Transmissions

Our guest this week on the show is singer/songwriter John Grant. You might know him from his work with Midlake, the Czars, Sinéad O'Connor or Hercules and Love Affair. His new album is called Boy From Michigan. It's produced by Cate Le Bon and fascinating, Blade Runner synths pulsing underneath incredible melodies and vocal performances. Grant joined Jason P. Woodbury for a freewheeling and candid...

Our guest this week is Cécile Schott, who records under the name Colleen. Since the early 2000s, she's generated soulful electronic and ambient music, utilizing vintage synths, drum machines, music boxes, and acoustic instruments. Her latest is called The Tunnel and the Clearing. It was recorded in Barcelona during the lockdown and followed a long period of illness and heartbreak for Schott. The r...

Music is never incidental in a movie made by our guest this week: director, collage artist, and music maker Jim Jarmusch. Music is part of his films’ DNA, a through line running through his characters’ black comedy gags and existential wanderings. There’s no stylistic template—everything from crazed blues to ambient drones have soundtracked Jarmusch’s films—but the director ties songs together wit...

Guitarist, songwriter, and producer Sarah Louise joins us this week on the show to discuss her new album, Earth Bow. Though Louise is known for her 12-string folks fantasias, her work is wide ranging, evoking the soundscapes of Robert Fripp and the interlocked rhythms of electronic pop. Reviewing the album for AD, Josh Moss writes that while "Louise is an incredibly gifted guitar player...Earth Bo...

Welcome back. Our guest this week on the show is Wadada Leo Smith, trumpeter, music theorist, and composer. Over his many years, he’s pioneered his own musical notation system, helped popularize and contextualize Miles Davis’s electric period, and has played with a wide set of collaborators including Bill Frisell, Pauline Oliveros, John Zorn, Vijay Iyer, Anthony Braxton, and many more. In December...

Our guest this week is guitarist and songwriter Richard Thompson. One of the founding fathers of British folk rock, he's the author of a new book, Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice (1967-1975). It chronicles the early days of his band, Fairport Convention, the launch of his solo career, run-ins with Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, a lost jam session with Led Zeppelin, and his collaborations w...

Our guest on the show this week is J Mascis. Along with Lou Barlow and drummer Murph, he formed Dinosaur Jr in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1984. After their original run, which ended acrimoniously in 1989, Mascis continued on with Dinosaur Jr, the Fog, and plenty of other wiggy and interesting side projects. But in 2005, the original Dino Jr. lineup returned with a genuine comeback classic, Beyond....

This week on Transmissions, we're digging into the Aquarium Drunkard vault for a 2016 conversation with the late New Age pioneer, composer, author and creator Joanna Brouk. An edited and condensed version of this conversation was published in 2016, but we are happy to present it here in its uncut form. Brouk passed away April 28th, 2017. Her remarkable recordings can be heard on Numero Group’s Hea...

As we've noted here before, Durham-based songwriter al Riggs keeps very busy. Their new album is called I Got a Big Electric Fan to Keep Me Cool While I Sleep. Though they bounce around genre-wise, this LP is rooted in country rock traditions and it features contributions from cosmic pedal steel guitarist Chuck Johnson, Patrick Haggerty of Lavender Country, and others. Riggs joined us for a discur...

This week on the show, Chicago’s Angel Bat Dawid. A composer, clarinetist, poet, and vocalist, she’s one of the shining stars of the International Anthem label, where she’s issued some incredible records like Live, with her band Tha Brotherhood, as well as the Oracle and the Transition East single. She also plays with other groups, like Damon Locks Black Monument Ensemble—she’s featured prominentl...

Pino Palladino and Blake Mills are two of the most dynamic studio wizards in music and they join us this week on Transmissions to discuss Notes With Attachments, their Impulse! Records-released collaborative long-player. Backed by a set of LA studio heavyweights like saxophonist Sam Gendel, drummer Chris Dave, organist Larry Golding, and others. Known for their individual collaborations with artis...

This week on the show, we're joined by poet and music journalist Noah C. Lekas and Ethan Miller of Howlin' Rain and Comets on Fire. They've got a new collaboration featured on Sounds From the Shadow Factory, a 10" record from Blind Owl: a rock & roll adaptation of "Saturday Night Sage," the poem from Lekas' recent book of the same name. The two joined us for a discussion about spoken word, their p...

Our guest this week on Transmissions is Martin Courtney of Real Estate. On March 26th, the long-running New Jersey group releases its new EP, Half a Human, which embraces the jammier side of the band and continues the stylistic explorations of 2020's The Main Thing. We discussed record stores, adjusting to life without live music, Twin Peaks, and Courtney's 2015 solo album Many Moons—and its forth...

