Transmissions

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 Alice Coltrane at her ashram. “I’ve had many experiences in that woman’s force field, and I’ve never forgot any of them,” Muldrow says, discussing how Coltrane’s work felt like “music from her home planet.” Mama You Can Bet leans into Muldrow’s jazziest tendencies, incorporating two remixes of works by Charles Mingus, whose influence is palpable. But Muldrow is her own creation, and her love of electronic funk, ambient, and hip-hop colors and shades the album. Ahead of what would have been Turiya Alice Coltrane’s birthday  on August 27th, Georgia joined Transmissions host Jason P. Woodbury via Skype to discuss the new record, the West Coast jazz tradition, and maintaining a long running creative partnership and independent label with her husband, Dudley Perkins.   Mama You Can Bet is available wherever you get music August 28th.    This week’s episode of Transmissions was written and produced by Jason P. Woodbury and edited by Andrew Horton. Executive producer Justin Gage. Art and imagery by D Norsen and Heavy Hymns. If you dig what we do at Aquarium Drunkard, share our podcasts, features, interviews, mixtapes, radio shows, and sign up for our Sidecar newsletter. If you wanna take your support a step further, head over to Patreon and look us up. We appreciate it. Music heard in this episode includes “Mama, You Can Bet” and “The Crowrie Waltz” from Mama, You Can Bet (SomeOthaShip Connect).    One more note: On August 29th, get to your favorite independent record store to get your hands on our vinyl release with ORG Music, The Lagniappe Sessions Vol. II. 13 performances from your favorite artists covering songs they’re inspired by on beautiful clear vinyl. Listen to the entire album now at Aquarium Drunkard. 

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 first part of his solo career and on September 4th, the Forst-based guitarist and composer follows that collection up with Solo II, which includes 1983's Lust , 1985's Süssherz und Tiefenschärfe, 1987's Traumreisen, 1996's Esperanza, 2004's Remember (The Great Adventure) and a brand-new album, Dreaming, which finds him returning to the spaced out pastoral drift of his classic albums. He was kind enough to join us on Transmissions to discuss his musical youth in India, his days as a conscientious objector, his collaborations with Klaus Dinger, Roedelius, Moebius, and his experiences with younger musicians who were inspired by his sound, including the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth.

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 literature, pulp magazines, pop culture, and media myth-making influences and shapes our perception of these damned subjects.  It’s a book packed with ideas, but easy to read, thoughtful, good humored, and sharp. Dickey determinedly engages with the currents of nationalism, colonialism, hucksterism or outright ill-intent, and racism that often accompanies these topics. This stuff is no longer confined only to the fringes. With the weirdness of our age getting ever weirder, the need to know how to navigate the strangeness is clear and present. Colin Dickey steps up to the task with your host, Jason P. Woodbury, this week on Transmissions. 

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 "strangely hymnal lyrics." In 2003, he abandoned the name The Microphones and embarked upon a series of records under the Mount Eerie moniker. They not only retained that sense of spaciousness, but greatly expanded it, incorporating the influence of black metal and extended song lengths. In 2016, Genevieve Castree, and illustrator, musician, and cartoonist, and also Phil’s wife and the mother of their daughter Agathe, passed away from pancreatic cancer. Phil recorded a set of harrowing, beautiful, and extraordinarily human albums about the experience, including A Crow Looked at Me, Now Only, and Lost Wisdom Pt. 2, recorded with Julie Doiron. Along the way, he married actress Michelle Williams and moved to New York City, though that relationship has ended and he and Agathe are back in the Pacific Northwest these days. It’s hard to sum up Elverum’s story, but in a weird way, that’s kind of what he does on his new record, The Microphones in 2020, which features one, 44-minute long song. It’s his first time using the Microphones name since 2003, and to hear him express it, it’s kind of an album about identity. While it’s no less autobiographical than his recent records, it’s a step in a different direction, temporal poetry about transience and the way a person becomes a different person—but somehow, it's also how they stay the same person. Once again, we’re dabbling in paradox and contradiction. Elverum created a film to go along with it, in which he displays decades worth of personal photographs, occasionally brushing them from the frame, where they are replaced by new images. And that’s where we find Phil: in the midst of trying to figure out how time shapes and creates us, and how we shape and conceive of time. This week on Transmissions, he opens his (virtual) door and invites us in to discuss the new album, personal history, identity, and Weird Al.

