The guy staring out at you from the cover of this collection may not look like a blues god -- maybe a little more like your local electrician. But it only takes a few seconds to be convinced. Bill "Mr. Stress" Miller was something of a local institution in Cleveland, playing no-nonsense electric blues boogie in dive bars for decades until his death in 2015. The lineup of the band that bore his nickname was of the revolving door variety -- and become a member or log in.
Psychic Temple is on a tear: In the last couple weeks, the group, led by composer/songwriter Chris Schlarb, has released not one but two excellent records, the loose-limbed Psychic Temple III and a reimagining of Brian Eno's 1979 album Music for Airports.
The twin albums demonstrate Schlarb's ability to synthesize styles and approaches, combining fusion-era Miles Davis, the English folk rock of Fairport Convention, experimental jazz, rock & roll, R&B, and pop. Working with collaborators like Nedelle Torrisi, Mike Watt, David Hood, Spooner Oldham, and more, the recent work reflects the blooming of Psychic Temple from a conceptual solo project to a full band, capable of strutting boogies, progressive complexity, and sophisticated grooves, and for the first time, confident, commanding vocals. Schlarb discussed the new albums with AD from his place in Long Beach, where he was prepping to head out on tour.
Aquarium Drunkard: This is the third Psychic Temple release, but the first billed with Psychic Temple and the band.
Chris Schlarb: I feel like there’s been a wholesale transformation since the first record. For me, there’s a thousand connecting threads. Damn near all the same people who played on III played on I, it’s just the context is different. I’m singing, rather than it being this exploration of ambient music and jazz and folk. But by the time III rolled around, I was a bit more adamant about [releasing it as a Psychic Temple record]…It was a little bit easier to convince them this time around.
AD: Psychic Temple III definitely sounds group-oriented.
Chris Schlarb: It turned into a band. There was a core of people who kept coming back, and we just kept exploring new territory, but we were doing it together. I really love the idea that this is its own entity. In the future, if I put out any records under my own name, those will be different even still.
Psychic Temple :: You Ain't A Star
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Unreleased John Lennon bit from the Esher Demo Tapes, recorded at Kinfauns in Surrey, England. We know it as "Jealous Guy" via Lennon's 1971 Imagine LP . . .
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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. Today we are joined by Zach Cowie (find How Small We Are, here) and Kaley Evans (find Rollin' Up The Rim, become a member or log in.
Two sons of Tommy Douglas invite you on a spring trip across Canada. From lonesome provinces to cosmic territories, and everywhere in between. A place where private press unknowns stand as tall as under-appreciated legends. Enjoy the ride.
Anne Murray - Buffalo In The Park
Luke Gibson - All Day Rain
Bruce Cockburn - Going To The Country
Dunleath - And That's For Sure
Bill Wing - World For Sale
Dixie Lee Innes - Queen of Colby Kansas
Sim Rushton - Just Watching P.E.I.
Mirth - Going Away
Ernie Manera - Just Another Pretty Face
Jim Munro - Snow . . .
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Our ongoing collaboration with Zach Cowie, aka Turquoise Wisdom, returns with How Small We Are — A Mixtape. Tune in and turn on this Friday as Cowie guests on our SIRIUS show — channel 35, noon EST.
(artist - song - album - label)
intro- an interview with simon jeffes over the intro to part II of gorecki’s symphony no. 3
daniel lentz - solar cadence - after images . . .
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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 432: Jean-Michel Bernard — Générique Stéphane ++ Tommy James - Midnight Train ++ Caetano Veloso - Nine Out of Ten ++ Della Humphrey - Dream Land ++ The Combinations - While You Were Gone ++ Mighty Voices Of Wonder - Every Year Carries A Number ++ Francis Bebey - Douala, O Mulema ++ Jim Woehrle & Michael Yonkers - Monkey's . . .
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Before Jimmy Buffett became a corporation, he was a rangy and somewhat ragged country-folk singer/songwriter living a low finance life, still discovering his marketable Margaritaville persona. One of the projects he worked on in those early 70s Key West days was the soundtrack for a now mostly forgotten, but oft-times beautiful impressionistic fishing film / hippie travelogue called Tarpon.
At the time, Buffett was hanging out with a group of fellow cosmic American artists, all in search of fun and adventure. These included writers Tom McGuane, Richard Brautigan, and Jim Harrison, painter Russell Chatham and film makers Guy de la Valdene and Christian Odasso (Odasso had recently completed We Have Come For Your Daughters, which followed a 154 person bus and truck tour spreading “the gospel of flower power” throughout the U.S.). In a 1986 posthumous article about Brautigan in Rolling Stone, this group was described as a loose collective of “rough cut, highly competitive male artists.”
