Transmissions :: Leyla McCalla

This week on Transmissions, guitarist Phil Manzanera, who joins us to discuss his latest project, a memoir called Revolución to Roxy. Writing about his childhood in revolutionary Cuba, his lifelong fascination with music, and his collaborations and run-ins with people like Brian Eno, David Gilmour, Robert Wyatt, and more, Manzera reveals his Zelig-like status as one of art-rock’s most creatively pivotal figures.  On albums like Brian Eno's Here Come the Warm Jets (celebrating 50 years in 2024) and Quiet Sun's Mainstream, Manzanera's guitars sound otherworldly and overheated; his further work proves as fascinating and it was a real pleasure to have him with us this week on Transmissions.  Aquarium Drunkard is supported by our subscribers. Head over and peruse our site, where you’ll find nearly 20 years of playlists, recommendations, reviews, interviews, podcasts, essays, and more. With your support, here’s to another decade. Subscribe at Aquarium Drunkard.  Transmissions is a part of the Talkhouse Podcast Network. Visit the Talkhouse for more interviews, fascinating reads, and podcasts. This episode is brought to you by DistroKid. DistroKid makes music distribution fun and easy with unlimited uploads and artists keep 100% of their royalties and earnings. To learn more and get 30% off your first year's membership, visit: distrokid.com/vip/aquariumdrunkard

Near the start of his recently released book World Within a Song, Jeff Tweedy admits there’s probably some parallel timeline where this one is his first, not third, book. It is, after all, dedicated to a subject he’s “thought about the most by far: other people’s songs.”  Through a series of comical stories and humble reflections, the Wilco leader puts together a playlist with the book. It’s a wide ranging one at that, covering the spectral, alt-country slow-core combo Souled American to gospel purity of The Staples Singers to the abrasive rapture of Suicide. Songs, Tweedy insists, teach us how to be human, how, to quote Tweedy ”universally vast the experience of listening to almost anything with intent and openness can be. And most importantly, how songs absorb and enhance our own experiences and store our memories.”  Tweedy has penned plenty of songs that fit that bill for me personally, and that’s why I’m so glad to welcome him to this week’s installment of Transmissions. This year, Wilco celebrated a milestone: 20 years of the band’s current lineup: founding members Tweedy and bassist John Stirratt, guitarist Nels Cline, multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone, keyboard player Mikael Jorgensen, and drummer Glenn Kotche. They aren’t commemorating with a rest. They’re staging another installment of their Solid Sound Festival, June 28-30th at MASS MoCA In North Adams, MA. And they’ve got a new EP on the way too, Hot Sun Cool Shroud, out June 28 via their dBpm label, which they’ll debut at the festival.   Aquarium Drunkard is supported by our subscribers. Head over and peruse our site, where you’ll find nearly 20 years of playlists, recommendations, reviews, interviews, podcasts, essays, and more. With your support, here’s to another decade. Subscribe at Aquarium Drunkard.  Transmissions is a part of the Talkhouse Podcast Network. Visit the Talkhouse for more interviews, fascinating reads, and podcasts. This episode is brought to you by DistroKid. DistroKid makes music distribution fun and easy with unlimited uploads and artists keep 100% of their royalties and earnings. To learn more and get 30% off your first year's membership, visit: distrokid.com/vip/aquariumdrunkard

Welcome back to Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions, our weekly series of illuminating interviews and contextual conversations. This week on the show, guitarist and composer Julian Lage.  A child prodigy in his youth, Lage has commanded attention for decades for his guitar prowess—he performed at the GRAMMYs at the tender age of 12—and he’s accompanied a truly staggering roster of artists over the years, including John Zorn, Nels Cline, Bill Frisell, Yoko Ono, Gary Burton, and more. But on his latest album, the Blue Note release Speak To Me, Lage often presents himself as something of a singer/songwriter—minus the singing, that is. Joined by a five-piece band and producer Joe Henry, Lage careens from jittery free jazz to classic West Coast pop, maintaining a careful flow that feels generous but considered, diverse but not haphazard.   This week on Transmissions, he discusses connecting to his musical center, cutting himself some slack, and how Henry helped him know when songs were "done enough." Transmissions is a part of the Talkhouse Podcast Network. Visit the Talkhouse for more interviews, fascinating reads, and podcasts. Next week on Transmissions? Jeff Tweedy of Wilco joins us for a wide ranging conversation about Solid Sound, his books, and his Jim O’Rourke side project Loose Fur. This episode is brought to you by DistroKid. DistroKid makes music distribution fun and easy with unlimited uploads and artists keep 100% of their royalties and earnings. To learn more and get 30% off your first year's membership, visit: distrokid.com/vip/aquariumdrunkard

