This week on the show, we're pleased to present a conversation with Matt Sweeney. He’s lived a truly dazzling life in music. After coming up playing with the great band Chavez, he contributed to masterworks of indie rock—including records by Cat Power and Bonnie “Prince” Billy, with whom he crafted the monumental 2005 classic Superwolf, a classic in the Aquarium Drunkard canon. He's also worked as an in-demand session player, working on recordings for the likes of Cat Stevens, Johnny Cash, Neil ...
Oct 02, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 9Ep. 36
If you’ve been listening to Transmissions for a while, you've noticed how often host Jason P. Woodbury brings up “time” when talking about music. And while he's certainly apt to talk about music in spiritual or "out there" terms, songs are in some ways literal time machines: they can take you back to your own past or in the case of traditional music, preserve some essential “nowness” of the human experience. Songsmith Jake Xerxes Fussell grew up understanding this intimately. As the son of folkl...
Sep 25, 2024•58 min•Season 9Ep. 35
This week on Transmissions, we're sitting down with a genuine legend: Joe Boyd, author of And The Roots of Rhythm Remain: A Journey Through Global Music, out September 24 from ZE Books. On the front cover of the book Brian Eno—a venerated saint in the Aquarium Drunkard canon—declares: “I doubt I’ll ever read a better account of the history and sociology of popular music than this one.” Joe Boyd’s career is the stuff of myth. As a producer, he’s worked with a murder’s row of collaborators, includ...
Sep 18, 2024•1 hr 15 min•Season 9Ep. 34
This week on Transmissions, the return of Leah Toth, aka Amelia Courthouse. She was last here on the podcast in its earlier, more feral incarnation—and by feral we mean "updated with elss regularity"—but back in 2018 she reviewed Shinya Fukumori Trio’s incredible ECM release For 2 Akis. We've wanted to have Leah back on ever since, and this now we've got a great excuse to do so: the release of her incredible new album under the Amelia Courthouse name, broken things . Blending Protestant solemnit...
Sep 11, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Season 9Ep. 33
From early mystic folk inclinations to more fried and psychedelic work, Ben Chasny's Six Organs of Admittance project has never settled into an easy, definable zone. But 2024 sees the Six Organs sonic universe expanding kaleidoscopically, even by Chasny's prodigious standards. First was Time Is Glass , an album that documented his return to Humboldt County; then Jinxed By Being , a collaboration with ambient dub master Shackleton, and on September 27th, Companion Rises (Twig Harper Remix) , whic...
Sep 04, 2024•1 hr 33 min•Season 9Ep. 32
Welcome back to Transmissions, our weekly conversational offering. On today's show? Nashville’s own Rich Ruth. Opening his review of Ruth’s latest, the Third Man Records LP Water Still Flows , Aquarium Drunkard’s Brent Sirota states : “We don’t even have a name for what has been going on in instrumental music lately. There’s plainly some kind of new fusion afoot…[but] it doesn’t really sound like old-school fusion. There’s electrified jazz there, to be sure, but now it sits alongside krautrock, ...
Aug 28, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Season 9Ep. 31
This week, we have an exceedingly rare interview with Jason Martin, of California dream pop band Starflyer 59. Fermented in the nascent Riverside dream pop underground alongside his brother Ronnie Martin of Joy Electric in the early '90s, Martin's band SF59 released its debut album, Silver , 30 years ago in 1994 on the fledgling Tooth & Nail label. His latest, Lust for Gold , finds him winking knowingly at the title of his 1995 album Gold , a record routinely cited as one of the best shoegaz...
Aug 21, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Season 9Ep. 30
This week on Transmissions, return guest Yasmin Williams. On October 4th, she releases Acadia via Nonesuch Records. It's her long awaited follow up to 2021's Urban Driftwood, and like that record, it's beautiful—a showcase for a one-of-a-kind artist. And while the focus remains Williams' fluid and lyrical guitarwork, she's joined by a roster of ringers to help fill out the corners: Aoife O'Donovan, Dom Flemons, Kaki King, William Tyler, and Darklingside and Rich Ruth, whose vocal and synthesizer...
Aug 14, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Season 9Ep. 29
Sometimes, background music moves to the foreground. That’s the case with today’s guests, guitarist Zac Sokolow, bassist Jake Faulkner, and drummer Nicholas Baker. Together, they form LA LOM, short for the Los Angeles League of Musicians. In 2019, they were hired to bring suitably vibey music to the lobby of the historic Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard. Employing a rotating cast of guest players, they filled the air with twangy cumbias, boleros, chicha, and reverberating Bakersfield-style...
Aug 07, 2024•49 min•Season 9Ep. 28
Welcome back to Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions, our weekly conversation podcast. This week on the show, we’re joined by Brian and Michael D’Addario, AKA, The Lemon Digs. Their latest slice of toothsome guitar pop is called A Dream Is All We Know . Writing about it in our mid-year favorite albums of 2024 (so far) list, we noted: “A dash of Badfinger, lots of Beach Boys, Todd Rundgren, and Sparks and you’re on the track. As always, The Lemon Twigs come arms full of records you can compare their w...
