Transmissions

Welcome back to Transmissions. This week on the program, we’re joined by electronic musician Moby and Lindsay Hicks. Together, they run Little Walnut, a production company responsible for documentaries like Punk Rock Vegan, music videos, and Moby Pod—a podcast dedicated to offering unique perspectives on music, animal activism, climate change, and beyond. 

This conversation with host Jason P. Woodbury demonstrates the way Moby and Hicks are brave and open in ways that aren’t common in our culture, rejecting the easy cynicism and guardedness that seems to rule the day. And while this talk does get a little bleak at times, it’s also a very funny conversation concerning our changing landscape, science fiction, music, and full of quips and jokes. We hope you enjoy it.

Thanks so much for spending time with us on Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions. We know you have a lot of listening options out there on the world wide web, so we are honored you’d carve out the space for us. Transmissions is part of the Talkhouse Podcast Network.

Next week on Transmissions? John Carroll Kirby. Be well in the meantime, this Transmission is concluded. 

For heads, by heads. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by our patrons. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support via our Patreon page. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You know Buck from Big Thief and his solo albums, like this year’s Haunted Mountain. Full of near-death experiences and tender but insistent roots-inspired songwriting, it’s an album that finds inspiration in the mysterious Mount Shasta, long a site of high strangeness—and a place that plays a pivotal role in Buck's own origin story.

Cut live to 2”-inch tape, it’s a personal and open-hearted record and we're so glad to have Buck here with us, hanging out and discussing Judee Sill, Bob Dylan–but not his work with Bob Dylan, thanks to one of those pesky NDAs, the autonomy preserving creative practices of Adrianne Lenker and Big Thief, working with fellow Texan Jolie Holland—who’s also got her own Haunted Mountain album—and the power of reciprocity. 

Speaking of reciprocity, Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions is brought to you by Aquarium Drunkard’s Patreon community. Join us over there and help support independent media. 

Transmissions is a part of the Talkhouse Podcast Network. Visit the Talkhouse for more interviews, fascinating reads, and podcasts. 

Next week on Transmissions: electronic musician Moby and his podcast co-host Lindsay Hicks. Be well in the meantime, this Transmission is concluded.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions. Here's hoping your autumnal drift toward Halloween is rolling along nicely. This week on the show, we’re chatting once again with Mitch Horowitz, occult scholar, practitioner, and historian. We’ve had Mitch on a number of times—once a year or so for the last few years. What can we say? We just love listening to the guy riff.

His latest is book is Modern Occultism: History, Theory, and Practice. A sprawling secret history in the same vein as his 2009 book Occult America (The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped our Nation), the book explores how wisdom and philosophies gleaned from the Hermetica, gnostic gospels, Kabbalah, and other esoteric systems made its way from ancient and often fragmented pasts to profoundly inform the modern age, illuminating how it fueled secret societies and motivated renegade thinkers. 

Our talk? Well, it’s all over the place. We discuss many of the figures who appear in the book, like the dubious but charming Carlos Castaneda, Anthroposophy founder Rudolph Steiner, and Theosophy’s grand dame H.P. Blavatsky, featured here alongside figures like Aleister Crowley, Carl Jung, Anton LaVey, and Jack Parsons, the pioneering father of modern rocketry—who was also a practicing magician, one-time Marxist, and famously died at 37 in a fiery explosion. Beyond that, we get into notions of radical self-reliance via Ayn Rand and comics artist Steve Ditko, UFOs, and the necessary path of following one's own innate proclivities.

Arthur Miller once said something along the lines of, “An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.” Perhaps that's at the core of this chat: in our hyper-individualized moment, with so many of the old ways breaking down around us, how we can think about the communal and the individual in less binary or dualistic terms? Horowitz is a frequent guest on Coast to Coast AM, so think of this as one of those Transmissions episodes that leans into that feel.

Transmissions is a part of the Talkhouse Podcast Network. Visit the Talkhouse for more interviews, fascinating reads, and podcasts. 

Next week on Transmissions? Next week on the show, Buck Meek.

