Hi, everybody. Hope you are all doing well and soaking up the sun when you’re able. (That’s a really good Sheryl Crow song, isn’t it?).
Thanks for all the great feedback on our first gear review. Please let me know if was helpful in picking out a phono preamp for your setup!
We had a couple premium subscribers cancel this month which is a real bummer. The content in Ambient Audiophile is exclusive and I don’t fling it out on other social media platforms. If times are hard, I get it, but if you’re able, a little financial support goes a long toward making this thing and the radio show better and creating them more sustainable.
The latest Trailhead had a nice vibe to it with returns to new releases from Saapato (Sound As Language), Early Fern & Reign of Ferns (Aural Canyon) and Kevin Coleman (Centripetal Force). We also heard from some classics like Steve Hillage’s wildly underrated ambient album from 1979 Rainbow Dome Musick (Virgin), guitarist Steve Tibbetts’ 1982 ECM debut Northern Song and Eberhard Weber’s stunning 1976 album Yellow Fields.
If you listen to the show regularly and aren’t a paid sub here, please consider buying me a coffee. Preparing and hosting a 2-hour show every week is wonderful work but it is work. Thanks!
Hear the show here and check the tracklist below.
1. Saapato - Midday Storm Dissolving - On Fire Island (Sound As Language, 2024) 00:00
2. James Bernard - Perpetual - Ambient Études For Bass Guitar & Pedalboard (Self, 2024) 06:01
3. Reign of Ferns - Heading Home / Day Break - Mirrored Hope (Aural Canyon, 2024) 14:04
4. Early Fern - They Live on the Soil - Memory Garden (Aural Canyon, 2024) 27:56
5. Steve Hillage - Four Ever Rainbow - Rainbow Dome Musick (Virgin, 1979) 42:22
6. Kevin Coleman - Truckers to Pulaski - Imaginary Conversations (Centripetal Force, 2024) 1:09:00
7. Steve Tibbetts - Nine Doors/Breathing Space - Northern Song (ECM, 1982) 1:23:20
8. Eberhard Weber - Sand-Glass - Yellow Fields (ECM, 1976) 1:45:00
The release of new Mountain Movers music is always very welcome around here. The Connecticut psych quartet have been frying minds for a long time now and while they have yet to pull a wild stylistic left turn on LP, Walking After Dark (Trouble In Mind) is close. Absolutely nocturnal, the double album reigns in some of the group’s noisy tendencies and focuses on a slower, more textural burn. A band of deep music heads, Mountain Movers have devoured and metabolized classic underground psychedelia (lead guitarist Kryssi Battalene is one of the most knowledgeable people on Japanese underground noise and rock that there is) and produce a sound that deeply referential, impossible to define but completely New England. This time around I hear these twisted villagers summoning the spirits of Cold Sun, Sam Gopal and Kluster and creating what may be their most cohesive statement to date. Highly recommended.
The other day while scrolling, I saw that Pavement is on tour and so I thought I’d put Wowee Zowee on Tidal. Long my favorite album of theirs, it hit really nicely until my almost 5-year-old demanded Barbara Streisand.
“You take a lot of turns on the stereo, dad.”
It’s true, I do. So I put Babs on. But the bell had been rung and later on I went back to the first Malkmus and the Jicks album, Pig Lib (Matador, 2003). Man, what an incredible album. Front to back, I didn’t skip a second. My British folk knowledge was fledgling back in ‘03 so I didn’t really pick up on how strong it vibrated in the tunes until now. ‘Witch Mountain Bridge’ and ‘1% Of One’ are ones to check out if you don’t have time for a full session. As I jammed I thought about how me listening to this was exactly like the timebridge between my dad getting back into Arthur Lee and Love and turning me on to them when I was in high school. So here I am connected with my classic rock. I made some time that day for Daydream Nation and then continued on to the next SM/Jicks LP, Real Emotional Trash (Matador, 2008). Such an open flange heaviness on this one, centered on the stunning title track and jam. As that one played I thought about how it kind of primed me for Phish returning the next year. I had more/less stopped listening to them after 2004 as it still hurt a bit and I was having a lot more fun diving deeply into a wider swath of the underground rather than listening to the same old tapes from 1997. But Malkmus and his love of 70s Swedish psych certainly played a part in getting excited about their return back then.
