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For the darkest time of year, a wintry mix of stark sonic landscapes — jazz, ambient, acoustic and unclassifiable. Instrumental treks through the snow, hopefully with a mug of hot chocolate (or something stronger) awaiting you at your final destination.
Christmas Evil may seem like a hokey slasher film done up in garland and wreaths, but it's a tragic character study that speaks directly to the motifs of the holiday season. With the thematic tissue of a Christmas film and the derangement of a horror film, filmmakers such as John Waters have referred to Christmas Evil as "the greatest Christmas film of all time."
Harkening back to a bygone era of multi-tracking techniques, Hi-Fi Christmas Guitar finds guitarist Joel Paterson paying tribute to Les Paul and Chet Atkins through the vessel of Christmas standards. Hang the mistletoe, crank up the Echoplex, and let the yuletide spirit roll.
Damon McMahon clears away the complications that befuddled his intricate, sample-heavy Death Jokes album to reveal the lucid, often beautiful melodies underneath. In what the artist has stated will be his last album as Amen Dunes, he circles back to the eerie simplicity of the song, and it works in a big way. With Death Jokes II, McMahon pares down the excess and focuses on pure melody. His voice does most of the work on this remix, in all its wobble-prone, echo-shrouded, vulnerable sincerity.
The Dreamers have always been John Zorn's most immediately appealing project. With The Dreamers, Zorn finally set aside the kabbalistic solemnity that suffused so much of his late 90s work in favor of the pulpier, less austere sounds of exotica, surf, lounge, library music and mod jazz. When Zorn's combo applied their considerable skills to classic holiday fare in 2011, they managed to make one of the greatest and grooviest Christmas albums of all time.
Jazz in Los Angeles is blooming right now. Thanks in part to concert promoters like Yousef Hilmy of Minaret Records, people across the city are hearing a wide range of improvisational music styles in bars, stores, churches, and gardens that now moonlight as jazz venues. Sam Wilkes, a bass player, composer, arranger, and bandleader, is one of the most sought-after musicians in that scene.
Freeform transmissions from Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard on dublab. Airing every third Sunday of the month, RFAD on dublab features the pairing of Tyler Wilcox’s Doom and Gloom from the Tomb and Chad DePasquale’s New Happy Gathering. This month, Wilcox leads things off with a very wintry mix of stark sonic landscapes; DePasquale follows it up with an hour of baroque pop, post-punk & lo-fi soul. Sunday, 4-6pm PT.
Incredibly, Terry Riley's 1980 mid-period classic Shri Camel had never been reissued on vinyl until last month. But Real Gone Music's new edition gives listeners a fresh opportunity to revisit what was arguably the studio culmination of Riley's solo organ-and-tape-delay performances of the 1970s. Over the course of four long movements, Shri Camel alternates between almost overwhelming spiritual intensity and mischievous humor and joy.
Truly, many of Tony Rice’s latter projects cannot be classified within a set genre but instead exist within the universal realm of ‘Guitar Music.’ On Unit of Measure, the picker continues to bare this distinction despite a more deliberate leaning-in toward tradition. After venturing to nearly every corner of the traditional music scene (and beyond), the peripheral experiences converge as a creative catalyst to Rice’s untimely and final reinvention of Bluegrass music.
Released in 1995, An Oscar Peterson Christmas finds the seventy-year-old jazz veteran comfortably gliding through fourteen Christmas standards. It’s cozy, warm, and familiar — everything one could hope for from a jazz record to soundtrack the holiday season.
The Louisiana-born, Portland-based soul singer Ural Thomas comes across like the pastor of a titillating, subterranean sermon on “First Place Winner,” a dimly-lit slice of lo-fi bedroom funk culled from Mississippi Records’ forthcoming Nat-Ural, which compiles ten 8-track home recordings made between the late 80s and early 90s. Over frosty synths and clapping drum machines, his voice is distant, faded, and downright spectral.
The context one can draw between the seven musicians involved in this project is a universe of interloping histories. Percussionists Tatsuhisa Yamamoto and Joe Talia have been involved with a handful of impromptu improvisational groups, sometimes including players like Ned Collette, Senyawa, and Akira Sakata, while both have notched a solo album for the ever-expanding Black Truffle catalog. German kraut four-piece Von Spar have penned over ten albums with a league of guest contributors including R. Stevie Moore, Laetitia Sadier, and Stephen Malkmus who they released an entire Ege Bamyasi cover album a decade ago.
