Aquarium Drunkard

Yesternow: Editor’s Note Volume Seven

Justin Gage — Sun, 31 May 2026 00:30:19 +0000

Twenty-one years ago, Aquarium Drunkard began in a Venice Beach apartment with little more than a stack of records and an internet connection. To mark the occasion, we've gathered a selection of features, series, broadcasts, and recurring obsessions that became part of the site's fabric along the way. A look back at some of the sounds, conversations, and cultural detours that continue to animate the project today.

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Dust-to-Digital :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview

Jason Woodbury — Fri, 29 May 2026 14:30:00 +0000

April and Lance Ledbetter of Atlanta's Dust-to-Digital join us for a discussion about the label's new radio app, Dust-to-Digital Radio, and the art of sharing archival music in the digital age: "The technology is amazing. I couldn't have imagined it 20 years ago. I mean, maybe Nikola Tesla or some science fiction writers could have, but it’s changing so fast."

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Wax Machine :: The Sky Unfurls, The Dance Goes On

Justin Gage — Fri, 29 May 2026 13:00:00 +0000

With Lau Ro's debut solo LP arriving next month, we revisit Wax Machine's 2023 album, a useful point of reference for the Brighton musician's forthcoming work. Prior to stepping out under his own name, Ro was already pulling together a wide range of influences into something distinctly his own. Consider this a preview of the road ahead.

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Brenda Ray :: D’Ya Hear Me! – Naffi Years 1979–1983

Justin Gage — Fri, 29 May 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Paste-up scrapbook transmission. D’Ya Hear Me!: Naffi Years 1979–1983 moves through a corner of British post-punk where homemade electronics, dub atmospherics and soft-focus pop dissolve into one another. Domestic and nocturnal, drum machines pulse beneath elastic basslines, guitars blur into tape haze, melodies appear only to evaporate. Reggae permeates everything, not as influence or quotation but as environment.

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Sean Thompson’s Weird Ears :: Inner Principles

Justin Gage — Thu, 28 May 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Across Nashville sessions, kosmische excursions, and off-center country-rock detours, Sean Thompson has quietly become one of the city’s most versatile guitarists. On the new Weird Ears instrumental LP Inner Principles, he pulls those threads into a fluid, atmospheric set that moves between ECM-style spaciousness, late-night boogie, and warmly exploratory ensemble interplay.

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Boris with Michio Kurihara :: Rainbow 2

Justin Gage — Thu, 28 May 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Originally released in 2006, Rainbow remains one of Boris’ most transportive recordings: heavy but unforced, suspended somewhere between slow-motion psychedelia and late-night amplifier glow. Nearly twenty years later, the newly released Rainbow 2 extends the world of the original with two side-long pieces drawn from the long out-of-print Rainbow box set, pushing further into spacious drone, low-end pulse, and hazy dual guitar interplay.

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The Aquarium Drunkard Show: SIRIUS/XMU (7pm PDT, Channel 35)

Justin Gage — Thu, 28 May 2026 01:00:00 +0000

Sodium-vapor dusk. Via satellite, transmuting from northeast Los Angeles — the Aquarium Drunkard Show on SIRIUS/XMU, channel 35. 7pm California time, Wednesdays.

34.1090° N, 118.2334° W

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Stolen Moments From A Life Well-Lived :: Sonny Rollins, 1930-2026

Justin Gage — Wed, 27 May 2026 20:02:36 +0000

From Birdland broadcasts and bridge-side practice sessions to late-night television, Leonard Cohen collaborations, and a final summit meeting with Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins spent nearly seven decades treating improvisation as a form of spiritual inquiry. In the wake of his passing at 95, we revisit a handful of essential films, broadcasts, and performances that capture the humor, velocity, deep concentration, and eternal forward motion of a musician who never stopped searching for the unknown.

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The Beach Boys at Big Sur Folk Festival (1970)

Justin Gage — Wed, 27 May 2026 14:00:00 +0000

On the heels of the majestic Sunflower and a carefully managed image rehabilitation campaign, The Beach Boys’ appearance at 1970’s Big Sur Folk Festival was a calculated effort to align themselves with the counterculture. Sans Dennis Wilson, off filming Two-Lane Blacktop, California’s native sons delivered an excellent set drawn largely from Pet Sounds onward — a quiet corrective to their infamous withdrawal from 1967’s Monterey Pop Festival. Despite years of archival excavations from the band’s vaults, the performance remains officially unreleased.

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All One Song :: Zachary Cale on “Ambulance Blues”

Jason Woodbury — Wed, 27 May 2026 12:00:00 +0000

We have got a doozy of a Neil Young song to talk about today — “⁠Ambulance Blues⁠." First appearing as the closing track on Neil’s 1974 masterpiece On the Beach, this is one of the man’s major works, a long, dark dirge that surveys the surreal mid-1970s landscape, from Patty Hearst to Richard Nixon, all accompanied by a brilliantly skeletal musical backdrop. Here to help us decode the mysteries and metaphors of “Ambulance Blues” today is NYC-based singer-songwriter ⁠Zachary Cale⁠.

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Pink Floyd :: Live in Saint Tropez, France 1970

Justin Gage — Tue, 26 May 2026 19:45:22 +0000

Shot for French television in Saint-Tropez during the summer of 1970, this broadcast captures Pink Floyd before the lore and iconography fully set in: no inflatable pigs, no circular screens, no stadium-scale spectacle, just four guys on a small stage dragging enormous sound through the Riviera night.

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Basic / Chris Forsyth’s WHAT IS NOW :: Both/And

Justin Gage — Tue, 26 May 2026 14:00:00 +0000

For the past two decades, Chris Forsyth has quietly built one of the most distinctive catalogs in contemporary underground music, balancing technical precision with deep feel, repetition, and exploratory instinct. On two new releases — Basic’s self-titled LP with Douglas McCombs and Mikel Patrick Avery, and the sprawling improvisational debut from WHAT IS NOW — Forsyth stretches outward in different directions, moving from hypnotic groove and motorik interplay to thornier, open-ended collective improvisation that rewards patience, curiosity, and total immersion.

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Magic Tuber Stringband :: Heavy Water

Justin Gage — Tue, 26 May 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Set against the poisoned beauty of South Carolina’s Savannah River watershed, Heavy Water finds Magic Tuber Stringband threading old-time Appalachian forms through drone, field recordings, ecological ruin and Southern psychic residue. Inspired by Courtney Werner’s research into radioactive birdlife near the abandoned nuclear zone of “Atomic City,” the trio’s ninth full-length moves between haunted fiddle laments, free-form string dissonance and environmental unease

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Lifetones :: For A Reason

Justin Gage — Mon, 25 May 2026 14:00:00 +0000

Outside. South London, early 1983. On For a Reason, Charles Bullen and Julius Cornelius Samuel pull away from the tightly wound scaffolding of This Heat into something slower, heavier, and more open-ended. Basslines circulate, rhythms drift, and dub space begins to overtake the frame. Forty years later, the record still feels uncannily present after dark.

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Antoine Dougbé et L’Orchestre Poly-Rythmo De Cotonou 1977-1982

Jason Woodbury — Mon, 25 May 2026 12:41:00 +0000

Benin-born songwriter Antoine Dougbé fused Cuban rumba, son, Congolese guitar music, and Vodún ceremonial rhythms into a singular strain of trance-inducing West African funk. Backed by the mighty Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou, the late ’70s and early ’80s recordings collected by Analog Africa move with hypnotic force: phased guitars, rolling percussion, wiry synth lines, and call-and-response vocals locked deep inside ecstatic grooves.

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