When I finished with RET, I was at an unclear roundabout, faced with three Jicks LPs that, for no good reason, I never listened to. I vaguely remember a single from Mirror Traffic (Matador, 2011) that referenced the Dead but around that time I was more Wolf Eyes of the World than shimmering indie jangle. Anyway, I chose to put on the most recent SM/Jicks, Sparkle Hard (Matador, 2018). Before hitting play I was kind of buzzing on how great a tone Stephen has on his guitar on all these records. The leads are always exciting and I just want every song to get a jam and for them to tour seven months a year and get the wooks on board. So Sparkle Hard starts up and I’m worried it might blow out the good feels the early records gave me. I mean this is the 7th album from SM/Jicks. But Beggars Banquet was the Stones’ seventh LP, so take that negativity elsewhere, Conklin. What happened was Sparkle Hard gave me everything I wanted from this band and some new textures. There was the hooked up, driving rockers, the folky strums, the mainstream twists and the couple of extended jams I need until the next one. ‘Kite’ is the most prominent peak here but it all slides around and locks in so perfectly as an album it’s hard to part it out. Album closer ‘Difficulties – Let Them Eat Vowels’ starts out doing a sort of ‘Moonlight Mile’ thing before getting back on the teutonic freeway for an outro jam that should go on up into the hills and forever.
Get that Pavement money but more kicks with the Jicks soon, please, Mr Malkmus.
This indie rock memory walk included a new discovery this week. I was jamming the first Loose Fur (Loose Fur, Drag City, 2003) album one night and looking up the early Drag City discography. I didn’t get on the DC train until the late 90s when I discovered Smog so there’s a big blind spot. Clicking around Discogs I came up on Funny Farm, the 1993 album by King Kong. I smashed on this one for the kind of lo-fi jamband-y art (reminds me a lot of early moe. albums) thinking maybe we had a Wetlands basement type of band I could groove too. While not quite that, I found the album on Tidal and was instantly drawn into the taut, Talking Heads-ish post-punk of the title track. Turns out King Kong were formed in Louisville by Slint’s original bassist Ethan Buckler and at one point featured the great David Pajo and album guests like David Grubbs. Funny Farm is an energetic and really impressive listen and would appeal to fans of the great modern group Lewsberg who do a similar thing albeit in a more minimal fashion. Retrospectively, this album was too late to be lumped with the first generation of post-punkers and too early for the dancey strain that saw a revival in Brooklyn in the early 00s.
It doesn’t look like King Kong’s first album, Old Man On a Bridge (Homestead, 1991) is on streamers but some kind soul has it up on YouTube. Far more bluesy than Funny Farm but not in a lame, Black Keys way, it’s definitely worth checking out as some kind of bizarre psychedelic punk take on Canned Heat—fresh nuggets galore!
Last but not least I stumbled upon this really cool, jammy southern rock LP recently I felt that was worth sharing. The Winters Brothers Band hailed from Tennessee and indeed included a pair of brothers (sons of Don Winters, the “yodeling king”). Similarities with the Allmans are, of course, aplenty but there’s something more folky about the Winters camp. I’ve only listened to their first, self-titled LP so (ATCO, 1976) and there’s a lot of acoustic guitars and folkiness and some great pop instincts. There are points where the band sounds like a slightly more barbequed NRBQ. The electric leads are soaring and the melodies are breezy. It’s a real nice ride and thankfully devoid of a lot of the confederate trashiness that the term “southern rock” can conjure. I don’t know what, if any, kind of national exposure the band had in their prime. The YouTube page for their album (only way to hear it online, sadly) is full of dudes who saw them at this bar or the other, praising them from the sawdust to the rafters and lamenting their obscurity. The first album is dirt cheap online and well worth it for making some hot summer daze.
Couldn’t agree more about Malkmus & the Jicks - definitely hoping for a new record at some point!
Need more Jicks? Here's a site with a bunch of live stuff. https://jickspicks.blogspot.com/