Transmissions

Transmissions is the interview podcast presented by Aquarium Drunkard, arriving weekly with musicians, artists, authors and filmmakers. Jason P. Woodbury hosts. The register is warm and unhurried, closer to two people comparing records than to a press junket. Conversations are given room to drift, and the drift is usually the best part. Steve Wynn of the Dream Syndicate came on to discuss the 40th anniversary reissue of 1984's The Medicine Show, expanded by Fire Records, and ended up telling the story of how Sandy Perlman came to produce it after simply doing a good job on sound one night. Cochemea closed out a season talking about Ancestros Futuros on Daptone Records, an album that completes a trilogy started with 2019's All My Relations and continued with 2021's Baka Sawa. The show has hosted Jeff Bridges and Emmylou Harris. Woodbury has described the recurring themes as the spiritual dimension of music, music's ability to bend a listener's conception of time, and the visionary side of dreaming. Running inside the same feed is All One Song, a Neil Young miniseries hosted by Tyler Wilcox, a longtime Aquarium Drunkard contributor who cheerfully calls himself a fanatic. Its format is one song, one guest, no rush. Brigid Mae Power talked through Albuquerque and how a place name that barely scans in English still carries the whole American Southwest. James Jackson Toth took on Thrasher, and the talk turned agricultural, circling Neil's long interest in farming and the difference between being a farmer and being a guy who knows farmers. Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo picked Big Crime and connected it back to Yo La Tengo learning Sun Ra's Nuclear War for a December run of shows in 2001, when the question was how to react to the moment without sloganeering. Wilcox also handles some field work. A Big Ears episode paired him with Thurston Moore and Kramer ahead of their collaborative album They Came Like Swallows, covering their shared history and a story about the Butthole Surfers unnerving Alex Chilton. The show announced a Transmissions Morning Show livestream from Knoxville with Aquarium Drunkard, Big Ears and Talk House. Guests are treated as peers with long memories, and the hosts know the catalogs well enough to ask second and third questions. Episodes close with a sign-off rather than a hard sell. It is a show made by people who care whether a reissue was mastered properly. Nearly three hundred episodes deep, it has the feel of an institution that never bothered to act like one.