excellent 2016 self-titled album, Bachman's proved himself one of the most nuanced guitarists in his field. Beyond its technical aspects, Bachman's playing stirs deep feelings, as do the recordings here, of Lemuel Turner's 1928 "Beautiful Eyes of Virginia" and . . .
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“You have to really want to be here,” Keith Abrahamsson says, overlooking the small West Texas town of Marfa.
We’re sitting on the deck of a stone and adobe house just off Highway 90, positioned atop a hill. Since 2014, the label Abrahamsson founded, Mexican Summer, has hosted the annual Marfa Myths festival here with arts nonprofit Ballroom Marfa. Initially a single performance at local venue El Cosmico, the gathering has bloomed into a four-day multidisciplinary happening, dedicated to blurring the lines between cinema, literature, art, and music.
Below us, a rooster crows and a couple dogs fitfully bark. Abrahamsson, wearing a denim jacket and faded Levis, leans back in his chair and considers my question: What keeps him coming back to Marfa?
“It’s kind of hard to articulate,” Abrahamsson says. “But it does feel like the town has this magical something. I don’t know if it’s the remote location, or the super-dramatic landscape and sky. There’s something about it that just has this seemingly magnetic pull. I don’t know how to articulate what about it gives you the feeling that it’s a special place, but it does have that quality.”
Marfa’s specialness is a reminder that there’s no such thing as “nowhere.” Despite its relative geographic remoteness – it’s located about six hours west of Austin and a three-hour drive from El Paso – Marfa feels alive in an indefinable way, pulsing with a vibrancy most small, mostly isolated communities in America can’t anymore, their industries and prospects dried up. Though regular injections of New Yorkers, Angelinos, and big city entrepreneurs – via festivals like Marfa Myths, the Marfa Film Festival, and the Chinati Weekend – bring clout and cash to the town, it’s not a hectic place. Which is precisely why everything feels so charming: Things happen here, at their own gentle pace.
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Everyone loves a good origin story. No matter the creative discipline such tales make even the most potent work seem more revelatory. Enter the late Japanese jazz pianist Ryo Fukui. An autodidact, Fukui taught himself piano at age 22 - just four years prior to the release of his exceptional 1976 debut lp, Scenery. Far from prolific, Fukui released just four more albums over the course of the next . . .
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Helen Oakley Dance was a pioneering record collector, jazz writer, producer and promoter. During the 1930s, she promoted the first jazz “concert”, where pop music was first played to listen to rather than as a reason to dance, and the first multiracial jazz band. For her, promoting black musicians was a way of promoting civil rights. In an age of Beyoncé and the Grammys, of Black Lives Matter, of Kanye and Trump, her story, of music and equality, of Jim Crow and the rise of fascism, deserves to be more widely known.
By the time she spoke to Mark Tucker from the Yale Oral History of American Music project, Helen Oakley Dance’s memory was not as sharp as it once was, and she sometimes stumbled over her words. It was 1987, and she couldn’t remember exactly which song Duke Ellington had been playing when she cried, standing at the side of the stage, one evening in the 1930s. She began to talk about the musicians she had known back in Chicago, and became a little lost: “I used to write about Jess when he was playing in the cellar, and playing… getting off at eight a.m. in the morning, and nobody knew about him. And, also, there was a… the Chicago Rhythm Kings, or… My memory is poor, Mark.”
“It's the thing when you don’t refer back to these same sets of things,” she said, “the names that you know very well escape you.” She called over to her husband, Stanley, whom she called Stanny. “We might need Stanny for some dates and some names, because…” Stanley, like Helen, was a respected jazz writer, particularly about Ellington. He’d first become well known in his native England, and had delivered the eulogy at Ellington’s funeral, but he deferred to Helen as the true pioneer, as a writer, producer, promoter, record collector, and civil rights activist: she “was there first”, he said, if people asked.
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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.
SIRIUS 474: Jean Michel Bernard — Générique Stephane ++ The Swamp Rats — I’m Going Home ++ Dennis Wilson / Beach Boys — Lady ++ The Kinks — I Go To Sleep (demo) ++ Le Bain Didonc — 4 Cheveux Dans Le Vent ++ The Brummels — Bof! ++ Nancy Sinatra (w/ Hal Blaine) — Drummer Man ++ The Motions — Beatle Drums ++ Naomi And The . . .
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Jason Molina (Songs: Ohia / Magnolia Electric Co) died March 16th, 2013. It's impossible to overstate the depth and virtue of his songs or the way he poetically expressed the human condition. We originally ran this set in 2013, following his passing. Still touring under the guise of Songs: Ohia, Molina recorded the following live session on April 20, 2003 for the "Duyster" radio show on Studio Brussel, FM 94.5 Belgium. Woodshedding material that would later appear on record (plus an interview), the set is raw and stripped down. Captain Badass, indeed.
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Rob Mazurek is building a life's work. Coming up in the Chicago free music scene, the cornet player and composer has made pioneering music alongside his peers, including Tortoise, Jim O'Rourke, Stereolab, and Jeff Parker, and collaborated with jazz heroes Bill Dixon, Pharoah Sanders, Yusef Lateef, and more.
