Lower Dens’ 2010 debut. A hazy and hypnotic collection of minimalist shadow pop. Jana Hunter’s autumnal finest.
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.
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.
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.
Deep-cut Jamaican dub from 1975. Produced by Clive Chin at Randy’s Studio 17 in Kingston, Jamaica.
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.
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.
Broadcasting from Copenhagen, Denmark — the Aquarium Drunkard Show on SIRIUS/XMU, channel 35. 7pm California time, Wednesdays.
Between the visible and invisible. Pastoral electronics, kosmische, fractured psychedelia, bent frequencies.
34.1090° N, 118.2334° W
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
While Panoramic Highway draws on a wide array of influences spanning geography and time, it’s anchored by the sounds of Marin County’s coastline, where Dexter+Franz recorded at the Panoramic House. Throughout the album, field recordings and samples of the ocean and beaches seamlessly weave in and out of the songs. Waves crash, seagulls chirp, and synth textures float through the mix like gusts of salty sea breeze. In these moments, Panoramic Highway becomes an elemental experience, rooted in the soundscapes of nature.
Australian singer-songwriter Leah Senior turns to two selections from the British folk guitar tradition for this installment of the Lagniappe Sessions. Recorded at home with Jesse Williams, her take on John Renbourn’s “Rainy Day” slows the tune’s insistent central riff, drawing out its sinuous, unhurried quality and the delicate, cascading descent that follows. On Jansch’s “Tell Me What Is True Love,” a lilting picking pattern opens onto a similarly pastoral expanse.
The muted hues, the subdued texture of the light, the encroaching dusk. There’s a sort of unspoken beautiful melancholy to autumn that has nothing to do with gloom or sadness. It hangs in the air, soft at the edges. Released 25 years ago this year, Kings of Convenience’s Quiet Is the New Loud gave that aching melancholy a voice.