Description: Our guest this week on the show is Shahzad Ismaily, whose recorded with, well, he’s recorded with a lot of people, from Moses Sumney and Sam Amidon to Beth Orton, Martha Wainwright, Yoko Ono, Bonnie Prince Billy, Jolie Holland, and many, many more. With his buddies Ches Smith and Marc Ribot, he’s a member of the punk jazz outfit Ceramic Dog, and last year he released Visitations with...

This week on Transmissions: Detroit’s own Warren Defever of Third Man Records and the experimental pop group His Name is Alive. Since the mid-80s, HNIA has released over a hundred records, EPs, and projects on labels like 4AD, Rykodisc, Time STEREO, and Unsung Hunger. Recently Warren has been exploring way back in the archives, sharing some of the work that caught the ear of Ivo-Watts Russell, who...

Our guest this week is Amanda Petrusich, author of It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, the the Search for the Next American Music, and Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78 rpm Records. She's also a critic at the New Yorker. She joined us from her place in upstate New York to discuss balancing comfort listening and new sounds, Bob Dylan’s Christian era...

Legendary music writer Peter Guralnick joins us this week on Transmissions. He's been writing about the blues, rock & roll, soul, and R&B since the late 1960s. His latest book is called Looking To Get Lost: Adventures in Music & Writing. It is a book about the creativity that fueled artists like Johnny Cash, Robert Johnson, Ray Charles, Dick Curless, and Howlin' Wolf, who Guralnick says viewed his...

Northern California mysticism with Fletcher Tucker. His latest album of ritualistic folk music is called Unlit Trail. Like the previous, Cold Spring, it's a record that settles deep into the sacred nature of existence. It's an lp designed to welcome the listener "into a liminal state, beyond ordinary awareness," and into the unknown. Tucker joined us to discuss Star Trek, animism, family and the d...

Hope you're enjoying the new season of Aquarium Drunkard's Transmissions. Here's a good one from the archives, a favorite of Timothy Showalter of Strand of Oaks a roundtable talk with three lifers: Howe Gelb, Robyn Hitchcock, and Steve Wynn. The three share similar paths through scenes and the industry, their paths are shared but divergent, and there’s a spiritual unity at work even in their diffe...

On her second lp, the newly released Urban Driftwood, Virginia-based guitarist Yasmin Williams creates expansive acoustic music. Playing guitar, kalimba, percussion, and kora, she pulls from disparate musical strands—including the smooth jazz she heard growing up—into music that feels spiritually connected to New Age music, Windham Hill guitar, and the work of contemporaries like Daniel Bachman (w...

Tamara Lindeman joins us this week on Transmissions for a conversation about Ignorance, her lush and sweeping new album as The Weather Station. Lindeman is the kind of songwriter who dares to write about big topics, like identity and global climate change, but the new album finds her exploring those concepts over deeply rhythmic jazz and pop-influenced compositions. It's out Friday, February 5 on...

This week we're happy to welcome Margo Price to Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions for a talk about the music industry, her creative partnership with husband Jeremy Ivey, her online radio show, forays into the cannabis business, and her latest rock and seventies pop inspired lp, That's How Rumors Get Started. Bold and strident, it's a record that finds her blurring genres, like many of her country he...

It’s 2021 and Aquarium Drunkard’s Transmissions podcast is back. Every Wednesday, your host Jason P. Woodbury sits down with a fascinating guest for a rolling conversation about art, process, and inspiration. To kick off our new season, we’re joined by Nels Cline. Known for his many varied solo projects, work in Wilco, and a long history of collaboration with artists like Yoko Ono, John Zorn, Wada...

Our guest this week is Patrick McDermott of North Americans. His latest is called Roped In and its blissed out guitar-scapes find him teaming up with cosmic pedal steel master Barry Walker Jr, William Tyler, and Mary Lattimore. He reached us from his place in Los Angeles to discuss pleasant zones, video games, and some particularly good lunches.    A quick note: this is the final episode of our se...

This week, we're joined by returning guest Chris Schlarb of Psychic Temple and Big Ego, his studio in Long Beach. His latest is called Houses of the Holy, a four-sided double-album, featuring a different band on each side: Cherry Glazerr with garage pop, the Chicago Underground Trio with their jazz inflection, psych warriors the Dream Syndicate, and rapper and producer Xololanxinxo. Schlarb took s...