Transmissions

For this episode, Woodbury sits down with artist and musician Lonnie Holley. His sculptures, assembled from found objects, seemingly align each random component with meaning. In 2012, Holley released his debut album, Just Before Music, on Atlanta label Dust to Digital. Reviewing the record, AD’s A. Spoto wrote, “He sings with an intense, emotional voice and unleashes lyrics without consistent meter or rhyme over gossamer keyboard lines that hang in the ether. His music is a blues nebula, splotched with riffy word jazz that shares in some rappers’ collagist aesthetics as well as the runaway passion of a gospel preacher enlivened by the Spirit.”

He followed it with a second, Keeping a Record of It, in 2013. Both featured improvised music and melodies, drawing on Holley’s personal reserve of gospel, jazz, blues, and folk music. Like his music, this conversation is wide-ranging and freeform, a gentle and inquisitive exploration into how much meaning we’re willing to grant the world around us.

Welcome to Aquarium Drunkard’s recurring Transmissions podcast. Today, we continue our mini-series in collaboration with the folks at Mexican Summer. In March, AD’s Jason P. Woodbury headed out to Marfa Texas to attend Mexican Summer’s Marfa Myths Festival, a four-day, multi-disciplinary celebration of art and music in West Texas, which resulted in his essay, “There’s No Such Thing As Nowhere.”

For this episode, he sat down with Natalie Mering, who records as Weyes Blood. We’ve long been fans of her sounds — our own Chad Depasquale said her most recent record, Front Row Seat to Earth, “evokes an atmosphere reminiscent of private press psych-folk and progressive exploration.”

This talk dives deep into her religious upbringing and explores the apocalyptic tone that pervades much of her songs.

For this episode, Woodbury down with poet and novelist Eileen Myles. She came up in the ’70s, at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project in New York. In 2015, her 1994 novel Chelsea Girls was reissued; in 2016, she released a collection of poems written between 1975 and 2014 called I Must Be Living Twice. In this episode, Myeles discusses her process and her next book, Afterglow, and along the way we’ll hear some selections of Myles’ poetry, pulled from her live album Aloha/Irish Tree, paired with recordings by Marfa Myths performers Pharoah Sanders and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. Photo by Peggy O’brien.

Welcome to Aquarium Drunkard’s recurring Transmissions podcast. Today, we’re launching a new mini-series in collaboration with the folks at Mexican Summer. Last month, we sent AD’s Jason P. Woodbury to Marfa Texas to attend Mexican Summer’s Marfa Myths Festival, a four-day, multi-disciplinary celebration of art in music in West Texas, which resulted in his essay, “There’s No Such Thing As Nowhere.”

While out there, Woodbury hooked up with a number of Myths performers to record interviews. For this episode, he sat down with the Los Angeles-based four-piece the Allah-Las, to discuss the group’s record store roots, sound, and Reverberation Radio, their long-running online radio series.

On last year’s Golden Sings Which Can Be Sung, Chicago-based singer and guitarist Ryley Walker came into his own. It wasn’t his first great record, but it was his most realized, a work that added shades of jazz, psychedelia, and experimental rock to his soulful folk sound. Writing about the record, AD’s Chad DePasquale said: “On two previous two long-players, comparisons to artists like John Martyn, Bert Jansch, Tim Buckley, and Nick Drake dominated conversations about Walker, but his latest finds him exploring English jazz folk through the unique lens of the Chicago experimental scene he came up in, folding in elements of improvisational jazz and experimental textures.”

We caught up with Walker last fall at Fivethirteen Recording in Tempe, Arizona, to discuss the record and hear a few songs. Keeping with his spirit of experimentation, Walker and band decided the setting was right to try out a few new tunes. We’re happy to debut three of them, “Shaking Like the Others,” “I Laughed So Hard I Cried,” and “Two Sides To Every Cross,” here for the first time, along with our interview.

As a producer, Daniel Lanois has been instrumental in crafting definitive records by U2, the Neville Brothers, Bob Dylan, Peter Gabriel, Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, Neil Young, and more. His productions have a trademark quality -- swampy and percussive, psychedelic but as earthy as the dubs of his noted influence Lee "Scratch" Perry -- that he also brings to his records as a songwriter and composer. His latest, Goodbye to Language, out now on Anti Records, is one of his best. Accompanied by Rocco DeLuca on lap steel, Lanois plays pedal steel, creating a sweeping landscape that spiritually connects to the sounds he contributed to Brian Eno 1983 ambient masterpiece Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks.

We joined Lanois following a live performance at his place, Bella Vista in Silverlake, to discuss the new record, his long production career, and his definition of "soul music," exploring how that definition guides and directs his artistic approach.

With the release of the Complete Matrix Tapes last year, you might be wondering: What exactly is left in the Velvet Underground archives? On this, the seventh episode of AD’s Transmissions podcast, we invite Aquarium Drunkard’s VU expert Tyler Wilcox (Doom and Gloom From the Tomb, author of Pitchfork’s Invisible Hits column) to speculate wildly about what’s left out there: songs which may or may not exist, early demos, legendary live performances and more. Along the way, Wilcox spins rare Velvets cuts.

A decade-spanning look at the Grateful Dead and the culture the band spawned, it's one of our favorite books of the year, one that explores of underground economies, thriving art scenes, cyberspace frontiers, the advent of psychedelia, the birth of the jam band movement, mystically motivated science projects, and much more through the lens of America's home brewed cosmic roots ambassadors. In his review of the book for AD, our own Tyler Wilcox wrote: Heads is an essential piece of underground cultural history, but more than anything it reads like an epic adventure story, with page after page of remarkable stories spinning out kaleidoscope-style, like a second-set Dead improv." He's right, and Jarnow was quick to provide further insight into not only the world of the Dead, but how he himself found his way into it.

Welcome to the fifth episode of AD's re-booted Transmissions podcast, our recurring series of in-depth conversations and unexpected sounds. As we did with our last episode, we're halving the show today, speaking with two disparate artists.

Up first, we sat down with singer/songwriter Damien Jurado. Starting off in the Seattle hardcore scene, Jurado evolved with moody albums like Rehearsals for Departure and Ghost of David, full of stark and heartbreaking vignettes. At the start of the current decade, however, Jurado took a turn, teaming with producer Richard Swift to create more vivid, psychedelic templates for his music, which turned toward the paranormal and spiritual. We spoke with Jurado about their latest collaboration, Visions of Us on the Land. We then spoke catch up with a true legend, famed soul man William Bell, author of essential songs like "Born Under a Bad Sign" and "You Don't Miss Your Water (Until Your Well Runs Dry)." His latest, This Is Where I Live, finds him once again on Stax, the legendary label he helped established, and finds his voice and lyrics in fine shape. Alright, let's get into this...

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Welcome to the fourth episode of Aquarium Drunkard’s Transmissions podcast, our recurring series of in-depth conversations and unexpected sounds.. On this week’s episode, we’re splitting our time with two unique artists.

Up first is Idris Ackamoor, leader of the intergalactic combo the Pyramids, whose new album We Be All Africans is a potent mix of soul, funk, world music, and spiritual jazz. Next, we hop in the van with singer/songwriter Eleanor Friedberger. As one-half of Fiery Furnaces, she created some of the most challenging and complex music of the 2000s, but on her latest album New View, she continues to ease into the confident, ’70s-inspired melodicism that has defined her solo albums, inspired in part by her move to upstate New York.