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Allen Ginsberg :: Last Word on First Blues

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The poetry of Allen Ginsberg was a foundational influence  on the counter culture, informing folk, rock & roll, and punk, establishing a vocabulary that was as profane and fearless as it was beautiful and transcendent. But while his contributions to the  discographies of Bob Dylan and the Clash are well documented, his own musical explorations have been less publicized. With the recent release of Omnivore Recordings' The Last Word on First Blues, a three-disc set featuring material recorded in 1971, 1976, and 1981, producer Pat Thomas has gone a long way toward illuminating this singing side of Ginsberg.

Featuring contributions from Dylan, avant-garde cellist Arthur Russell, an appearance by Don Cherry on kazoo, David Mansfield, Steven Taylor, Peter Orlovsky, and many more, the sessions presented here are wild, loose, and celebratory. The recordings  encompass far out country, gospel sweetness, jug band reveries, swinging jazz,  and blues, effectively presenting a template for future freak folk weirdness, playing in sandboxes similar to those of his friends the Fugs and Holy Modal Rounders. Certainly, Ginsberg's voice takes some getting used to, but once you're acclimated it's easy to hear its versatility, capable of warm  softness on songs like "Gospel Nobel Truths" or free rapping on material like "Jimmy Berman (Gay Lib Rag)."

We reached out the Thomas to discuss assembling the collection, talking about Ginsberg's voice, his role in Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue, and his assorted celebrations of pure freedom.

Allen Ginsberg :: NY Blues

Aquarium Drunkard: In the notes, you talk about hearing about Ginsberg's First Blues on MTV News, obviously released many years after the sessions were recorded. What was your first impression listening to the record?

Pat Thomas: I really was blown away, I immediately connected with it, in retrospect, surprisingly so -- I didn't need any "warm up" time to Ginsberg's vocals or lyrics -- and it quickly become something I played a lot! As much as any Beatles or Clash or whatever albums.

AD: After the initial 1971 sessions, there was talk of Apple Records releasing the material. Any insight as to why that didn't happen? Seems like Allen's stuff would have fit in well with Lennon and Yoko's vibe, alongside people like David Peel.

Pat Thomas: I think mainly it didn't get released on Apple because Apple was falling apart. The Beatles had of course broken up, they were fighting in with each other and with their "manager" Allen Klein. I mean, Lennon could have "pushed it out," but didn't for whatever reason. But yeah, it would have fit in nicely with the David Peel LP for sure...

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Ty Segall & White Fence :: Scissor People (Room 205 Session)

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Hey, can y'all get this joint thing back together?? Until then, watch the ripper, below -- it soaks the album version in phlegm and kerosene and set it on fire . . .

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Sunburst :: Ave Africa: The Complete Recordings 1973-1976

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Analog Africa, Soundway Records, Now Again Records, Awesome Tapes From Africa, and Strut. Together, these five labels have done more to advance western comprehension of African music  than most ethnocentric undergraduate study curricula ever could.  A sonic diaspora, their exploration of vintage continental sounds via a decade-plus of  releases . . .

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Ryley Walker :: The Halfwit In Me

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We'll save you the usual litany / free association of artists Ryley Walker deftly channels and allow you to just...listen. You're welcome. Produced by fellow Chicagoan LeRoy Bach, Walker's third lp Golden Sings That Have Been Sung is out August 19th via the Dead Oceans label.

Ryley Walker :: The Halfwit In Me

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Catching Up With Steve Gunn :: Eyes on the Lines

Steve Gunn The AD InterviewPosted on

The songs on Steve Gunn’s seventh album and Matador Records debut Eyes on the Lines don’t move straight ahead. Instead, they loop, swirl, and curl. But they do have a sense of purpose, and the driving language Gunn sprinkles across the nine songs parallel how he and his band push forward. On the album, detours aren’t distractions. Often, they’re the point.

“I was thinking about the concept of being lost, welcoming a sense of the unknown,” Gunn says via his cell from the road. Musically, the reference points carry over from his last couple of excellent outings, like the sounds of mentors and collaborators Mike Cooper and Michael Chapman, blues from Chicago and Mali, and the Basement Tapes. But on this album, there's a distinctly rock feel to the proceedings.