Hailing from Music City, USA, Styrofoam Winos are Lou Turner, Joe Kenkel and Trevor Nikrant. Following up one of our favorite albums of 2024, the Winos return this month with their debut Lagniappe Session. With four covers as eclectic and malleable as their collective influences, the trio lean into the Roches' 1979 s/t cult classic, the wonder that is “Blue” Gene Tyranny, peak and primal Exene Cervenka, and a cut via Link Wray's inestimable 3-Track Shack era.
“Strumming in opposition to the towers.” Tashi Dorji strums his guitar with raw, primal abandon and absolute intention. The strings may clang and buzz but the notes are given room to linger, pausing for reflection, space, and understanding. On We Will Be Wherever The Fires Are Lit, the latest album from the Asheville-based Bhutanese guitarist, Dorji renders ten improvised acoustic pieces, his winding and mesmerizing works played with a conviction that feels weighted and true, even as they wander into swathes of uncertainty.
Carolina Chauffe has written a song every day for at least 12 years. It’s the kind of discipline that would force an artist to live in the moment, to not think too hard whether any particular tune was good enough, to capture an effervescent flow of ideas and images and melodic progressions that might otherwise get away. Their latest album, 444, compiles the best of these phone-recorded compositions and the fresh, lively aura that surrounds songs that come unmediated out of the inspirational ether.
In late July of 1978, the Sun Ra Arkestra rolled into Baltimore’s Famous Ballroom in a concert put on by Left Bank Jazz Society. A long running institution, the Left Bank normally hired acoustic bop musicians like Sonny Stitt, Freddie Hubbard, and Joe Henderson. So bringing on Sun Ra was something of a risky move: not only was he electric, he was a bit of an outside musician too. Would the bluebloods of Baltimore enjoy it?
As 2024 draws to a close, the darkness encroaches … in more ways than one! Some welcome light can be found in the following recommended records. Bandcamp Friday hits again on December 6, but wherever you get your music, make sure your cash is making its way to the artists — we need their work now more than ever.
The Ladybug Transistor released The Albemarle Sound in the spring of 1999, but it sounded pretty much timeless upon arrival. A quarter-century later, the LP’s glow remains undimmed — it’s a jewel-box of lush strings, classic pop melodies and delicious rainy-day melancholy, a Wes Anderson soundtrack in search of a film.
Dave Schools of Widespread Panic joins us to discuss the legend of Phil Lesh, helping us understand just how profound of an influence he has had on not just contemporary music culture, but the evolution of human consciousness and sound as a whole.
A formidable player then and now, James Blackshaw was considered a fitting heir to first wave Takoma artists like John Fahey and Robbie Basho. Following an extended break from performance in 2016, Blackshaw returns this month with a new album, Unraveling in Your Hands. It includes just two tracks. The title cut is one nearly half-hour composition for solo guitar, while “Dexter,” much shorter, includes string and wind arrangements by Charlotte Glasson, an in-demand session player, film soundtrack contributor and member of the Lost and Found Orchestra.
The last installment in the Can live archival series continues to explore the unfairly maligned late period of the pioneering German band. Recorded at Keele University in 1977, it finds former bassist Holger Czukay settling into his new role as effects wizard, with replacement bassist Rosko Gee, also of Traffic, upping the funk quotient for long, elaborate improvisations and sometimes surprisingly industrial pieces. As with the other entries in the series, it shows a group committed to exploding their sound, exploring the outer limits and creating new worlds, for as long and as far as they could go.
A vibrant fusion of sounds comes blasting off the grooves of Ayo Ke Disco: Boogie, Pop & Funk from the South China Sea (1974-88), the recently released compilation from the inimitable Soundway Records. Curated by the label’s own longtime general manager Alice Whittington (aka DJ Norsicaa) and informed by her Malaysian heritage and collection of Asian records, the disc surveys the 70s and 80s discotheque scenes of South-East Asia, boasting disco, synth, and psychedelic-infused funk from Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong and the Philippines.
When Kikagaku Moyo surprisingly called it quits a few years back, one naturally anticipated that we'd eventually see new projects (solo or otherwise) trickle out from the uber-talented five piece. Described as a "unique fusion of music and visual art", the first offering arrives as the debut EP from lead vocalist Tomo Katsurada.
Chatuye is a group composed of musicians from Dangriga, Belize, who only got together in Los Angeles in 1981. There, they quickly became major exponents of the newly-formed afrobeat scene, garnering attention from world music enthusiasts that were emerging in the US in the 1980s. As such, it was one of the first— though certainly not the last—bands to be described as “afrobeat” without being from Africa.
