Transmissions

Back in 2022, songwriter Lincoln Barr got in touch, writing a personal note in which he expressed an appreciation for what we do here at Aquarium Drunkard. "Listening to the topics that come up in your conversations, I can't help but recognize a kindred spirit out there in the desert.” Since then, Barr and Transmissions host Jason P. Woodbury have gone back and forth via email, discussing spirituality, art, poetry, Ireland, Sinéad O'Connor, NRBQ, psychedelia, personal work, and much more. And now, they finally link up for a proper podcast discussion. Though their conversation was shaded by the passing of O'Connor, a shared favorite, they covered lots of ground additionally, waxing on mysticism, personal exploration, and Barr's incredible album, Forfeit the Prize.

Transmissions is part of the Talkhouse Podcast network, check out Talkhouse for more great reading and listening. Next week on Transmissions? Darren Jessee joins us to discuss songwriting, playing drums in groups like Ben Folds Five and Hiss Golden Messenger and more. Stay loose until then, this Transmissions is concluded. 

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Sunburned Hand of the Man is a long-running, free-form band from Massachusetts. They record everything, and their discography has over 200 entries. Membership is fluid, at times determined simply by whoever joins in the jam. One time they started to design a deck of cards where each card had a band member… but there were so many people they would have ended up with a full hand of jokers. There are no rules other than the unspoken rule that nobody tells anyone else what to do. 

Despite this swirling complexity (or perhaps because of it), media outlets typically only interview one or two of the founding members. With this podcast, we embrace the full force of Sunburned Hand of the Man. The final result is assembled from conversations and recordings with 15 current and past members as well as outside commentary from friends, fans, and collaborators. Across eight episodes, we unravel the band’s complex history and examine the hows and whys of this bizarre creative endeavor.

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Hataaliinez Wheeler grew up in Window Rock, Arizona, the capital of the Navajo Nation. And though he’s just recently released his Dangerbird Records debut,  Singing Into Darkness, he’s spent the last few years creating as much art as he can—recording music, making lo-fi videos, and writing poetry. 

Sunbaked and sly, the new album is full of strange grooves and quixotic lyrics, and a sound that borrows from country, surf, indie rock, and shoegaze. We first heard Hataałii through Michael Klausman, who wrote about him for Aquarium Drunkard in 2021, saying, "[I]t was probably predetermined that he’d make music, as Hataałii literally means 'to sing.' His songs are weirdly genreless and out-of-time, yet constantly reach for some sort of cosmic agency. You can frequently hear him experimenting and trying different personas on, but the force of his charisma unites all the disparate elements he puts together. He’s a master at conjuring a kind of Southwestern saudade," a feeling of longing melancholy that permeates Brazilian music. 

Today, he joins host Jason P. Woodbury to discuss his run-in with and shout-out from Mac Demarco, discuss the influence of his father's record collection, and discuss what its felt like for his personal art project to find a life outside of his own head.

Transmissions is part of the Talkhouse Podcast network, check out Talkhouse for more great reading and listening. Next week on Transmissions? Lincoln Barr joins us to discuss the magic of music.

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Welcome back to another episode of Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions, so glad to have you with us. A major inspiration for us in the podcast zone is media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, host of the Team Human podcast. As our digital age gets stranger, more fractured, and harder to parse, we find his humanist, consciousness-centered approach very helpful. One of the things he’s known for saying is “Look for the others”—the others who grok your worldview, whose enthusiasms and obsessions mirror your own. And no doubt about it, our guest this week, Andy Zax, feels very much like one of the others.

Zax is a lifelong music devotee, and he’s worked on pretty much every side of the music business, writing copy and liner notes, producing records, working with labels like Rhino, and generally helping to shine a light on figures like Judee Sill, David Axelrod, Talking Heads, and many more. In 2019, he oversaw the massive Woodstock 50th anniversary project, restoring virtually all the audio associated with the historic concert. For Zax, all of this is something of a holy calling, and its led him to discoveries in unexpected places, like when he found an unreleased recording by electronic pioneer Mort Garson—known these days for the hippest ever music for plants to grow by LP Plantasia—nested in the archive of spoken word artist Rod McKuen. And not just any recording: we’re talking “Journey to the Moon,” music Garson composed for the live CBS News broadcast of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. That recording sees release this week via Sacred Bones’ Journey To the Moon and Beyond, released on Friday, July 21. Over the course of his long chat, we riff on the value of archived music, music streaming and music technology, audio quality, the merits of keeping your records unorganized, the haunting quality of Leonard Nimoy’s late ‘60s studio albums, and much more. 

Transmissions is part of the Talkhouse Podcast network, check out Talkhouse for more great reading and listening. Next week on Transmissions? 20-year-old Navajo singer/songwriter Hataałii joins us to discuss his label debut and what music has meant to him growing up. Until then, this Transmission is concluded. 

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

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It's the thick of the summer, which means your Transmissions correspondents are spending as much time in cool dark spaces as possible. One record that particularly suits the mood in our summer bunker hideaway is Gia Margaret's Romantic Piano. Though Margaret's 2018 debut, There’s Always Glimmer, was the striking work of a singer/songwriter, when medical issues put a strain on her voice, she turned to instrumental music, first with her ambient leaning self-titled 2020 album, and now Romantic Piano, a collection of moving piano compositions, mostly instrumental, that feels at once meditative and comforting. It’s the kind of music that carves out more space for the listener—and it turns out, it’s the kind of music that did something similar for its creator. 