“When I’m coming up with stuff, we’re talking about rock & roll songs," Gunn says. "Mostly the Velvets, Stones, and Dylan, to cite three.”

Lyrically, Eyes on the Lines is devoted to the unexpected, celebrating deviations from the path, dwelling on moonlit wanderings, strange dreams, and observing the thrill that comes from finding oneself truly lost, the ultimate acknowledgment of the unknown.

On “Conditions Wild,” Gunn lyrically paraphrases from author Rebecca Solnit’s book A Field Guid to Getting Lost. “It’s a field guide from the other side, beyond the path you know,” he sings, his husky Philly baritone rolling over organ and a steady backbeat. “Feel the path and move along the traces where you’ll go.”

“It’s really an interesting book,” Gunn says of Solnit’s 2005 collection of personal and historical reflections, which helped order his thoughts about the concept of "losing oneself." “Being a creative person, you have to kind of trust this other aspect of your life, which is something you can’t explain or predict. You can’t have preconceived notions."

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Rob Mazurek & Emmett Kelly :: Alien Flower Sutra

Rob Mazurek & Emmett KellyPosted on

Composer Rob Mazurek is no stranger to high concepts: His Exploding Star Orchestra has plotted albums around the cycle of galactic death and rebirth; Return the Tides: Ascension Suite and Holy Ghost was centered around the idea of energy transference, inspired by his mother's passing; Alternate Moon Cycles was a patient drone constructed in alignment with lunar luminosity. So, the science fiction ambition of his new LP Alien Flower Sutra isn't unusual in the context of Mazurek's discography, but in vocalist Emmett Kelly of the Cairo Gang, he's found a powerful storytelling ally.

Rob Mazurek & Emmett Kelly :: Of Time Wasted

Originally conceived as an opera, Alien Flower Sutra tells the story of "a cybernetic organism struggling to reconcile the human buried inside their computer-regulated psyche." Kelly provides vocals and first-person lyrics on the album, his skeletal melodies and guitar work wrapped in noisy soundscapes and washes of modular synthesizer by Mazurek.

The resulting album features a haunting, moving saga, Kelly's words stretched over songs like ""I Untied My Wrists," "Embryo Genesis," and finally "We Are One." Mazurek brings violent, chaotic charge to the songs, but Kelly's words continually pull the listener back in to his character's grief at the sight of bombs, bodies running toward water, and the uneasy tension between machine and man. "We all can become anyone/under cross electric fire/in the prison, we are one/a good companion in the steel," he sings.

The sounds move quickly between heavy drones, minimalist loops, and ambient folk, always accentuating the emotional tenor of the subject matter. "The spaces inside me, cavernous ricochets," Kelly sings, the music matching his illustrative language, rife with longing and electric wires.

The album ends with "Overture Towards the Beginning of the End of Time," its blown-out melodies offering a kind of scorched triumph. Kelly doesn't sing here, perhaps suggesting the occurrence of singularity between flesh and circuitry, or perhaps implying the unit's creased operation. It's beautiful, compelling speculative fiction in the vein of William Gibson's cyberpunk tales or Leiji Matsumoto's romantic Galaxy Express 999. words / j woodbury

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Wax Wonders :: Bob Dylan – From A Buick 6 (Alternate Take)

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Happy 75th to a poet, a rock 'n roll icon, a folk sensation, and a living legend. Stop and take a moment to fathom that number; 75 years. Bob Dylan has spent 54 of those on earth as a recording artist. He was at the forefront of the NYC folk scene, marched on Washington for civil rights, defected from the folkies into an electrified cultural icon who influenced just about every style of music imaginable, and is still out there, doing his thing. Sure, he’s released a few clunkers along the way, but all it takes is . . .