And though they were competitive, there was an overriding camaraderie among the men — evident in de la Valdene’s and Odassos’ Tarpon film. Tarpon is a fishing film in the same way John Lurie’s surreal early 90s Fishing With John series is about fishing. The sport is partly a vehicle to explore larger philosophic questions and reflect on nature and humanity.
Tarpon :: Soundtrack Excerpt One
Buffett’s soundtrack is low-key, laid back country akin to the textures on his albums of the time - A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean, Living and Dying in ¾ Time, and A1A — but all instrumental. The music accentuates the cinema verite / pseudo-documentary nature of the film. The hippies, the tourists, the grizzled old salts; atmospheric, moody shots of fly fishing in the sub-tropical heat and giant tarpon jumping in the scattered sun (bringing to mind the cinematography of Peter Fonda’s 1971 The Hired Hand). Informal interviews with McGuane and Brautigan are highlights, Brautigan’s in particular as he expounds from a hammock, one of the only existing instances of him ever captured on film.
It’s not all existential mellowness, however. In a particularly brutal and jarring sequence, a deckhand on a tourist excursion fishing boat wears a “shark killer” t-shirt and seems to take perverse pleasure in clubbing small sharks to a bloody death while the passengers watch uneasily, not sure whether to laugh or look away.
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In the market for an expansive, dreamy headphone record par excellence? You couldn't do much better right now than Ears, the latest by Bay Area composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith.
Mining influences like the minimalism of Terry Riley, Suzanne Ciani and Laurie Spiegel, the films of Hayao Miyazaki, and the cartoons of Jean Giraud Moebius, Smith's vision is kaleidoscopic and breathtaking, equally evoking rich earthiness and cosmic expanses. It's an enveloping, moving record, blending woodwinds played by Rob Frye of Bitchin Bajas, bubbling arpeggios, and Smith's vocals, multi-tracked and densely layered.
AD spoke with Smith from her home, where she was prepping for her upcoming tour with Animal Collective, packing last minute provisions and gearing up for live performances.
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith :: First Flight
Aquarium Drunkard: I have my own personal experiences listening to Ears, but I wonder: Were you trying to evoke anything like a specific mood on this record?
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: My intention was to create a sonic motion ride through a futuristic jungle. I wanted it to be heard straight through, from beginning to end, so that it feels like it has an intentional arc to it. Well, it's pretty straight "up," so it's more a ramp than an arc. I can't presume everyone will listen to it straight through, but that was my intention.
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"Anybody can throw a bunch of licks at your face," Endless Boogie's Paul Major writes in the liner notes of Anthology Records' new reissue of Ilian's 1977 pop gem Love Me Crazy. "Communicating, telling the story is where it's at."
"When you hear my songs, you always good," Leon D. Nahat -- Ilian himself -- says from his place in Flagstaff, Arizona. "When you hear a song and you want to play it again, that's . . .
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Cleveland guitarist/singer/songwriter/scenemaker Peter Laughner, best known for co-founding Rocket From The Tombs and Pere Ubu, died at far too young an age in 1977. But he managed to pack an astonishing amount of activity into his short life -- including a tangled relationship with Television, Tom Verlaine's pioneering CBGB-centric NYC band. Over the years, countless myths, legends and half-truths have been built up about this relationship, often going way beyond "just the facts." Fortunately, Cleveland punk scholar/Laughner archivist Nick Blakey has gone above and beyond and written Let Me Take You To The Empty Place, the definitive history. It's an essential longread.
As a soundtrack to Nick's essay, we've got two raw-but-right documents: Laughner's early 1976 tape of a Television set at CBGB (kindly supplied by Peter's friend and collaborator Don Harvey), along with a home recording of Peter and Don in Ann Arbor, featuring some of his own distinctive originals (check out the gorgeous rendition of "Amphetamine), plus covers of The Velvet Underground, Richard Hell ... and Television, naturally. words / t wilcox
Download: Television - CBGB, January 1976 (zipped folder)
Fire Engine / Prove It / Little Johnny Jewel / Psychotic Reaction / Friction / Guiding Light / Let Me Out / Kingdom Come
Download: Peter Laughner - The Ann Arbor Tape, February 1976 (zipped folder)
Candy Says / Fire Engine / Blank Generation / That's The Story Of My Life / Dead Letter Zone / Amphetamine / Venus de Milo
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David Bowie had a habit of covering the songs of other artists, sometimes sublimely, sometimes woefully. In turn, covers of Bowie songs range from the “why?” (see Barbra Streisand’s “Life On Mars?”; well, don’t really) to the weird to the rare version that manages to surpass the Bowie original.