Jul 31, 2024•53 min•Season 9Ep. 27
This week on a far-ranging episode of Transmissions: guitarist, folklorist, and all-around-top-notch thinker Daniel Bachman. A songwriter and composer from Fredericksburg, Virginia, Bachman first began releasing records under the name Sacred Harp, before adopting his own name for a series of finger-picked classics like 2012's Seven Pines and 2015’s River, which Aquarium Drunkard’s Tyler Wilcox called “a solo acoustic tour de force that can easily stand proud next to John Fahey’s Days America or ...
Jul 24, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Season 9Ep. 26
Welcome back to Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions. This week on the program, we are pleased to welcome guest host Zara Hedderman and singer/songwriter Chris Cohen to the show to a generous, expansive, and genuine conversation. Cohen’s new record is called Paint a Room . His fourth solo album—perhaps you know his work with Deerhoof, The Curtains, Cryptacize, Ariel Pink, Cass Mccombs, and Weyes Blood and more—it finds Cohen pairing with musical heavyweights like Jeff Parker and Josh Johnson, laying ...
Jul 17, 2024•1 hr 39 min•Season 9Ep. 25
This week, we welcome one of our favorite musicians to the show: Mark Lightcap of Acetone and the Dick Slessig Combo. Back in 2017, author Sam Sweet released a great book about Acetone called Hadley Lee Lightcap , accompanied by a stellar Light in the Attic anthology compilation, 1992-2001. Writing about it, Transmissions host Jason P. Woodbury said: Though Acetone were label-mates with the Verve at Virgin subsidiary Vernon Yard, recorded for Neil Young’s Vapor Records, and attracted high-profil...
Jul 10, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Season 9Ep. 24
There are heavy hitters, and then there's The Dirty Three. A trio comprising violinist Warren Ellis, guitarist Mick Turner, and drummer Jim White, these Australian independent rock legends recently returned with their first album in 12 year, the aptly titled Love Changes Everything . Though they are perhaps best known for their work with artists like Nick Cave (Warren is a foundational Bad Seeds member and works with Cave in a variety of other contexts), Cat Power, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Bill Ca...
Jul 03, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Season 9Ep. 23
Welcome back to Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions. This week on the show, Joe Pernice of The Pernice Brothers, Scud Mountain Boys, and Chappaquiddick Skyline—as well as books, records, and other projects under his own name. Since the early 2000s, Transmissions host Jason P. Woodbury have placed Joe on their personal Mount Rushmore of criminally underrated singer-songwriters. There have always been genres associated with Pernice's work—chamber pop, y’allternative, retro pop, power pop, indie—but it...
Jun 26, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Season 9Ep. 22
This week on Transmissions, guitarist Phil Manzanera, who joins us to discuss his latest project, a memoir called Revolución to Roxy . Writing about his childhood in revolutionary Cuba, his lifelong fascination with music, and his collaborations and run-ins with people like Brian Eno, David Gilmour, Robert Wyatt, and more, Manzera reveals his Zelig-like status as one of art-rock’s most creatively pivotal figures. On albums like Brian Eno's Here Come the Warm Jets (celebrating 50 years in 2024) a...
Jun 19, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Season 9Ep. 21
Near the start of his recently released book World Within a Song , Jeff Tweedy admits there’s probably some parallel timeline where this one is his first, not third, book. It is, after all, dedicated to a subject he’s “thought about the most by far: other people’s songs.” Through a series of comical stories and humble reflections, the Wilco leader puts together a playlist with the book. It’s a wide ranging one at that, covering the spectral, alt-country slow-core combo Souled American to gospel ...
Jun 12, 2024•54 min•Season 9Ep. 20
Welcome back to Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions, our weekly series of illuminating interviews and contextual conversations. This week on the show, guitarist and composer Julian Lage. A child prodigy in his youth, Lage has commanded attention for decades for his guitar prowess—he performed at the GRAMMYs at the tender age of 12—and he’s accompanied a truly staggering roster of artists over the years, including John Zorn, Nels Cline, Bill Frisell, Yoko Ono, Gary Burton, and more. But on his latest...
Jun 05, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Season 9Ep. 19
Incoming transmission. On this episode of our weekly podcast, singer/songwriter Leyla McCalla joins us to discuss the new sonic terrain of her latest album, Sun Without The Heat . Though her earlier work with groups like the Carolina Chocolate Drops and on her own was often classified as Americana, this album finds her shifting into a blurrier, more dynamic zone, where Afrobeat, Tropicalismo, post-rock, and sleek funk all share space. Inspired by Afrofuturistic ecological writings, the natural w...
May 29, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 9Ep. 18
Welcome to Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions. This week on the show, direct from his desert studio on the US/Mexico border south of Tucson: synth music pioneer Steve Roach. As a kid in Costa Mesa, he became entranced with motorsports, prog rock, and kosmische musik by Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, and other Berlin school fusionists. In 1984, he released his landmark third album, Structures from Silence. Record stores filed it in the new age section, where it sold like hotcakes. But as far as Roa...