Incoming transmission. On this episode of our weekly podcast, singer/songwriter Leyla McCalla joins us to discuss the new sonic terrain of her latest album, Sun Without The Heat. Though her earlier work with groups like the Carolina Chocolate Drops and on her own was often classified as Americana, this album finds her shifting into a blurrier, more dynamic zone, where Afrobeat, Tropicalismo, post-rock, and sleek funk all share space. Inspired by Afrofuturistic ecological writings, the natural world, and her own experiences, it’s a record that showcases an artist stepping into a new position, that of an interpreter of alternate sonic histories, an art-pop imagineer casting brand new shapes.  Transmissions is a part of the Talkhouse Podcast Network. Visit the Talkhouse for more interviews, fascinating reads, and podcasts. For heads, by heads. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by our members. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by subscribing to our online music magazine. This episode is brought to you by DistroKid. DistroKid makes music distribution fun and easy with unlimited uploads and artists keep 100% of their royalties and earnings. To learn more and get 30% off your first year's membership, visit: distrokid.com/vip/aquariumdrunkard Join us next week for a conversation with guitarist Julian Lage.

Welcome to Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions. This week on the show, direct from his desert studio on the US/Mexico border south of Tucson: synth music pioneer Steve Roach.  As a kid in Costa Mesa, he became entranced with motorsports, prog rock, and kosmische musik by Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, and other Berlin school fusionists. In 1984, he released his landmark third album, Structures from Silence. Record stores filed it in the new age section, where it sold like hotcakes. But as far as Roach was concerned, it was simply his take on the electronic music that fascinated him, with a humanistic touch: it's pace mimicked the pulse of human breath. Roach has maintained a steady flow of music ever since. This year, Roach and his longtime label Projekt released a 40th anniversary version of Structures. It was quickly followed by Reflections in Repose, a live set performed,  composed and recorded in Baja Arizona in late 2023. Add to that production on Serena Gabriel’s The Saffron Sky and a three-night stint at Hotel Congress in Tucson, May 29th, 30th, and 31st, where he’ll be joined by fellow synth lifers Robert Rich and Michael Stearns, and you can see why it's a miracle he time to join us for this episode, dedicated to discussing his creative process, learning to go with your own flow, and his lifelong sonic journey.  Transmissions is a part of the Talkhouse Podcast Network. Visit the Talkhouse for more interviews, fascinating reads, and podcasts. For heads, by heads. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by our members. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by subscribing to our online music magazine. This episode is brought to you by DistroKid. DistroKid makes music distribution fun and easy with unlimited uploads and artists keep 100% of their royalties and earnings. To learn more and get 30% off your first year's membership, visit: distrokid.com/vip/aquariumdrunkard Join us next week for a conversation with Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, who joins to discuss the Solid Sound festival, his literary work, and his vast songbook.

