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Jenny Sorrenti :: Suspiro

Though one may not guess it from the more recent entries of her discography, at one moment, Jenny Sorrenti was deep in the underground annals of psych folk. The Italian songstress may have moved on toward the more madrigal/trad-folk side of things in recent years, but 1976’s Suspiro came barreling forth in sun-drenched pop with a flair for fuzz and grit. And though it has been recognized for its association with Jorma Kaukonen’s brother Peter making an appearance on mandolin and production duties, Sorrenti’s debut deserves the chance to stand on its own merit . . .

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Raul Lovisoni / Francesco Messina :: Prati Bagnati Del Monte Analogo

Prati bagnati del monte Analogo from composers Raul Lovisoni and Francesco Messina was released on the Italian label Cramps in 1979. While nominally a part of the Italian minimalism genre, the music bears more in common with Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, released a year earlier. It’s minimal even by minimalist standards. Messina and Lovisoni were a part of the fertile avant garde scene in Italy . . .

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Grimório de Abril :: Castelo D’Água

A new release, Castelo D'Água, comes out now via the incredibly consistent Brazilian micro-label Municipal K7. It maintains the characteristic amplitude of Sanchez' landscapes while attaining more closely to the wetness indexed in reverb. The tracks follow what Bachelard would call the homology between water and dreams: the oneiric as a fluid substance, a liquid flow, or rather a submersion into pre-formal matter . . .

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Dave Harrington, Max Jaffe, Patrick Shiroishi :: Staring Into The Imagination Of Your Face

Recorded live and in the moment at Golden Beat recording studios in Los Angeles, Speak, Moment documents the first afternoon guitarist Dave Harrington (Darkside, Dave Harrington Group, Tapers Choice), saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi and drummer Max Jaffe met. Ahead of the album's release on March 8th, we're pleased to share the video for "Staring Into The Imagination Of Your Face," and Jaffe's comments on the hypnotic video . . .

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The Aquarium Drunkard Show: SIRIUS/XMU (7pm PST, 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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High Llamas :: Sister Friends

From the opening keys to the bouncy, echoing synths: indeed, the High Llamas are back with their immediate, radiating brand of orchestral lounge music. The last time we checked in with the prolific Sean O’Hagan, he referenced a parallel to the career trajectory of Robert Wyatt to describe his own creative tear of late. Perhaps recalling Mary Hansen’s vocals on Llamas tracks of yesteryear, the swaying new single “Sister Friends” features English pop singer Rae Morris taking lead vocals in a lush, jazzy duet . . .

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Transmissions :: Laetitia Sadier

This week on the show: a conversation with Laetitia Sadier. As the main vocalist of Stereolab, her spacey voice shines as the human core in that project’s motorik and dense avant-pop, a blend of electronic music, krautrock, space age lounge sounds, and much more. Her latest is called Rooting for Love, and she joins us to discuss the collective and the individual, and the radical potentiality of love . . .

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Jazz Ragas For Restless Times

At this year's NYC Winter Jazzfest, the dominant forms veered into New Age and ambient territory: abstract, pretty, burbling along in loose conglomerations of synths and “organic” instrumentation. And maybe jazz comingling with New Age sensibilities is exactly the antidote we need for today's troubling times . . .

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Dean McPhee :: Astral Gold

English guitarist Dean McPhee has spent more than a decade now patiently carving out a singular niche for himself. That patience has paid off — there’s really no one else who can create (and sustain) the darkly seductive mood that’s embedded within his work. Astral Gold, McPhee’s first album since 2021, continues to mine that same rich vein, with his luminous, electrified tones spiraling out over steadily looping undercurrents and uncanny percussive accents . . .

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Linda Smith :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview

Linda Smith started recording cassettes at home in the late 1980s, painstakingly writing out simple parts for voice, guitar, bass and percussion, laying them down on a four-track, dubbing them onto cassettes and selling them by mail order to a handful of admirers—many of them also DIY musicians. ow, following its 2021 compilation Till Another Time: 1988-1996, Captured Tracks has reissued Smith’s two exquisite mid-1990s cassette recordings, Nothing Else Matters and I So Liked Spring . . .

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Aquarium Drunkard Book Club :: Chapter 28

Welcome back to the stacks. It’s Aquarium Drunkard’s Book Club, our monthly gathering of recent (or not so recent) recommended reading. In this month’s stack: the communal effort that has made up NYC’s varied music scenes over the decades, Thurston Moore’s epic memoir, Haruki Murakami, the poetry of Oswell Blakeston and the hallucinatory, existential odyssey that is The Apple in the Dark . . .

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Organic Pulse Ensemble :: Zither Suite

Those recurring zither glissandi sound like toybox miniatures of Alice Coltrane’s celestial harp. But interestingly, while the opening “Zither Suite” commences with a clutch of spiritual jazz signifiers—a lovely, tentative bass melody, warm piano chords, rain stick clatter, some hand drums, and a searching flute solo—the track takes a sharp turn around the three-minute mark . . .

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Nora Brown :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview

Nora Brown has been playing old time music since she was six years old. She came up in the folk scene surrounding the Jalopy Theatre, the headquarters of traditional music in New York City. Gearing up for a European tour this spring, she spoke with AD about the banjo, the vibes of old time music, listening to your elders . . .

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Weather Report :: Internationales Musikforum, Ossiach, Austria (July 1971)

Grateful Dead archivist Dick Latvala referred to tapes from 1968-70 as “primal Dead.” And while I know Jerry was never a fan of this sort of music (he dismissed the first wave of fusion as “state-of-the-art music-school music,”) I’m going to go ahead and call this show a slab of “primal Weather Report.” In fact, this is as a primal as it gets, being, by all accounts, the band’s earliest recorded performance . . .

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Real Estate :: Daniel

It’s an ironclad law at this point, a logical theorem: every Real Estate record is good, and every Real Estate sounds like Real Estate, because Real Estate is good. But Daniel, their latest, is a wonder in more ways than one . . .

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