Astral blues. More freeform interstitial airwave debris transmitting somewhere off the coast of Los Angeles. Green swamp fuzz from the 1970s.
Direct download, below. Subscribe to future transmissions via iTunes and/or through the RSS, here. The first nine transmissions can be found and downloaded, here.
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Yeah, the party line on the Velvet Underground is that the band was almost completely ignored during the 1960s, their flowers of darkness vibes passed over in favor of flower power. But as it turns out, plenty of people were listening -- including this one guitarist you may have heard of, a guy called Jimmy Page. Of course, Page had a direct connection to the Velvets, having played 12-string on
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Wrapping one's head around the music of Wooden Wand, the ongoing project of idiosyncratic singer/songwriter James Jackson Toth takes some effort. With over 100 releases to his name, from spiraling freak-out ragas and avant-garde experimentation to classic Asylum Records-style folk pop — Toth skips through styles like a zealous host swapping out LPs on the turntable at a party.
2011’s Briarwood was a smoky slab of country funk, one of the strongest entries in Toth’s extensive catalog, but his brand new Blood Oath of the New Blues finds him indulging more esoteric impulses, exploring looping crime story like “Southern Colorado Song,” lonesome folk with “No Debts,” and droning expanses with “Dungeon of Irons.” The melodic elements of Briarwood are still there; only they’re pulled and expanded, stretched across the new record’s meditative ballads.
Toth — who moonlights as a writer at Aquarium Drunkard — describes the record as "Sunday morning's wake and bake" after "Briarwood's’ Saturday night revelry.” Amen.
AD: This marks the first successive Wooden Wand record to be recorded with the same group as the previous, correct?
James Jackson Toth: More or less. Wooden Wand and the Vanishing Voice had a pretty stable lineup, but since I’ve been doing solo stuff, I’ve definitely favored the revolving door approach. But we did [Blood Oath of the New Blues] in the same studio with the same people as [Briarwood]. It just works. I’m definitely going to record with them again. It’s good, as long as they can tolerate me, and I don’t alienate anybody [laughs].
AD: Briarwood and Blood Oath of the New Blues sound very interesting back-to-back. I imagine there are fans yours that favor one “thing,” or one Wooden Wand style more than another.
James Jackson Toth: Oh yeah.
AD: This record feels like it unites a lot of your sounds. I imagine it wasn’t intentional, but when you listen to it, do you get a sense that it ties together some of the disparate styles you’ve explored?
James Jackson Toth: Yeah, I think it does. Like you said, it wasn’t really intentional, but it does feel like a culmination at this point. There’s a lot of Wooden Wand material out there, and often you’re posed the question, “What one record would you tell someone to buy to get a sense of what you do?” I didn’t really have a good answer to that question. Like you said, I move around quite a bit and try different things. It’s a really good distillation of the many hats we’ve worn over the years.
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In a lengthy, revealing interview with Pitchfork, Christopher Owens mentioned that he thought the songs he’d written for Girls’ 2011 album Father, Son, Holy Ghost were capable of winning Grammys. If he only meant that those songs were among the best of the year--or even of the era--then he certainly would have been correct. But if Owens, whose heartfelt honesty has made his interviews nearly as captivating as his songwriting, truly believed that the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences might recognize that achievement as such, then it’s further proof that the Bay Area songwriter is only partially of this world. What I mean is that, for all of his personal eccentricities, Christopher Owens occupies a space that many of us left behind years ago, a place where recognition from awards shows and the Billboard charts are actual barometers of success. He’s long heralded the work of Ariel Pink, but he doesn’t seem to get the joke--or, what’s more likely, he doesn’t particularly care that it’s a joke. It wouldn’t be right to call him post-irony, if only because he doesn’t seem to have ever gone through irony’s throes.
That’s not really a fair reading--you don’t escape from what Owens has escaped from without growing a little world-weary--but the tenderness that characterizes Lysandre, his first post-Girls album, is beyond reproach. The album largely concerns Girls’ first tour through Europe, and Owens’ relationship with a French woman whose name gives the album its title. Owens and Lysandre’s relationship dissolved, just as the Girls project dissolved, and while Lysandre is not without its devastating moments, it’s a far cry from the existential horror that powered some of Father, Son, Holy Ghost’s most moving songs. Where that record, and Album before it, tried to rally its singer and subjects out of defeat, Lysandre finds Owens comfortably removed; he’s telling his story, not recreating it.
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“Where did it begin?” asks Lonnie Holley in his liner note. “We had songs with us all the time. Humans had songs even if they weren’t doing anything but moaning, they had MUSIC.” Just Before Music is aptly titled since Holley restrains himself from too much conventional musicality–melody and that sort of thing. There is scarcely a proper chord change in his music, much less a full progression. He sings with an intense, emotional voice and unleashes lyrics without consistent meter or rhyme over . . .