Welcome back to Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions. This week on the show, we’re sitting down with Damon McMahon, best known as the man behind the mysterious and compelling Amen Dunes musical project. Transmissions host Jason P. Woodbury first spoke to McMahon way back in 2012, when he was touring in support of the second Amen Dunes album, 2011’s Through Donkey Jaw. Then, they checked in again in 2018, when he released the tremendous Freedom. Amen Dunes’ sound has shifted and morphed all along the way, though some constants have remained—particularly, his mantra-like vocals. Even when it’s hard to clearly understand exactly what he’s saying, McMahon has a way of making his lyrics felt, as if the shape and sound of the words in and of themselves has some occulted meaning.  McMahon’s latest is called Death Jokes. It was released on May 10th by Sub Pop Records and it’s a dense, layered gem. Built on beats, piano—a new instrument for McMahon—and stacked with samples of artists like Lenny Bruce and J Dilla, it’s a difficult record to grok at first. It doesn't reveal itself quickly. In a media landscape that often asks us to rush through our experience of music, Death Jokes asks us to stop, to listen again, and to listen deeper. It reveals more as you sit with it.  In that way it’s a profoundly counter cultural album; it bucks against the mode of our day. This conversation follows suit, examining the way the digital age has tried to reduce human experience down to clean binaries. It’s a conversation about spirituality, about the root of music, about the subconscious, and much more. Transmissions is a part of the Talkhouse Podcast Network. Visit the Talkhouse for more interviews, fascinating reads, and podcasts. Next week on Transmissions? Synth legend Steve Roach. For heads, by heads. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by our members. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by subscribing to our online music magazine. This episode is brought to you by DistroKid. DistroKid makes music distribution fun and easy with unlimited uploads and artists keep 100% of their royalties and earnings. To learn more and get 30% off your first year's membership, visit: distrokid.com/vip/aquariumdrunkard

Hauntology. Perhaps the phrase alone is enough to convince you we've wandered into the realm of pretension. But we've got to use it anyway, because this week on the podcast we're speaking with one of the main people associated with that term: Jim Jupp, co-founder of Ghost Box Records, which has mined TV soundtracks, vintage electronics, psychedelia, pop, and supernatural folklore for decades, issuing music by Broadcast, Pye Corner Audio, The Advisory Circle, and Jupp's own band, The Belbury Poly. Last year, The Belbury Poly released The Path. Borrowing the soundtrack work of Roy Budd and Roger Webb as a starting point, Jupp and crew cook up a heady blend of sound, indulging loping, flute-led jazz passages, delay-soaked kosmische soundscapes, and bombastic bursts of wah-wah and fuzz guitar and funk drums. And over it all is novelist and poet Justin Hopper, who adds quixotic and evocative narration to the record. This week on Transmissions, Jupp joins us to discuss his storied label, plumbing the nostalgic depths, the evocative spaces of The Twilight Zone, fairy lore, extraterrestrial, and yes, "hauntology." Transmissions is a part of the Talkhouse Podcast Network. Visit the Talkhouse for more interviews, fascinating reads, and podcasts. Next week on Transmissions? Amen Dunes joins us to discuss Death Jokes. For heads, by heads. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by our members. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by subscribing to our online music magazine. This episode is brought to you by DistroKid. DistroKid makes music distribution fun and easy with unlimited uploads and artists keep 100% of their royalties and earnings. To learn more and get 30% off your first year's membership, visit: distrokid.com/vip/aquariumdrunkard

Though he’s known for his fiery, raging performances with groups like Sons of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming, and Shabaka and The Ancestors, Shabaka Hutchings eases into a contemplative zone with his debut solo album, Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace.  Released on Impulse! Records and recorded at the legendary Van Gelder Studio in New Jersey—where John Coltrane cut A Love Supreme and many other jazz classics were committed to tape—the album finds Hutchings setting down his sax in favor of a variety of flutes and pondering questions about what it means to be, what it means to do, and how one gives themselves over to energizing forces. Joined by guests including Saul Williams, Euclid, Esperanza Spalding, Floating Points, Laraaji, poet Anum Iyapo, Carlos Nino, and fellow flute devotee André 3000, Hutchings drifts into a gentle, new age-inspired zone, blending spiritual jazz expression with ambient sensibilities.  “What does it mean to have music of spiritual substance?“What does it mean to be spiritual? What is spirit?” This week on Transmissions, Shabaka Hutchings joins us to discuss that force, his shift toward the flute, the influence of Outkast, and connecting with his father on a creative level.  Transmissions is a part of the Talkhouse Podcast Network. Visit the Talkhouse for more interviews, fascinating reads, and podcasts. Next week on Transmissions? The Belbury Poly. For heads, by heads. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by our members. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by subscribing to our online music magazine. This episode is brought to you by DistroKid. DistroKid makes music distribution fun and easy with unlimited uploads and artists keep 100% of their royalties and earnings. To learn more and get 30% off your first year's membership, visit: distrokid.com/vip/aquariumdrunkard