For heads, by heads. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by our patrons. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support via our Patreon page. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We were introduced to the music of Maria Elena Silva via 2021’s Eros, which featured collaborations with previous Transmissions guests Jeff Parker of Tortoise and was produced by Chris Schlarb. Writing about Eros, AD stalwart Tyler Wilcox said: “Maria Elena Silva’s voice rarely rises above a whisper on the remarkable EROS — but don’t mistake this one for a lullaby-type album. The intensity level is kept at a superhumanly high level throughout. Whether Silva is singing in English or Spanish, whether she’s floating ghostlike through a jazz standard or delivering her own spellbinding originals, you’ll be hanging on every syllable…"

Silva is back with a new one, the recently released Dulce. Here, she’s joined by Schlarb once again, as well as Transmissions alumni Marc Ribot, who brings a raw, questing intensity to her new songs, which swell with rock & roll gusto and a newfound display of bravado. At the core of the record are the drums of Scott Dean Taylor, who matches Maria’s humanistic phrasing with nuance and a palpable charge. You might think of PJ Harvey when you listen to a number like “Love, If It Is So,” but it equally brings to mind Mark Hollis of Talk Talk or Mary Margaret O'Hara at her most free. This conversation focuses on that notion—freedom—and we're glad to share it with you today. 

For heads, by heads. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by our patrons. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support via our Patreon page. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to Transmissions. We're still buzzing from this last weekend, which saw a live taping of Transmissions at The Philosophical Research Society, the Los Angeles campus founded in 1934 by esoteric scholar Manly Palmer Hall, featuring Jason P. Woodbury's talk with Matt Marble, an artist, author, audio producer and director of the American Museum of Paramusicology, best known for his podcasts, including Secret Sound, an exploration of the metaphysical history of American music, and the interview show The Hidden Present. He’s the author of Buddhist Bubblegum: Esotericism in the Creative Process of Arthur Russell, and that’s what we gathered at PRS to discuss. Hall founded PRS with a dedication “to the ensoulment of all arts, sciences, and crafts,” and we hope you find this talk as ensouling as we did. 

Special thanks to our friends and PRS, especially Alex McDonald and AV director Sara Alessandrini, who you’ll hear us refer to throughout the episode, for their help making this happen. And we want to thank Steve Knutson of Audika Records for getting the word out, and of course a warm thanks to everyone who turned up for the show, both in person and via Zoom, to be a part of this special presentation.  

Transmissions is a part of the Talkhouse Podcast Network. Visit the Talkhouse for more interviews, fascinating reads, and podcasts. Next week on the show, Maria Elena Silva on her remarkable new album, Dulce.

For heads, by heads. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by our patrons. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support via our Patreon page. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the last episode of the podcast! We start with comments from Sunburned members reflecting on the impact of press coverage and ensuing exposure on the band. This shifts to general comments about how they’ve navigated – and oftentimes defied – external expectations. This section closes on the role humor has played in the band. Then we shift to comments and stories shared by friends, collaborators, and fans of Sunburned Hand of the Man, including thoughts from Thurston Moore, Ethan Miller, Neal Campbell, and more! We close out the episode and the podcast with a final thought from each of the band members interviewed for this project. 

The “pocket documentary” created by Troels Mads is called Behind a Hill. You can watch the section focused on Sunburned here. The full documentary is here and features chapters devoted to the wider Western Mass music scene, including Dredd Foole, MV&EE, JowJow (also feat. Shannon Ketch), Tarp (feat. Conrad Capistran), Feathers, Asa Irons, and Big Blood. This is the the Dredd Foole Archival Series Kris Prince is working on for Corbett Vs. Dempsey (promo film here). Here’s a short video of the dynamite action described by Ethan Miller. For some modern content, here’s a recent interview with Rob Thomas over at Primitive Man Soundz. And for more John Moloney, you can check out his conversation with Lou & Adelle Barlow on second episode of the Raw Impressions podcast. 

We hope to add a couple of bonus episodes down the road, so be sure to subscribe for updates. Thanks for listening!

Check out Sunburned Hand of the Man’s Instagram profile for more pictures related to this episode!

Sunburned’s Bandcamp 

Sunburned’s Website

Songs heard in this episode: 

Time Goes Way Back - Wallpaper Blues

Exploding Head Flick - That Which Is

One Dimensional Man - That Which Is

Prism Mirror Lens - Headless

Born Clever - Headless

Virgin Swirl - Chinese Perfume

Chiseled - April 4, 2006 - 1 - Chiseled

…Music - Hypnotape

End of the Endless - Headdress

Or 

Check out this Spotify playlist with all the songs heard in this and previous week’s episodes!

You can email or go here for Kelly.

Allison Hussey is here and on Twitter.

Go here for more Aquarium Drunkard or Talkhouse Podcast Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week on Transmissions, we welcome returning guest Cécile Schott, aka Colleen. Her latest album, Le Jour Et La Nuit Du Réel—the day and night of reality—was tracked using a minimalistic setup, a Moog Grandmother and two delays: a Roland RE-201 Space Echo and a Moogerfooger Analog Delay.

But for Schott, this assemblage allows for near infinite synthesis, and a genuine multitude of expression. As the world gets stranger and more difficult to understand, the record wordlessly questions what is real—and the times of day and night when the line between real and imaginary blurs.

