Transmissions

Incoming transmission from...Sam Prekop. For more than 25 years, he's released music with the Sea and Cake and on his own. With the band, he's responsible for guitarwork and providing signature vocals, cool, aloof, and melodically clear. But his last few solo albums have found him focusing less on pop song craft and more on analog synthesizers and ambient textures. His latest for Thrill Jockey rec...

Our guest this week is legendary guitarist Bill Frisell. In the 1980s, he served as ECM Records’ in-house guitarist, and he’s been hard at it ever since: partnering with John Zorn for a long series of unclassifiable records, playing alongside Elvis Costello, Lucinda Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Vic Chesnutt, and many more, all while making his own records, which blur the lines betwe...

Our guest this week is Jerry David DeCicca. Perhaps you know him best from Black Swans, or maybe some of the great albums he's produced by so called "outsider" songwriters like Ed Askew, Larry Jon Wilson, and Chris Gantry, among others. Since 2014, he's been putting out great records under his own name. His latest is called The Unlikely Optimist And His Domestic Adventures. Jerry describes it as “...

Our guest this week on Transmissions is Jerry Williams Jr., but if you know your musical cult heroes, you probably know him by the name Swamp Dogg. Since the early '50s, he's lived as a true record man—writing songs, producing artists, self-releasing music, and putting out major label flops that have gone on to achieve lost classic status. He’s always walked the line between R&B and country, makin...

Our guest this week is Chris Forsyth, guitarist, bandleader, composer, and DIY lifer. His studio albums evoke the punk psychedelia of Television, balancing ‘70s rock grooves the loose, exploratory feel of the Dead. But as good as his studio LPs are, it might be live recordings that best showcase his sound. His latest is called First Flight. On it, he’s joined by guitarist Dave Harrington, drummer...

This week on Transmissions, we're joined by songwriter, Dr. Dog drummer, and noted Twitter personality Eric Slick. His new album of classic pop songcraft is called Wiseacre. Best known for his work with Dr. Dog and his wife, songwriter Natalie Prass, Wiseacre was inspired by the golden-hued melodies of Harry Nilsson, Haruomi Hosono, and a general '70s gloss. It's a deeply personal record, one that...

On Mama You Can Bet, her new album under her Jyoti alias, Georgia Anne Muldrow embraces her jazz roots. Born and raised in Los Angeles, her parents were immersed in the city’s jazz community. Her father Ronald Muldrow worked with Eddie Harris; Rickie Byars-Beckwith, her mother, worked with Pharoah Sanders. And there’s the matter of her spiritual lineage: the Jyoti name was bestowed upon her by Ali...

Our guest this week practically invented kosmische guitar. As a member of Neu!, Harmonia, and an early incarnation of Kraftwerk, Michael Rother's fluid, emotive playing helped define the sound of krautrock, as the music came up out of Germany's avant-garde underground in the late '60s and headed for the cosmos in the '70s. In 2019, he released of Solo, a multi-disc boxed set that documented the fi...

Our guest this week is Colin Dickey, author of The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession With The Unexplained. Bigfoot, UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster, phantom islands like Atlantis and Lemuria…the paranormal haunts our collective imagination. In his new book, Dickey smartly explores the lore woven into these topics, and along the way, he describes the way occult litera...

Since the late '90s, Phil Elverum has remained at work on one of the strangest and most beautiful discographies in independent rock. As The Microphones, he created genre-defining records like 2001's The Glow Pt. 2, which has been hailed by critics like Heather Phares, who praised its "kaleidoscopic sounds...pastoral folky ballads, playful symphonic pop, and gusts of white noise," and Elverum's "st...

This week on Transmissions, we’re joined by songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Jenn Wasner. She had planned on spending a fair amount of 2020 on the road playing guitar, keys, and singing with Bon Iver, but instead she’s spending it in a manner probably familiar to readers: watching TV and drinking coffee, thinking about the potential end of the world. But that doesn’t mean she hasn’t...

Lots of records evoke a place. But Mossy Kilcher’s 1977 lost folk gem Northwind Calling does more than that: it welcomes the listener into the spirit of her treasured place of origin, Alaska. Born to homesteading parents who’d fled Switzerland  during World War II, Mossy was raised near Homer, Alaska, and her beguiling songs are filled with references to the land, paired with field recordings she...