May 22, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Season 9Ep. 17
Welcome back to Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions. This week on the show, we’re sitting down with Damon McMahon, best known as the man behind the mysterious and compelling Amen Dunes musical project. Transmissions host Jason P. Woodbury first spoke to McMahon way back in 2012, when he was touring in support of the second Amen Dunes album, 2011’s Through Donkey Jaw. Then, they checked in again in 2018 , when he released the tremendous Freedom. Amen Dunes’ sound has shifted and morphed all along the...
May 15, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Season 9Ep. 16
Hauntology. Perhaps the phrase alone is enough to convince you we've wandered into the realm of pretension. But we've got to use it anyway, because this week on the podcast we're speaking with one of the main people associated with that term: Jim Jupp, co-founder of Ghost Box Records , which has mined TV soundtracks, vintage electronics, psychedelia, pop, and supernatural folklore for decades, issuing music by Broadcast, Pye Corner Audio, The Advisory Circle, and Jupp's own band, The Belbury Pol...
May 08, 2024•1 hr 18 min•Season 9Ep. 15
Though he’s known for his fiery, raging performances with groups like Sons of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming , and Shabaka and The Ancestors , Shabaka Hutchings eases into a contemplative zone with his debut solo album, Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace . Released on Impulse! Records and recorded at the legendary Van Gelder Studio in New Jersey—where John Coltrane cut A Love Supreme and many other jazz classics were committed to tape—the album finds Hutchings setting down his sax in favor o...
May 01, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Season 9Ep. 14
Hello, welcome back to Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions. On Saturday, April 20th, Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions returned to the esoteric grounds of the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles for a living taping with guest host Will Sheff (Okkervil River) in conversation author Sean Howe, discussing Agents of Chaos: Thomas King Forçade, High Times, and the Paranoid End of the 1970s , book on High Times founder, provocateur, and trickster Thomas King Forçade as part of PRS' Earth Day celeb...
Apr 24, 2024•50 min•Season 9Ep. 13
This week on Transmissions: Camae Ayewa, better known as Moor Mother . As one-half of the Black Quantum Futurism collective, a creative project she founded with Rasheedah Philips, Ayewa has focused her considerable energies on “the manipulation of space-time in order to see into possible futures, and/or collapse space-time into a desired future in order to bring about that future’s reality.” As the front-person of the incendiary jazz punk group Irreversible Entanglements, she’s let it rip on a s...
Apr 17, 2024•57 min•Season 9Ep. 12
This week on Transmissions, author, producer, archivist, and musician Pat Thomas. In the late '80s, he helped take the Paisley Underground overground with his label Heyday Records. Later, he helped bring out reissues by artists like Judee Sill, Sandy Bull, PiL, and more. And as if all that wasn't enough, he's the author of a number of essential counterculture histories, including 2012's Listen, Whitey! The Sights & Sounds of Black Power 1965–1975 , 2017's Did It! Jerry Rubin: An American Rev...
Apr 10, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Season 9Ep. 11
This week on Transmissions, Aquarium Drunkard founder Justin Gage joins host Jason P. Woodbury to discuss big changes coming to Aquarium Drunkard: AD is transitioning to a membership-based model subscription model on April 8th . Transmissions has a very smart audience and one that’s tapped in—so we likely don’t need to explain to you how much the online landscape has changed, but this decision wasn’t reached lightly, and this conversation will shine some light on the reasons behind our moves. Aq...
Apr 03, 2024•47 min•Season 9Ep. 10
Incoming transmission from Roger Eno. This week on the show, he joins us for a freewheeling, friendly chat about art, place, and Dune (1984) . Eno began his recording life in 1983, when he joined his brother Brian and Daniel Lanois at the latter’s studio in Hamilton, Ontario, to cut one of our favorite albums of all-time, Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks . Imbued with country and western ambiance, it suggests the vastness of space and man’s ventures into it. Not only that, but it serves as on...
Mar 27, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Season 9Ep. 9
This week we're welcoming Elizabeth Nelson of The Paranoid Style to the show for a conversation about music, writing, ZZ Top, and her new album, The Interrogator. Packed with pub rock charm, punk verve, and rootsy, wide-eyed songwriting, the album finds Nelson and her collaborators, including partner Timothy Bracy and Peter Holsapple of The dB's, cranking the amps in service of sharp, literary rock & roll. Sitting down with host Jason P. Woodbury, Nelson explores her dual roles as a writer a...
Mar 20, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Season 9Ep. 8
This week on the show, we’re so pleased to welcome John Lurie . Perhaps you know him from his work in films like Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law, Paris Texas, or The Last Temptation of Christ ; or maybe you know him better for his music—groups like The Lounge Lizards, his trailblazing avant-garde jazz unit, or his fictional bluesman persona Marvin Pontiac, or the John Lurie National Orchestra. Or maybe you know him from his pioneering and singular television shows, 1991’s surreal nature prog...
Mar 13, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Season 9Ep. 7
