MOON DUO

As night ascends… fall through the psych side of the Moon Duo in solar transit to southern realms. With the recent announcement of the 2015 Meredith Festival inclusion, and following on their previous 2013 Australian visit as guests of Jon Spencer Blues Explosion –  Ripley and Sanae return as a trio with John Jeffrey now firmly on drums. 

“Moon Duo sound like they’re divining what it means to rock, and roll, in the 21st century.”

The highest apex of psychedelia, be it art, music, drugs or literature, is to induce a prolonged consciousness shift that affects the consumer far beyond the time they were privy to the act. Moon Duo’s third full-length LP, Shadow of the Sun, was written entirely during one of these evolving phases — a rare and uneasy rest period, devoid of the constant adrenaline of performing live and the stimulation of traveling through endless moving landscapes. This offered Moon Duo a new space to reflect on all of these previous experiences and cradle them while cultivating the album in the unfamiliar environment of a new dwelling; a dark Portland basement. It was from this stir-crazy fire that Shadow of the Sun was forged.

Evolving the sound of their first two full-length records, Mazes (2011) and Circles (2012), Moon Duo — Ripley Johnson and Sanae Yamada — have developed their ideas with the help of their newly acquired steam engine, Canadian drummer John Jeffrey (present on the band’s last release, Live in Ravenna). The unchartered rhythms and tones present on this record are reflective of Moon Duo’s strive for equilibrium in this aforementioned new environment.

tone deaf and consume presents:
MOON DUO
australian transit 2015

Wednesday 9 Dec  Brisbane THE ZOO
plus special guests.
tickets from zoo.oztix.com.au and all Oztix outlets

Thursday 10 Dec  Sydney NEWTOWN SOCIAL CLUB
plus special guests.
tickets from newtownsocialclub.com and ph 1300 724 867

Saturday 12 Dec  Meredith MEREDITH MUSIC FESTIVAL
info here: 2015.mmf.com.au

Sunday 13 Dec  Adelaide JIVE – GOING STEADY FEST
From 4.00pm presented by Going Steady Music and ThreeD radio
Plus Glass Skies, The Dunes and more to be announced.
tickets from www.moshtix.com.au and the venue.

tickets available now.

new album SHADOW OF THE SUN out now on sacred bones through rocket

moonduo.org
facebook.com/moonduoofficial
twitter.com/moonduo

MOON DUO
Formed in San Francisco in 2009 by Wooden Shijps guitarist Ripley Johnson and Sanae Yamada, Moon Duo’s first two critically acclaimed EPs, Killing Time (2009) and Escape (2010), fused the futuristic pylon hum and transistor reverb of Suicide or Silver Apples with the heat-haze fuzz of American rock ‘n’ roll to create tracks of blistering, 12-cylinder space rock. Their debut album Mazes, recorded in San Francisco and mixed in Berlin during 2010 as the band prepared to move to the mountains of Colorado, explores a far broader, lighter, sound. That’s most clear on the dreamy organ and skipping riff of the title track, which recalls the Velvet Underground, or the handclaps and swinging organ bloops over the potent shredding and guttural riff delivered by Johnson in When You Cut. Throughout, Mazes is the sound of Moon Duo carving out their own identity, looking to the horizon, and moving forward. Late 2011 saw the release of the darker, mostly instrumental Horror Tour EP around the band’s fall tour of Eastern Europe; Record Store Day 2012 brought a limited edition LP Mazes Remixed which featured remixes by the likes of Sonic Boom, Psychic Ills, and Purling Hiss. Circles, their second full-length LP with Souterrain Transmissions was released in 2012. Circles being the product of a long winter’s isolation in the Rocky Mountains, though the road to its fruition stretched over six months and several locations. The groundwork for the album was laid at the band’s home in Blue River, Colorado in the early months of 2012, where all songs were written, and the preliminary tracks recorded. For two weeks in early April, Moon Duo moved into a small apartment above Lucky Cat Recordings in San Francisco for an additional recording session with engineer Phil Manley (Trans Am, Life Coach).

With the lastest album Shadow of the Sun, Moon Duo used the creative process as a flickering beacon of sanity in an ocean of uncertainty while in their land bound months. The unchartered rhythms and tones of this album reflect their strive for equilibrium in this new environment, and you can hear this is the result of months of wrangling with this profound, unsettling way of being. Exploring the record, a listener will perceive the song “Night Beat,” with its off-kilter dance rhythm, as an attempt by the band to find meaning and acceptance in this new, shifting ground, while “Wilding” delivers a familiar Moon Duo sound, taking refuge in a repetitive, grinding riff-scape. Elsewhere on the record, the band recognizes that no journey is possible without being on the road, paying tribute to the cosmic trucker boogie saint in “Slow Down Low” and “Free the Skull.” From the narcoleptic dancefloor killer “Zero,” the record spirals perfectly into a resplendent daydream, the ecstatically pretty “In a Cloud,” which is a spectacular moment to witness. In a nod to a great pop tradition, the lead single, “Animal,” appeared as the A-side of a 7-inch, packaged with each copy of the vinyl edition. The song has an early West Coast punk viciousness to it that is entirely unique to the Moon Duo catalog.

To further coat the album with an air of uncertainty and tension, the duo decamped to Berlin to mix with Finnish beat-meister Jonas Verwijnen of Kaiku Studios. There in a counter-intuitive act of creative catharsis, they managed to dissolve the album’s formal technique into a cool and paradoxically sane sound of confusion.

The result, at the end of the trip, is the album Shadow of the Sun. OUT NOW ON SACRED BONES

* www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/shortlist-album-reviews-moon-duo