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 kept busy: this week, her duo with Andy Stack, Wye Oak, releases its new EP No Horizon, a collaboration with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. And she’s got another EP out too, the recently released Like So Much Desirefrom her solo project, Flock of Dimes. Both projects are great showcases for her progressive songcraft, which pairs oblique and exploratory lyrics with swooning avant-pop. Wasner has never settled comfortable into just one mode—scanning through her discography reveals folk, synth-driven art rock, and guitar epics—but her inquisitive, intricate lyrics serve as a throughline.  She joined us to discuss the role of imagination in creating the future, staying sane, what’s keeping her company on the turntable, working with Justin Vernon’s Bon Iver collective and what she’s learned from producing singer/songwriter Madeline Kenney.

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 made there. At 76, Mossy is experiencing a late career rediscovery following Tompkins Square Records reissue of the album, which earned her a great story in the New York Times by Grayson Haver Currin, who praised her “soft, welcoming voice,” which “floats over delicately picked acoustic guitar and an occasional banjo or fiddle, or her own recordings of birds.” This week on Transmissions, Mossy joins host Jason P. Woodbury to discuss returning to her masterpiece more than four decades after its release, the utopian dreams of her parents, her relationship with the land, and the work of Jewel, her niece. Oh yeah, did we mention Jewel is Mossy’s niece? Northwind Calling is available now from Tompkins Square Records. 

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 into its body of work, which constitutes one of the great under-recognized discographies in all of indie rock.    Unwed Sailor’s latest is called Look Alive, and it showcases the collective’s more driving side, marrying Peter Hook-inspired basslines to rumbling soundscapes that evidence the early influence of groups like Bedhead and Tortoise. I caught up with Ford to discuss his history in American indie rock, and how he made his way from the grinding math rock of Roadside Monument to the slow-core folk of Pedro the Lion, and Unwed Sailor’s vast genre-diverse tapestry of sounds—and all zones in between. 

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 records he released along the way, but in 2016, he returned to making records under his own name with Don’t Give Up On Love, released by Fat Possum Records.    He’s got a new one, too: You Make Me Feel. Produced by Scott Bomar, it’s a raw, live feeling record, but it also showcases the subtle lyricism and sophistication of Bryant’s songwriting chops. He joined host Jason P. Woodbury to discuss highlights from his massive songbook, his marriage and creative partnership with Ann Peebles, and his return to the stage.

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 record matches the apocalyptic mood of the US, and much of the world, in 2020. But it also speaks to the continued growth of the Protomartyr aesthetic, pairing guest vocals and contributions by players associated with free jazz and experimental music with reverb-drenched guitars and brittle rhythms. Writing about the album, Ana da Silva of the Raincoats says: “Our world has reached a point that makes us afraid: fires, floods, earthquakes, hunger, war, intolerance..there are cries of despair. Is there any hope?” For this episode of Transmissions, Jason P. Woodbury asks Casey to answer that question, as well as Protomartyr's artistic growth, the uncanny influence of Robocop, and other doomed and damned topics. A reminder: Transmissions relies on our supporters on Patreon. Everything at Aquarium Drunkard does—so if you enjoy this show, our mixes, the Lagniappe Sessions—where your favorite artists cover their favorite artists—our weekly Sidecar newsletter, and the rest of our efforts, consider helping us by pledging your support of our independent outfit. 

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 Nature.     Drifting, seasonal, and often focused on the subtle saxophone work of Jeff Tobias of Sunwatchers, the album also features percussionist Jim Wallis and Kayla Cohen of Itasca, who’s been a guest here on Transmissions as well. That talk’s available in our archives, like all our past episodes. This show is sponsored—like everything at Aquarium Drunkard—by our listeners, who support us directly via Patreon. Supporters receive access to bonus audio, notes, special mixes and other projects.