LIVE TRANSMISSIONS: On September 30th, we’re hosting a live taping of Transmissions at Manly P. Hall’s Philosophical Research Society with Matt Marble, discussing his fantastic book about Arthur Russell, Buddhist Bubblegum. Get more info and tickets here.

Transmissions is a part of the Talkhouse Podcast Network. Visit the Talkhouse for more interviews, fascinating reads, and podcasts. Next week on the show, Matt Marble.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is about how Sunburned Hand of the Man makes their free-form music. Through the episode, we consider the semantics of improvisation and practice in the context of this free form entity. In that context, we learn how the open nature of the band manifests in unspoken rules of not telling each other what to do. This, in turn, allows the band members to enter and commit to the jam in a way that is more authentically connected and elevated. While each player is actively doing their own thing, they are listening intently to the others, and the resulting ebb and flow of the group results in something greater than the individual parts. We hear how this creative practice of listening and responding has resulted in Sunburned’s oddly consistent and unique sound. Finally, we close this episode by tuning in closely to consider the impact of founders Rob Thomas and John Moloney on the band.

After listening to this episode, we recommend going back to some of the live shows linked in the previous show notes. It could be interesting to re-watch the band’s playing while keeping in mind everything we now know about their creative practice. 

Check out Sunburned Hand of the Man’s Instagram profile for more pictures related to this episode!

Sunburned’s Bandcamp 

Sunburned’s Website

Songs heard in this episode:

Flex - Pick a Day to Die

Hot Lickety Lazy Days - Covered in Mud

The Middle Ages -> Sexmap - Secret in Disguise

Pick a Day to Die - Pick a Day to Die

Air Support / Tantrum / Wicked Passenger / The Easy Way Out - A Taste of Never

Or 

Check out this Spotify playlist with all the songs heard in this and previous week’s episodes!

You can email or go here for Kelly.

Allison Hussey is here and on Twitter.

Go here for more Aquarium Drunkard or Talkhouse Podcast Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions; this week on the show, we're joined by Jarvis Taveniere of Woods. You know his long running Woods band with Jeremy Earl of course—and Woodsist, their record label and Woodsist Festival, which returns September 23-24 upstate with Kevin Morby, Avey Tare, Cochemea, Tapers Choice, Ana Saint Louis, Natural Information Society, Kurt Vile, Scientist, DJ Aquarium Drunkard—that’s our own Justin Gage—plus many more. The band also just released a glowing new album, Perennial, which finds the band in a gentle, rambling mode. 

Jarvis and host Jason P. Woodbury, alongside Willian Tyler and Sadie Sartini Garner, were all members of a book club through much of the pandemic, reading selections of authors like JG Ballard, Kiese Laymon, Eve Babitz and others.

LIVE TRANSMISSIONS: On September 30th, we’re hosting a live taping of Transmissions at Manly P. Hall’s Philosophical Research Society with Matt Marble, discussing his fantastic book about Arthur Russell, Buddhist Bubblegum. Get more info here.

Transmissions is a part of the Talkhouse Podcast Network. Visit the Talkhouse for more interviews, fascinating reads, and podcasts. Next week on the show, Coleen joins us to discuss her tremendous new album.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We open with our focus on the role that music has played in the band members’ individual lives and how a shared love of music brought them all together. This morphs into a consideration of the band’s many artistic influences, with a close look at the impact of the Wu-Tang Clan on Sunburned. We hear about the complicated and often difficult backgrounds of many of the Sunburned musicians and how jamming with the band can often serve as a type of group therapy.

This is the Quietus interview where Rob Thomas talks about the influence of the Wu-Tang Clan on Sunburned. Here’s a mid-period live set from Sunburned at the Abbey Lounge in (I think) Somerville, MA. The set is interspersed with clips from a conversation with Rob Thomas reflecting on the band. Sarah mentioned the People of God’s Love, we did some digging and found this WaybackMachine archived page for a group with that name founded (like Sarah said) in Ohio. 

Check out Sunburned Hand of the Man’s Instagram profile for more pictures related to this episode!

Sunburned’s Bandcamp 

Sunburned’s Website

Songs heard in this episode:

No Magic Man - No Magic Man

Take 5 - Mylar Tantrum Part II

Take 6 - Mylar Tantrum Part II

Yer Own Eyes and the Number None - No Magic Man

Serpent’s Wish - No Magic Man

Heavy Rescue - When the Shit Hits the Jazz

Or 

Check out this Spotify playlist with all the songs heard in this and previous week’s episodes!

You can email or go here for Kelly.

Allison Hussey is here and on Twitter.

Go here for more Aquarium Drunkard or Talkhouse Podcast Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices