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On The Turntable

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    Lower Dens

    Lower Dens :: Twin-Hand Movement

    Lower Dens’ 2010 debut. A hazy and hypnotic collection of minimalist shadow pop. Jana Hunter’s autumnal finest.

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    Klaus Schønning

    Klaus Schønning :: Lydglimt

    Rustling wind. Check. Ambient bird calls. Check. Serpentine Hohner Clavinet funk. Check. Originally released in Copenhagen in the winter of 1979, Klaus Schønning’s Lydglimt was reissued in 2020 via the ever-sleuthing Frederiksberg Records. A baker’s dozen, the record is a taut embrace of ice cold synths and a Teac 4-track recorder.

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    Yuzo Iwata

    Yuzo Iwata :: Daylight Moon

    Thumping Velvety boogies, Bardo Pond-worthy zoners, achingly strange ballads, feedback laced freeforms … and more! The (mostly) instrumental record grips hold of you as a reminder of the essence of a true psychedelia in sound, rather than the buzzy ambiguity that the term seems to be placated in of late.

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    Pharoah Sanders

    Pharoah Sanders :: Pharoah (Box Set)

    Everything about Pharoah Sanders’ eponymous 1977 album is a gift. It’s a masterpiece of quiet mystique and joy that almost never was. Despite the fact that the maestro himself was never satisfied with the album and rarely spoke about it, Pharaoh took on a life of its own over the next four decades to become one of Sanders’ most hallowed and revered recordings.

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    Atlas Sound

    Atlas Sound :: Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See but Cannot Feel

    A beautiful, dislocated trip through bedroom psychedelia, haunted melodies and hazy, otherworldly textures. Like tuning into Someone’s dreams on an old, discarded shortwave radio.

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    Clive Chin Presents

    Clive Chin Presents :: Randy's Dub

    Deep-cut Jamaican dub from 1975. Produced by Clive Chin at Randy’s Studio 17 in Kingston, Jamaica.

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    White Fence

    White Fence :: Orange

    The first White Fence record in over seven years, the chiming guitars and Ty Segall back behind the drum kit and console convey a warbly and mysteriously optimistic guiding light.

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    Van Morrison

    Van Morrison :: Common One

    Common One was the album Van Morrison had been trying to make for ten years. It would mark the furthest he had moved away from the sounds of Astral Weeks, while still maintaining the sonic and literary craftsmanship of the legendary session.

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Radio AD — Longform Listening. Worldwide. Twenty Four-Seven. Red sun setting over a violet horizon.

Marshall Crenshaw :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview

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With his crystal clear voice and keen melodic sensibility, Marshall Crenshaw stands as one of the finest rock songwriters going. His latest collection, The Bootleg Sounds of Marshall Crenshaw: 1984-1987, offers a peek into his process. Culled from his extensive archives, the record brings together unreleased demos, live cuts, and unheard studio recordings captured in the lead up to his third and fourth LPs, 1985’s Downtown and 1987’s Mary Jean & 9 Others. Full of scuffed up, lo-fi charm, it’s a testament to Crenshaw that even his rough drafts feel like brillant slices of pop rock.

Linus + Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy :: The Outsider: The Music of Jules Decorte

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Three oddly-shaped pieces come together in the most natural way in this under-the-radar release from Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. The disc reconfigures the work of blind Dutch songwriter Jules de Corte, an outsider artist who wrote and recorded over 3,000 songs during his lifetime. This is not what you’d call a natural fit. De Corte’s songs are quick and witty and cerebral, more like cabaret or art song than BPB’s mournful Americana. Yet the two artists share an unconventional spirituality; there’s real searching in De Corte’s cleverly put together tunes.

Habibi Funk 035 :: Beirut City Pop

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In a departure from the usual template of old photos of the artists, the cover of Habibi Funk’s latest reissue features an illustration by Beirut-born, Paris-based artist Raphaelle Macaron. Poolside beach chairs sit empty on the patio of a luxurious apartment complex at dusk, separated by red, rocky terrain from the city skyline in the background. Cool purples, pinks and blues saturate the scene in a clear nod to the style of Hiroshi Nagai, whose work graces the covers of Light in the Attic’s Pacific Breeze City Pop compilations of funk, soul and AOR from 1980’s Japan. But while the references in the album’s title and cover art lovingly highlight the parallels with the City Pop era, the contents of the album highlight the perpendiculars.

Lex Walton :: Ultimate Love Forever

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Lex Walton makes swaggering, theatrical, large-scale rock – the spit and snarl of her vocals punk laced, the instrumental arrangements swelling to arena-rock proportions. Dan Boeckner, half of one of the last big emotive rock duos of the aughts and teens, produced Ultimate Love Forever, and it has, sonically at least, some of Wolf Parade’s unabashed romanticism. The content is lacerating, the mood nihilistic, but the music itself is all about the good time. It high-kicks and cake-walks and vibrates with theatrical music hall energies.

Transmissions :: Adam Voith

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Our guest this week is author Adam Voith, whose new novel, RIYL, short for “Recommended If You Like,” is an at times thinly veiled memoir of the ’90s Christian punk and indie scene. With echoes of Get in the Van and Freaks and Geeks, RIYL threads that delicate needle of looking back at earnest teenage corn doggery with warts and all embarrassment, tempered by the type of affection that only time and distance allow all of us. It’s also frequently flat out hilarious.

Hiroshi Yoshimura :: Quiet Forest

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With no deceleration in sight, the 2020s have thus far been the decade of Kankyō Ongaku pioneer Hiroshi Yoshimura. 1996’s Quiet Forest, the musician’s final offering, is another gem in a slew of reissues courtesy of tireless label Temporal Drift. The Hoh Rainforest is the setting here, as Yoshimura interprets the terrain with his singular approach: superimposed synth soundscapes that contagiously mirror the greenery and precipitation: fluttering new age soundscapes as opulent as they are evocative.

Ronnie Self :: The Lost Sessions

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Best remembered for the unhinged rockabilly of “Bop-a-Lena” and Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry,” Ronnie Self spent much of his later career writing songs that went largely unheard. The Lost Sessions, a collection of seventeen recordings from that period, finds him somewhere between country, folk-rock, and the lonely hours of the night. A long-overdue glimpse of the songwriter behind the legend.

Bill Nace / Mike Polizze Duo :: Live at Pageant: Soloveev

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Live at Pageant is an incendiary slab of sound, a conflagration of Mike Polizze’s eruptive, corrosive, psychedelic guitar and Bill Nace’s equally untethered taishigoto. The music happened at Philly’s Pageant Soloveev gallery in early summer of 2025; it only exists in recorded format because Polizze pulled out his phone just before the music starts.

Josh Johnson :: Animative

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Josh Johnson plays the saxophone like an orchestra in this third solo album, Animative. That will surprise no one who’s seen his live shows, frenetic, ebullient displays of the power of live looping, as one sax riff echoes another and another. Nimble, pointillistic “Idiophone” which starts off the album, juggles reed and electronic sounds like a circus plate spinner, a cerebral abstraction one moment, a funk-syncopated fusion dream the next.

Call Mr. Lloyd :: A Brief Richard Lloyd Appreciation

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A restless farewell to Richard Lloyd! The musical “alchemist”—a self-selected term—passed away on November 7. In tandem with Tom Verlaine in Television, Lloyd helped rewrite the rules when it came to the electric guitar in a rock setting. Lloyd was a player of boundless technical skill and unbridled imagination—a potent combination, to be sure. When Lloyd launched into a solo, every note was life or death, every moment a high-wire act of wildly impassioned delight. Here, a small sampling of the man’s six-string genius.

Jon Hassell :: Music Is Invisible (Pentimento Volume Three)

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Music Is Invisible marks the third and final entry in Jon Hassell’s Pentimento trilogy. Arriving five years after the experimental trumpeter’s death, it’s not exactly a studio album, but it’s more than a live tape. As a record of a singular artist’s psychic terroir, strong, mutable style and idiosyncratic sonic palette, it’s a fittingly puzzling send-off. But rare elements of “straight Hassell” lurk in the mix, for those with the ears to see.

Felt :: Be Still (The Beach Boys)

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Toward the tail end of their ten-album run in the eighties, English jangle pop outfit Felt had sights on 1968’s understated Beach Boys classic Friends for the band’s only known cover. This transformative take on Dennis Wilson’s soulful, momentary piano ballad “Be Still” sits comfortably next to Primal Scream’s Screamadelica-era cover of another Dennis gem in “Carry Me Home” (keyboardist Martin Duffy would play in both bands). A shimmering beauty reminiscent of every frosty, ethereal component of the brilliance of Felt.