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Klaus Johann Grobe :: Spagat der Liebe

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Krautpop. Speaking of Trouble In Mind Records, earlier this month the Chicago label released Spagat der Liebe, the Zürich based Klaus Johann Grobe's second LP. Comprised of Sevi Landolt (organ/synths/vocals) and Daniel Bachmann (drums/vocals), the pair continue down the path set out on their initial self-produced singles and 2014's Im Sinne der Zeit - a groove laden Autobahn equally rooted in their German krautrock forebears, '90s Stereolab . . .

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New Age Sounds :: Jeff Berry’s SunPath

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Los Angeles-based label Leaving Records been been responsible for releasing some of 2016's most blissful sound explorations, like Matthewdavid's Trust the Guide and Glide and Carlos Niî±o & Friends' Flutes, Echoes, It's All Happening (the latter pairing the Spaceways Radio deejay with saxophonist Kamasi Washington, legendary beatmaker Madlib, cosmic channel Iasos, and the Aztec-evoking avant-garde composer Luis Pérez Ixoneztli).

For its latest New Age entry, Leaving is going back to the early 1980s, with Dream Music by SunPath, the recording name of one Jeff Berry. Collecting material from 1980's Yasimin and the Snowflake Dragon and 1984's SunPath 2, the sounds here are deeply melodic and zone deeply inward, featuring Berry on Prophet synthesizer, incorporating natural sounds -- streams recorded in the open and in caves, storms -- and augmented by the inclusion of homemade flutes, drums, and stringed instruments.

The tape is out now. We spoke with Berry about his sound and approaching the "magic of the multiverse."

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Beth Orton :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview

Beth Orton The AD InterviewPosted on

Beth Orton has spent 20-some years walking the margins between folk rock and electronic music. Before her 1996 classic Trailer Park, she recorded an entirely electronic debut, SuperpinkyMandy, but even then, she covered cosmic balladeer John Martyn's "Don't Want to Know About Evil." In Orton's hands, the lines between the genres have always been smudged -- she's collaborated with everyone from Terry Callier to William Orbit to Ben Watt -- but with her new album, Kidsticks, Orton makes a decisive statement.

"...I would go as far as to say this resolutely is not a folk record," Orton says via the phone from her home in Los Angeles, her accent making plain her English roots.

She has a point. Kidsticks has more in common with Stereolab or Four Tet than the gentle folk of 2006's Jim O'Rourke-produced Comfort of Strangers or Sugaring Season, the album that followed it six years later. Built on loops engineered by Orton and Andrew Hung of Fuck Buttons, the new album is vivid and neon-colored. "Wave" rides a funky, shimmering pulse; "Flesh and Blood" bursts with interlocked melodies; "Petals" rises and falls with tremendous swells of synthesized bass. Orton's hardly abandoned her lyrical focus. These songs, concerning the passage of time and exploring concepts of identity, feature some of her best lyrical work, not obscured, but enhanced, by the dense sounds that flutter around it. "There's starlight burning in our hearts tonight," Orton sings on the slow motion ballad "Dawnstar," a line which encapsulates the vividness of her prose on the record.

Orton spoke with AD about building the album's framework from rhythm loops, the influence of shuffle mode, and why this feels like the album she's been waiting to make for a long time.

Aquarium Drunkard: You start off “Snow” singing, “I’ll astrally project myself into the life of someone else.” That’s one of my favorite metaphors for the act of releasing music. When you put out a record, that’s what you’re doing: releasing your voice and experiences into the lives of people listening. Where did that lyric come from?

Beth Orton: That’s a lovely way of interpreting it. I like that way of interpreting better than any. I don’t know, I was just playing with that idea. The themes that come up a lot on this record deal with time: a sense of time travel, a sense of shifting time, of time not being quite real.

AD: A shared illusion, at least.

Beth Orton: We sort of slip between time without really realizing it. We’re always traveling through time, our daily space is constantly between dreams. I play around with identity a lot on the record, and I just love the idea of astral projection. What the fuck does it actually mean, you know? Time travel – that’s definitely a theme of the record.

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Omni :: Wire

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I've been waiting nearly a year for this record to come out - Omni's debut lp, Deluxe. - and this track,  "Wire", was my initial introduction. Clocking in at just over three minutes, the track neatly encapsulates the best of late 70s / early 80s jittery post-punk, all without muddying the waters with unnecessary pastiche. Omni, like its namesake, hail from Atlanta and are comprised of former members of Carnivores/Deerhunter.