In our talk, we discuss the intuitive roots of Gia’s music, working with previous Transmissions guest David Bazan of Pedro the Lion, and much more. It’s a thoughtful, spacey conversation for you as we weather the way out heat of summers in a changing world

Transmissions is part of the Talkhouse Podcast network, check out Talkhouse for more great reading and listening. Next week on the show, archivist Andy Zax shares the story of an unheard Mort Garson soundtrack and ponders alternate musical histories.

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In “Lies and Distortion,” the opening essay of his book Unstrung: Rants And Stories Of a Noise Guitarist, Marc Ribot writes: “We seem to love broken voices in general: vocal cords eroded by whiskey and screaming, the junked-out weakness of certain horn players, distortion which signifies surpassing the capabilities of a tube or a speaker—voices that damage, but (at least in performance) don’t actually die…Was this always true? I don’t know.”

In a way, that speaks to Ribot’s own playing, on his own and with many luminary collaborators. Though he can certainly play delicately, a frayed, beyond-the-limit quality informs Ribot’s sensibility. Since 2008, he’s released records with Ceramic Dog—a band featuring Ribott on vocals and guitar, previous Transmissions guest Shazhad Ismaily on bass and vocals, and Ches Smith on drums and vocals. On July 14th, the band releases another scalded and electrifying record with Connection. 

Ribot is our guest this week on the show, and we’re pleased to present this rollicking, and at times charmingly contentious talk this on Transmissions. From his complicated relationship with his former Lounge Lizards collaborator John Lurie, to his views on how labor and capitalism inform his relationship with music, his history as a collaborator, Hal Willner’s Night Music, his recent embrace of the Gibson SG, and much more, this is a charged chat with a jazz-punk creative icon. 

Transmissions is part of the Talkhouse Podcast network, check out Talkhouse for more great reading and listening. Next week on the show, Gia Margaret on her Romantic Piano.

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While Black Lips have matured and grown since forming in 1999, the Atlanta-based garage band haven’t "settled down." Case in point is Apocalypse Love, the group’s 10th album, released last year on Fire Records. Incorporating gospel and country influences, it’s as strange and exciting as the band’s early work, but it also showcases a new depth to the band. Today on Transmissions, Black Lip Jared Swilley joins us to discuss his pentecostal roots, his minister father coming out of the closet, the importance of the Bomp Records catalog, his mentor The Mighty Hannibal, and much more. 

Transmissions is part of the Talkhouse Podcast Network, check out Talkhouse for more great reading and listening, and support Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions by pledging on Patreon.  Next week on the show, guitarist Marc Ribot. 

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This week on the show, we’re joined by London-based singer/songwriter David John Morris. Perhaps you know him for his work with folk rock band Red River Dialect, but for this talk, we mostly speak about his latest two solo albums, 2021’s Monastic Love Songs and 2022’s Wyld Love Songs, on which, to quote Aquarium Drunkard's Tyler Wilcox, balances "sacred and profane concerns, finding moments of welcome humor amidst more spiritual matters."

He joined us to discuss his time in a Buddhist monastery, how it augmented his approach to music, his podcast listening habits, the consistent spiritual longing of the creative process and, truthfully, so much more. 

Support Aquarium Drunkard on Patreon. Transmissions is a part of the Talkhouse Podcast Network.

Next week on Transmissions? Next week on the show, Jared Swilley of The Black Lips joins us to document the band's apocalyptic love story.

This episode of Transmissions is brought to you by Dad Grass. Go to Dadgrass.com/Transmissions to try it out.

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Writing about The Modern Folk’s Modern Folk One in our AD 2022 Year in Review, we called it, “A blend of field recordings, astral zones, freak outs, leisurely jams, and rustique concrète from the ever-prolific Josh Moss.” That gives you a little sense of the kind of music Moss creates with his ultra-prolific recording project. Head over to his Bandcamp and you'll find dozens and dozens of releases. Moss is such an inspiring creator, completely beholden to doing his own thing explicitly, so naturally, this conversation wanders down strange paths—from Bigfoot to Bob Dylan—and stands as one of our most discursive episodes to date. 

This episode originally aired exclusively for our Patreon supporters, and we’re sharing it in the main feed as a reminder that if you want to support Aquarium Drunkard on Patreon, you’ll get access to bonus audio and more.

Support Aquarium Drunkard on Patreon. Transmissions is a part of the Talkhouse Podcast Network.

Next week on Transmissions? Next week on the show, David John Morris of Red River Dialect joins us to discuss monasticism and music. 

This episode of Transmissions is brought to you by Dad Grass. Go to Dadgrass.com/Transmissions to try it out.

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Welcome to Transmissions. The name Bruce Licher commands respect in the underground world of independent rock. As musician and letterpress artist with Independent Project Press, he’s created art and bespoke album packaging for artists like R.E.M., Stereolab, Camper Van Beethoven, and more, and created music with post-punk combo Savage Republic, instrumental rock pioneers Scenic, and other projects. In 2020, he reactivated his Independent Project label, which he originally founded in 1980.

On this episode, Bruce joins host Jason P. Woodbury to discuss his album art creations, his time in the Mojave Desert, the Southwestern dream-pop scene of the ‘90s, his letterpress origins, his work with R.E.M. and much more. He’s a lifer and a true example of sticking to your vision—we're really honored to have him on the show this week, and of course honored to have you joining us for this conversation. 

Support Aquarium Drunkard on Patreon. Transmissions is a part of the Talkhouse Podcast Network.

Next week on Transmissions? Next week on the show, The Modern Folk.

This episode of Transmissions is brought to you by Dad Grass. Go to Dadgrass.com/Transmissions to try it out.

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