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Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard :: March 2024

Freeform transmissions from Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard on dublab. Airing every third Sunday of the month, RFAD on dublab features the pairing of Tyler Wilcox’s Doom and Gloom from the Tomb and Chad DePasquale’s New Happy Gathering. This month, Chad offers up a misty portal into spring — orchestral pop, psychedelic folk & earthy jazz; then, Tyler delivers some Stereolab-ish situations, from solo efforts and side projects to similarly styled space age bachelor pad music. 4-6pm PT . . .

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Morris Belknap :: My Lost Friends

Morris Belknap's lone 1976 LP Jesus Saves was reissued last year by the dedicated crate diggers at cult Arizona label Skull Valley Records. It oozes honesty and earnest, faithful fervor. Though the album is informed predominately by the sounds of blues, country, and folk, "My Lost Friends" carries in it some nascent Velvets-like quality . . .

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Ryan Power :: World of Wonder

Four years after the brilliant Mind the Neighbors and seven after the highly-praised They Sell Doomsday, World of Wonder brings back Ryan Power's multi-genre kaleidoscope of kosmische sensibility, toy aesthetics, and chamber pop sublime. It closely follows Fievel is Glauque's now-famed brand of indie jazz psychedelia, with broken and demented (and yet perfectly refined) melodies going through unexpected harmonic progressions, modulating right before the phrases can find a conclusive stage . . .

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Oisin Leech :: Cold Sea

Oisin Leech is an Irish singer-songwriter who had his brush with commerce with the 1990s band 747s and a more ruminative sort of acclaim with the Lost Brothers, his folk duo with Mark McCausland “October Sun.” Cold Sea is his first solo album, and while you might miss the Lost Brothers’ shadowy harmonies on it, he is not exactly alone.

Indeed, on the translucent opener “Cold Sea,” both producer Steve Gunn and long-time collaborator M. Ward lend a hand, and later, Dylan bassist Tony Garnier turns up for some lovely acoustic low-end . . .

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Waxahatchee :: Tigers Blood

Katie Crutchfield hit an artistic and commercial high water mark in 2020 with the full-throttle country rocking St. Cloud, an album which doubled her audience and established her as a significant force in Americana music. Tigers Blood comes four years later, past a global music industry shutdown, a world health crisis and Crutchfield’s own battle to get sober. If anything, it’s a bigger, brighter album, its rough, confessional poetry charged with triumph, its instrumental sound bolstered by a full complement of collaborators . . .

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The Aquarium Drunkard Show: SIRIUS/XMU (7pm PDT, Channel 35)

Come down easy. 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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Corey Madden :: Taste The Hour

Reeling off the success of Color Green’s last few years, guitarist Corey Madden has set aside the time to assemble a record that embodies the freewheelin’ ethos of the former while propagating a singer-songwriter persona of his own design. Released on the peripatetic Worried Songs, Taste the Hour finds camaraderie in the label’s ever-expanding ilk of freaks, heady rockers, and ardent songcrafters. Sure to stand above the fray in a growing world of blissed-out jammers, Madden has founded a realm where folk-rock grit is further refined in fuzz and adorned with sparks of power . . .

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Transmissions :: John Lurie

This week on our Transmissions podcast, a freewheeling conversation about television, Martin Scorsese, Anthony Bourdain, his book The History of Bones and Music From Painting With John . . .

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Harold Land Quintet :: The Peace-Maker

Like many great collaborations, Harold Land joining forces with Bobby Hutcherson was the fruitful artistic spark needed to elevate his career. Beginning in late 1967, The Peace-Maker was recorded in two sessions and offers the perfect, lively synergy of Land's collaboration with Hutcherson. Transcending the tradition of hard bop standards, Land had also taken a five year hiatus as a bandleader, making this offering all the more dazzling . . .

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The Lagniappe Sessions :: Jeffrey Silverstein

Songwriter Jeffrey Silverstein joins the Lagniappe Sessions with inspired country funk covers of tunes by Chip Taylor, Steely Dan (via Waylon Jennings), Jim Ford, and Tom T. Hall's immortal "That's How I Got To Memphis . . .

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Michael Naura Quartett :: Call

Hailed at his death in 2017 as the jazzpapst, the pope of German jazz, pianist Michael Naura once fronted the most popular post-bop jazz combo in early 60s Germany. After a serious illness brought his performing career to a halt, he took over editorial management of the state radio NDR's jazz programming in 1971. There Naura had a front-row seat to the birth of fusion. Soon after, he returned to the studio at the head of a newly assembled electric jazz quartet. Their first release, Call, is a moody, shimmering wash of jeweled tones that sounded like . . .

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Charles Moothart :: Black Holes Don’t Choke

As the late Reverend William Sloane Coffin once said in his Blessing of Grace, "the world is too dangerous for anything but truth, and too small for anything but love." Maybe there's only room for loving oneself and the truth of that existence at any given moment. Black holes don't choke; they simply swallow everything into a singularity, to a new way of being. Black Holes Don't Choke is a snapshot of the singularity; go with it awhile and see where it puts you down . . .

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Videodrome :: Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013)

Before Lynch and Villeneuve, Alejandro Jodorowsky spent the mid-1970s trying to bring Dune to the screen. Frank Pavich’s documentary examines Jodorowsky’s ill-fated adaptation — what many consider to be the greatest film never made . . .

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Astrid Sonne :: Great Doubt

Great Doubt, the new record by Danish experimental composer Astrid Sonne, carefully applies extended techniques for viola and detuned pianos upon hard, synthesized beats and brass sections, which are then warped into a surreal, narcotic kind of R&B. Her flat and clear-cut vocal delivery highlights the tension building within and behind it, among a digital flora of post-rock orchestration . . .

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Takuya Kuroda :: Rising Son

Rising Son is a ray of regal jazz-funk bliss from start to finish, but the highlight has to be Kuroda’s cover of “Everybody Loves The Sunshine,” sung by José James with the world-weary joy of the Roy Ayers Ubiquity. This reissue closes with a “Sunshine” remix by UK keyboardist Joe Armon-Jones, layering smears of synth and thumping breakbeats over dubby, echo-drenched effects. Blue Note originals have been known to break the bank, so get down with Rising Son on its latest solar cycle . . .

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