Hello, welcome back to Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions.  On Saturday, April 20th, Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions returned to the esoteric grounds of the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles for a living taping with guest host Will Sheff (Okkervil River) in conversation author Sean Howe, discussing Agents of Chaos: Thomas King Forçade, High Times, and the Paranoid End of the 1970s, book on High Times founder, provocateur, and trickster Thomas King Forçade as part of PRS' Earth Day celebration Plantstock. I am such a big fan of PRS, where we recorded a live talk with Matt Marble on the esoteric influences of Arthur Russell last fall. It’s a place that invites inquiry, rewards curiosity, and enjoys the beauty of the unknown.  Which makes it a perfect setting for this talk. Howe’s Agents of Chaos is a time machine that transports the reader directly to the chaotic, funky-smelling center of the paranoid 1970s. The result of almost a decade of sleuthing, Howe’s fascinating book details the true story of Thomas King Forçade, mysterious founder of High Times Magazine, cannabis kingpin, el supremo of the Underground Press Syndicate, Yippie agitator, known drug smuggler, and possible CIA spook. Transmissions is a part of the Talkhouse Podcast Network. Visit the Talkhouse for more interviews, fascinating reads, and podcasts. Next week on Transmissions? Shabaka Hutchings. For heads, by heads. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by our members. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by subscribing to our online music magazine. This episode is brought to you by DistroKid. DistroKid makes music distribution fun and easy with unlimited uploads and artists keep 100% of their royalties and earnings. To learn more and get 30% off your first year's membership, visit: distrokid.com/vip/aquariumdrunkard

This week on Transmissions: Camae Ayewa, better known as Moor Mother. As one-half of the Black Quantum Futurism collective, a creative project she founded with Rasheedah Philips, Ayewa has focused her considerable energies on “the manipulation of space-time in order to see into possible futures, and/or collapse space-time into a desired future in order to bring about that future’s reality.” As the front-person of the incendiary jazz punk group Irreversible Entanglements, she’s let it rip on a series of albums released by International Anthem & Don Giovanni Records. Last year’s Protect Your Light found the band moving to the legendary Impulse! Records.   Along the way, she’s released records under the Moor Mother banner, like 2021’s Black Encyclopedia of the Air and 2022’s Jazz Codes. Her latest is The Great Bailout, a record that functions at times like a sonic horror movie, while also possessing tremendous passages of beauty. Joined by guests like Lonnie Holley, Kyle Kidd, and Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty—past Transmissions guest Angel Bat Dawid delivers an absolutely breathtaking clarinet solo out ‘South Sea”—the album finds Moor Mother transmuting jazz, noise, rock, folk, gospel, classical music—melting down genres in a poetic churn. Moor Mother plays history and time like a science fiction story, bending temporal moments in a psychedelic flurry. This conversation flows in similar way. Join us to jump through timelines, ponder the Mandela Effect, and untangle histories with Moor Mother on Transmissions. Just announced: Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions Live! at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles, feat. Will Sheff (Okkervil River) in conversation author Sean Howe, discussing his book on High Times founder Thomas King Forçade. Secure your tickets now. Transmissions is a part of the Talkhouse Podcast Network. Visit the Talkhouse for more interviews, fascinating reads, and podcasts. Next week on Transmissions? Moor Mother. For heads, by heads. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by our members. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by subscribing to our online music magazine. This episode is brought to you by DistroKid. DistroKid makes music distribution fun and easy with unlimited uploads and artists keep 100% of their royalties and earnings. To learn more and get 30% off your first year's membership, visit: distrokid.com/vip/aquariumdrunkard