The album drops July 8th, via

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SIRIUS/XMU :: Aquarium Drunkard Show (Noon EST, Channel 35)

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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 434: Jean-Michel Bernard — Générique Stéphane ++ Jean Jacques Dexter - Be Quite ++ Stomu Yamash'ta's Red Buddha Theatre - Awa Odori ++ Faust - It’s A Bit Of A Pain ++ Bohannon - Save Their Souls ++ Lennie Hibbert - Rose Len ++ Gandalf - Nature Boy ++ Funkadelic - Music For My Mother ++ Nina Simone - Be My Husband . . .

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Bleached :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interivew

Bleached The AD InterviewPosted on

On its latest LP, Welcome to Worms, Los Angeles band Bleached pulls off everything you want great rock songs to do. Led by sisters Jennifer and Jessica Calvin, the album's funny and loud, as well as reflective and self-aware. It's fun, effervescent, and catchy, but it rewards repeated spins, inviting the listener deeper into singer Jennifer's often dark head space, which she explores without pretension. "Trying to lose myself again," she sings on the song of the same name, allowing her direct lines to just sit with the listener the same way the sugar-rush fuzz guitar does.

"Trying to understand myself was the biggest thing," Jennifer says of the writing process. "I would have one day where I thought I was amazing, and then the next, I would hate myself. But I just knew what I had was my writing and being honest with myself, so I just went there every time I'd write...We're really scared to face the darkness in life, but when we just accept that's part of the package, the good and and the bad, then I think it's easier to be happier."

The contrast between the gleeful strut of these songs and intimate lyrical reflections is underscored by -- as bone-headed as the observation might read -- the power of the album's riffs, meaty, Joan Jett-plays-Cheap Trick slabs of heavy guitar.

"We definitely wanted to up our game from the last record," Jennifer says. To that aim, they worked with established producer Joe Chiccarelli, pushing the band to make the sonic feel of the record "scary and hard."

That heaviness "made this record possible," Jessica says.

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Transmissions Podcast: Car Seat Headrest / Bob Mehr

Car Seat Headrest Podcast Sidecar (Transmissions)Posted on

Welcome to the second episode of Aquarium Drunkard's newly rebooted Transmissions podcast, our recurring series of unique discussions and extraî±o sounds.

On this episode, we spoke with Will Toledo of Car Seat Headrest, whose new album Teens of Denial comes out this Friday via Matador Records. It's a fantastic record, bigger and more fully realized than before, and it reflects the transition from solo project . . .

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Krano :: Requiescat In Plavem

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Lost records come of many vintages. By comparison to long-lost '60s and '70s nuggets, Requiescat In Plavem, recorded only as far back as 2012, might seem a bit too fresh for "lost classic" status, but damn if there isn't some mystical appeal at work in these songs.

Recorded by Italian songwriter Marco Spigariol, singing in the Italian dialect of in the hills of Valdobbiadene on a Tascam 8-track, the album taps into uncorked Neil Young vibes on album opener "Mi E Ti," offers up woozy folk on "Busiero," and goes arcane places with the creeping "Vergine De Luce," Spigariol saying as much with a fuzzed-out guitar as he does with his far off vocals, sung in the Vento dialect.

Krano :: Mi E Ti

"When I received this record I had no idea what I was getting myself into," Jonathan Clancy of Maple Death Records says. "It came with no notes, just a letter in broken English. For days I made up lyrics to it trying to crack and uncover the language, dreaming of some Latin American retreat. Little did I know I was actually taking a stroll up the Piave river, plunging through pre-war cascades, seeing feverish trees set mountains in motion and a Veneto valley full of psychedelic beauty naked in front of my eyes."

Luckily, Maple Death has rescued and reissued this gem, laden with Morricone dread and Shakey looseness; it's low key and deeply-felt, and after recording the album Spigariol hung up his music hat, leaving behind this spooky thing, suitably humid listening as we ease into summer. words / j woodbury

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