The earliest hail from a time when Bowie was as much a jobbing songwriter as he was a performer. Scraping together a living in part by doing lyrical translations for Israeli and Belgian composers, Bowie made demo after demo, which his manager sent to the likes of Peter, Paul & Mary, Jefferson Airplane, Chris Montez, and Tom Jones, with no success.
A few took chances with Bowie’s material in the Sixties. In 1965, Kenny Miller sang Bowie’s fledgling composition “Take My Tip”. There was Billy Fury’s go at “Silly Boy Blue”, with Fury gamely handling lines like “yak-butter statues/ that melt in the sun.” Better still is The Slender Plenty’s version of a song that Bowie never recorded (though a demo exists): “Silver Tree Top School For Boys,” in which masters and boys in a public school share joints on the cricket pitch.
Giving Bowie a push after a halt in momentum (he’d had a UK Top 10 hit with “Space Oddity” but his follow-up singles stiffed) was Peter Noone’s take on “Oh! You Pretty Things,” a UK #12 in 1971. Noone and his producer Mickie Most tweaked the lyric (the earth is a “beast” here, not a “bitch”) and smoothed the song’s rough edges. Bowie played what he called “composer’s piano” on the recording, needing multiple takes to get through it, as his hands would cramp up at the keyboard.
Bowie also offered one of his strongest compositions of the period, “All the Young Dudes,” to Mott the Hoople. It was a bequest to a band he liked, and it essentially marked the end of Bowie, Songwriter. Having become a cross-Atlantic rock star with Ziggy Stardust, he no longer had to market his compositions (with a few exceptions–he wrote for Ava Cherry, Mick Ronson and Tina Turner, among others).
So here’s a dig through the Bowie catalog, as heard through the voices of others. We start with a track originally from Bowie’s 1967 debut LP. - Chris O'Leary
White Fence - “She’s Got Medals": As the chassis of Bowie’s gender-fluid “She’s Got Medals” is the garage band staple “Hey Joe,” it’s fitting that White Fence (Tim Presley and friends) showcased the song’s Nuggets qualities in a 2013 Aquarium Drunkard Lagniappe Session.
Lucien Midnight - “Space Oddity": For grandeur, there’s the astronaut Chris Hadfield singing “Space Oddity” from space; for eeriness, there’s the Langley Schools Music Project, who sound like the children of Village of the Damned singing in harmony. Lucien Midnight (pseudonym of Montréal’s Frank Fuller) made Bowie’s trademark song a washed-out, bummed-out internal conversation: “la planî¨te terre est bleue, qu'est-ce que tu m’veux ça me calisse?” (roughly “planet earth is blue, so why the fuck should I care?”). Major Tom also wears a fur hat here, not a helmet (well, he is in Montréal). From 2008’s Champion des Choses en Bois.
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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 431: Jean-Michel Bernard — Générique Stéphane ++ Billy Changer - Chiller ++Emerald Web — Flight Of The Raven ++ Harumi — What A Day For Me ++ Truck — Earth Song ++ Mandy More — If Not By Fire ++ Tages — You’re Too Incomprehensible ++ Twice As Much — The Spinning Wheel ++ Tangerine Peel — Trapped ++ Twice As Much — Play With . . .
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Drawing a line from the rootsy grooves of the Band to the scuzz of late '70s punk rock isn't the first move most musicologists would make, but a case could be made for exactly that via the lean, ambling music of Eggs Over Easy. In the early '70s, New Yorkers Jack O'Hara and Austin de Lone met and formed a duo in Berkeley, California, before bouncing back to New York to solidify the band, which they called Eggs Over Easy. Borrowing directly from the Band's rustic swagger, the group eventually . . .
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It's back. Welcome to the first installment of Aquarium Drunkard's re-tooled podcast. Picking up where the Sidecar (Transmissions) left off, consider this new program a late night broadcast exploring pop culture through an esoteric lens, focusing on music, literature, film and other dispatches from parts unknown.
Beginning now, expect a new episode every other week. Our debut features Jason P. Woodbury's interview with longtime AD favorite Will Oldham, AKA Bonnie "Prince . . .
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