But one of his longest running collaborations is with drummer Chad Taylor, with whom Mazurek leads various "Underground" groups. Their latest, A Night Walking Through Mirrors, finds them teaming with London musicians Alexander Hawkins and John Edwards. It's both brash and thoughtful, a live exhibition of the telepathic interplay between Mazurek, Taylor, and their guests. AD caught up with Mazurek to discuss the record, and how a unifying thread, loosely inspired by science fiction and cyberpunk literature, has begun to solidify in his work, uniting it thematically and conceptually.
Aquarium Drunkard: I'd like to start off about asking you about your notion of protest music. In the biography that accompanied A Night Walking Through Mirrors you say that the various Underground albums have always been "protest" music. How, and what, does your music protest in this context?
Rob Mazurek: I mean, it's basically just a protest against anything or anybody that wants to put up some kind of barrier between total creativity, ya know? So whether it's music or psychologically or spiritually, that's been the thing [we're protesting]. The first Chicago Underground record is called 12 Degrees of Freedom. It has those same precepts, not just in music but dealing with psychology, spirituality, the whole thing. That's always been the underlying theme with that. Whether we're talking about Exploding Star Orchestra or Chicago Underground, it's all about expressing freedom.
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The existence of the ‘tax scam’ LP is one of the stranger tales of the 1970s record business. In short, crooked label heads would press up demos of unsigned artists, outtakes from known artists, and other various ephemera in limited quantities that were thrown out into the market with zero promotion -- all based on the hopes of commercial failure and the ability for the ‘label’ to write off the failure as a loss.
John Scoggins’ Pressed For Time is one such record, and one that has become legendary in power-pop collector's circles. Originals are nearly possible to find, and sell for several hundred bucks when they do.
As it turns out Pressed For Time wasn’t a ‘solo’ album by any means, but the product of a New York band called Ramparts, led by Mr. Scoggins. Ramparts were a ubiquitous opening band in mid seventies Manhattan, and Scoggins himself worked as a roadie when he wasn’t gigging. In one of the more bizarre tales of A&R, the band was signed over the phone by a representative from Roulette Records new off-shoot, Tiger Lily Records (a quick search on organized crime and Roulette will take a reader on an insightful, intriguing ride through the criminal element of the music biz). Miraculously, even though the LP had zero promotion, Bomp Magazine’s Greg Shaw did, in fact, get ahold of a copy and wrote a very positive review, stating the lp was well worth the trouble to seek out.
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Our enthusiasm for 70s era Beach Boys and the creative stretch of brothers Carl and Dennis Wilson runs deep, notably during the course of albums Surf’s Up, “So Tough”, and Holland. And recently it’s the latter, Holland, a still somewhat overlooked gem from 1973 that is resonating most. Spend enough time with the record and you’ll find spectacular revelations beneath its miraculous scope; a sonic goldmine that reveals itself in greater and more profound depth with each seemingly infinite visit.
With Brian Wilson taking something of a backseat, younger brothers Carl and Dennis, along with manager and co-lyricist Jack Rieley, found themselves in a sandbox all their own. And in contrast to the waters of surf-pop innocence a decade past, here we peer through an aquatic lens matured and layered, revealing something altogether foggier and oblique.
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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.
SIRIUS 473: Jean Michel Bernard — Générique Stephane ++ Sun Ra - We’re Living In The Space Age ++ Honeyboy Martin & The Voices - Dreader Than Dread ++ Johnny & The Attractions - I'm Moving On ++ Andersons All Stars - Intensified Girls ++ King Sporty - DJ Special ++ Freddie Mackay - When I'm Gray ++ Hopeton Lewis - Sound And . . .
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Immediately apparent when listening to Real Estate is their sense of motion. Melodic guitar lines swirl; the rhythm section bounces and folds along; and their literal knack for memory and/or scenic based songwriting transports the listener to a specific place. All of this holds true on their fourth LP, In Mind. Recorded in Los Angeles (and with a augmented lineup), the band is in fine form.
Preparing for some high profile gigs around the globe, we caught up with Martin Courtney and Alex Bleeker on the eve of the album's release, touching on their bi-coastal band arrangement, favorite venues, and recording in LA. Plus, all of the members sent over some tracks that inspired the new record (vibey, as expected).
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Aquarium Drunkard: The band is now bi-coastal. How has this impacted the writing, recording and rehearsing for the new album? Any growing pains and/or nice surprises?
Martin Courtney: Living in different cities definitely forced us to approach this album very differently. In the past, we were able to get together a few times a week and work on new songs as they came. This time, I spent a few months writing and demoing songs and sending them around to the band before we ever got together to work on them. Then, the rest of the band came out to the town where I live (very nice of them), rented a house down the street from mine, and we spent three weeks (in two different sessions) working on the songs and recording full band demos with Jarvis from Woods in an old converted high school art classroom.
Doing it that way, we actually probably ended up spending about the same amount of time on this album as we did on Atlas, just all at once instead of spread out over a few months. And, it was super fun getting up every day, walking to the school together, and spending a few hours jamming. The vibe was really good the whole time, and we approached the songs in a looser, more free way. I really feel like the good vibe during the writing sessions carried through the whole process and is audible on the record. This was a fun album to make.
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