Of all of Lou Barlow’s many projects, Sentridoh is the most misunderstood. The new compilation, Really Insane - A Lou Barlow Compendium, invites us to return to (or discover) Sentridoh with fresh ears – not as an alternative to hardcore but a continuation of it. With Sentridoh, Barlow built his own, solipsistic world, colored by persistent tape hiss, thumping guitar downstrokes, and the psychosexual hassles of an extended adolescence.
Tradition runs rampant around Thanksgiving: generations of old recipes, football, Alice’s Restaurant, and, of course, a parade of balloons shutting down NYC. What else do you need? If you thought you were covered in the Thanksgiving tradition department, we did too…until a few years ago, when someone blew the dust off a long lost tape — Doug Sahm’s Thanksgiving Jam.
It opens with an abduction—and only gets crazier from there. Groupies is the latest series from KCRW's Lost Notes music podcast. Written and hosted by Dylan Tupper Rupert and producer Jessica Hopper, the show's eight episodes span the end of the '60s, the birth of the '70s Sunset Strip culture, and the dawn of punk rock, illuminating the lives of women often written out of the story or viewed as mere accessories to their rock star companions.
I first caught wind of Robert Walter around 1998 at a late night show at the Maple Leaf in New Orleans during jazz fest. Now fast forward 26 years. Two months ago Walter joined forces with Dave Harrington, Spencer Zahn and Kosta Galanopoulos for a heady Tuesday night of free improv space jazz/funk at Gold Diggers in East Hollywood, Los Angeles. Spread over the course of two sets, shit got real as the audience played witness to something new, something primal. Thankfully there was a taper in the house.
Prior to this fortieth anniversary reissue, you likely never saw The Things or 1984 debut record Coloured Heaven included on canonical Paisley Underground lists. Wearing its influences on its sleeve, the album is emblematic of their Los Angeles roots from Love to their Paisley peers in Rain Parade. Similar to Emergency Third Rail Power Trip, it's a relic of woozy, melodic neo-psychedelia that stands out across any era or movement.
Teaser: When he's not singing high harmonies and playing sun-baked folk as one half of the excellent SoCal duo Mapache, Sam Blasucci moonlights on his solo records as a polished purveyor of AM gold. Picking up where last summer's brilliant Off My Stars left off, Blasucci's new album Real Life Thing mines a vein of early 70s soft rock to craft a perfect collection of sophisticated bubblegum.
In 2019, Vancouver composer and sound designer Kristen Roos acquired a floppy disc of pioneering computer musician Laurie Spiegel's 1986 algorithmic composition program Music Mouse for a few bucks on eBay. The purchase sent him tumbling down a rabbit hole of vintage music software interfaces. Over the three volumes of Universal Synthesizer Interface, Roos has captured the fruits of his research and experimentation. Composed of pulses and patches, primitive drum machines and bass squelches, Universal Synthesizer Interface emerges as one of the most slyly delightful, engaging and weirdly beautiful musical projects going.
Via French television, check out this terrific 13 minutes of Bridget St. John performing three songs solo in Paris, the songwriter’s crystalline guitar and singular vocals captured perfectly. Do we talk about St. John enough? Sure, she’s had plenty of boosters over the years (John Peel was a huge fan), but in our mind she deserves to be mentioned alongside Nick Drake, Sandy Denny, John Martyn and others as one of the great English songwriters of the late 60s/early 70s. I’m also going to put her up there among the very best heads of hair of the 1970s — a competitive area, to be sure.
Out of the Blue (1980) marks Dennis Hopper's return to the director's chair after a decade of exile, transforming what was intended to be a light-hearted coming-of-age drama into a domestic tragedy about wayward youth during the apex of the punk scene.
We’ve reached the end of the road for this season—season 9 concludes with this episode, a conversation with Matthew Houck, the leader of the avant-country band Phosphorescent. In April, Phosphorescent released Revelator, the band’s ninth album. It’s their debut for Verve Records, after a string of well-received albums on Dead Oceans. Joined by collaborators like Jim White of the Dirty Three—who you heard earlier this season—Jack Lawrence of The Raconteurs, and his wife and songwriting partner Jo Schornikow, it finds Houck examining—what else?—the end of the world.
It's officially Bert Jansch season. Recorded live in the spring of 1973 for Norwegian television, the following twenty-eight minute session finds the Scottish troubadour in the company of Norwegian folkie Finn Kalvik. The set kicks off with the pair collaborating on Jansch's own "Running From Home" (via his 1965 s/t LP) before sliding into an alternating guitar pull between the two musicians. Koselig!