Our guest this week is Johnathan Ford of Unwed Sailor. For more than two decades, he’s led the post-rock band Unwed Sailor. In that time, Ford has steered the band—an ever-evolving collective that’s included members of Pedro the Lion, Fleet Foxes, Danielson Famile and more—through a searching string of albums, incorporating the influence of ambient music, shoegaze, new age, math rock, and drone in...

Welcome back to another episode of Transmissions podcast, our weekly talk show. Our guest today is Don Bryant. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, Bryant was one of the premier songwriters at Hi Records, where he wrote material for Al Green, O.V. Wright, Syl Johnson, and his wife, Ann Peebles. He released Precious Soul under his own name in 1969, but mostly kept behind the scenes, baring a few gospel reco...

Our guest this week: Joe Casey of Protomartyr. One of the most exciting rock bands of the last decade, the Detroit-based post punk band will release its fifth album, Ultimate Success Today via Domino Records July 17th. The word prophetic isn't a stretch. With its references to disease, institutional brutality, and gross inequality—symptoms of “a cosmic grief, beyond all comprehension”—the new reco...

We're back. This week, we’re featuring Jesse Locke’s interview with Jack Cooper of Modern Nature. The band’s new mini-album, Annual, is the follow up to the band’s debut, 2019’s How to Live. Inspired by the group’s time on the road in support of that album, this new one demonstrates the way live performance and improvisation has informed Cooper’s continually more expansive approach to Modern Natur...

Welcome to another episode of the Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions podcast, our weekly interview series. Our guest this week is Lisa E. Harris, whose new album with Nicole Mitchell is called EarthSeed. It was recorded live at Fullerton Hall at the Art Institute of Chicago and features the Black Earth Ensemble—an all-star collection of Chicago improvisers and free jazz artists—backing up the two com...

Welcome to another edition of the Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions podcast, our weekly interview show featuring artists reflecting on their creative process, history, and work. This week, counter culture icon David Crosby. Anyone familiar with his Twitter feed knows Croz is a fount of opinions and insight, capable of immense warmth and good humor, but never one to pull punches. On July 31st, he’s r...

And we’re back. Welcome to another edition of the Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions podcast, our weekly series of conversations with artists, writers, and creators. This week: a discussion with sitarist and ambient composer Ami Dang, whose new project is called Meditations Mixtape, Vol. 1. Dang is a multi-instrumentalist from Baltimore, and we reached her there to discuss her particular fusion of so...

And we’re back. Welcome to another installment of Transmissions. For this episode, we’re bringing you one from the Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard’s archives: a live conversation with Ben Kramer and our founder Justin Gage, discussing 15 years of Aquarium Drunkard. Though RFAD is on pause, keep your eyes open for the eventual return of the Tonight Zone, Kramer’s late night call-in show. For now, tune...

And we’re back. Welcome to the Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions podcast—our series of strange conversations for strange times. My guest this week is pedal steel player Luke Schneider. He’s got a brand new album out this month called Altar of Harmony, released by the venerable Third Man Records. Luke is best known as a sideman for country artists like Margo Price and Orville Peck, but he takes the p...

Were joined by singer/songwriter/producer/guitarist Steve Gunn for this episode of the Transmissions podcast—completing our round of talks with the participants of the Gunn/Lattimore/Tyler canceled tour. But there’s much more to hear here than another pandemic rap. Topics of conversation include the new Livin’ In Between EP, which pairs Gunn’s last Lagniappe Session with a brand-new cover of Neil...

On this episode, we caught up with guitarist and songwriter Buck Curran. Formerly one half of the psychedelic duo Arborea, Buck is currently situated in Bergamo, Italy, in one of the areas hit hardest by COVID-19. Though he’s quarantining with his family, he decided now was the right time to release his third solo album, No Love is Sorrow.  It’s a gorgeous and comforting record. Writing about it f...

Welcome to the Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions podcast, and this episode, we’re encouraging you to watch UFOria, a 1985 science fiction comedy starring Cindy Williams, Fred Ward, and Harry Dean Stanton. At once sweet, earnest, silly, and wry,it was a flop upon initial release and has subsequently slipped through the cracks of cinematic history—but thanks to an enterprising YouTuber, you can join A...

And we’re back. For this episode of Transmissions, we’re joined by author, WFMU DJ, and historian of all things “heady,” Jesse Jarnow. His writing has been published by Relix, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times, and in addition to his beautifully written and deeply researched books, which include Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock, Heads: A Biography of Psychedeli...