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This Friday, during the second hour of the Aquarium Drunkard show, we’re airing the AD session Melody's Echo Chamber laid down for us at Red Rockets Glare Studios last Fall while in Los Angeles. We're debuting it here, first -- those of you sans satellite radio can download/stream the tracks below.
And for those of you who missed it, the singer-songwriter's swirling self-titled debut (produced by Tame Impala's . . .
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The Besnard Lakes return with “People of the Sticks”, the band’s first glimpse of brilliant light taken from their forthcoming album, Until in Excess, Imperceptiple UFO, coming April 2 through Jagjaguwar. That’s quite an intriguing title as husband and wife duo Jace Lasek and Olga Goreas have spent the past two albums convincing fans about the existence of “Roaring Nights” and “Dark Horses” along with themes of espionage, codes and imminent danger lurking around every corner. But you wouldn’t know it from this new track. Somewhere among the ether of Spiritualized and Blue Cheer lies The Besnard . . .
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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.
Turquoise Wisdom takes over the reins during hour one -- you can download his set, become a member or log in.
Imaginational Anthem Volume 5 is the first volume in this long-running series not compiled by Tompkins Square label boss Josh Rosenthal but by young guitarist Sam Moss, and refreshingly offers some curveballs. The most rewarding contributions to this series have consistently been those that venture furthest from contemporary solo guitarist clichés — colonialist ethno-meandering, Takoma flashbacks, and modal fantasias — and this fifth volume is no exception.
Jordan Fuller’s exciting prepared guitar style on “I Think We’ll Be Happy Here” is imbued with a nervous, clattering . . .
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There's a collection of unreleased Townes Van Zandt recordings from 1971-72 coming out in a few weeks. I haven't heard a note of it, but I'm going to go out on a limb and call it one of the best releases of 2013. The years 1968-1973 were Van Zandt's peak period, with classics pouring out of him at an astonishing rate. The albums he released during that time -- Our Mother the Mountain, Townes Van Zandt, Delta Momma Blues, High . . .
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Samuel Yirga is a talented, young jazz pianist from Addis Ababa. His music is indebted to the “Golden Age” of Ethiopian music, that funky mish-mash of Western jazz and East African folk styles that was popular in “swinging” Addis before the 1974 Communist revolution. However his style is even more cosmopolitan, grabbing at all sorts of Carribbean rhythms and inflections as well as the work of modern jazz players. There’s a smoothness to his style that shares an aesthetic with players like Keith Jarrett or George Winston: Yirga’s got a very clean, fluid way about playing . . .
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Originally by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, this poppin’ rendition by The Uniques belongs to the band’s lead singer, Keith “Slim” Smith. His full voice had soul, and his falsetto sounded unhinged, unpredictable, manic–in a word: exciting. Bunny Lee’s production bounces with pep, and The Uniques’ harmonies are unusual, tightly responding to Smith’s lead. During the bridge sections, Smith breaks away from fellow Uniques Lloyd Charmers and Jimmy Riley, punctuating the chorus with upper register gasps and bleats. It’s a ragged and passionate performance . . .
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Despite David Byrne and St. Vincent gracing the decommissioned altar of the Church of St. John the Baptist, despite Win Butler and the Strokes’ Nik Fraiture running a charity basketball game in McGill’s shoebox-sized gym, despite even a homecoming set by Grimes, the most-hyped performance at Pop Montreal this September was the premiere of new work by drone maestro Tim Hecker. Call it home cooking--Hecker, though a Vancouver native, lives and works in Montreal--but his at the very-much-in-service Church of St. John the . . .
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Turquoise Wisdom here with another installment of my Sad Seasons mixtape series for AD. This time around we're thinking about winter. ps- I have officially joined the future and started a 'lil website to regularly post jams from my record collection, that's here: playitasitlathes.com. Onward! zc/tw
1. Terry Callier - Dancing Girl (excerpt) - What Color Is Love - Cadet (w/ a sampled introduction by Gil Scott Heron. RIP to both of you.)
2. Robert Wyatt - Biko - Work In Progress - Rough Trade . . .
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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.
Aquarium Drunkard's Lagniappe Sessions return with Tashaki Miyaki. Here, the ethereal Los Angeles dream-pop three piece lay down a resonating, haunting rendition of The Flamingos "I Only Have Eyes For You", coupled with a narcotized take on the Mats "Unsatisfied". Drummer and vocalist Lucy Miyaki, in her . . .
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