Listen: Blue Moth ‘Blue Moth at the Gates of Heaven’

This week the psych-duo Blue Moth put out their Blue Moth at the Gates of Heaven mini-album, and the digital-only release is currently available via their Bandcamp page. The project brings together the Chicago-based analogue synth player Will MacLean (Ice Cream Mission to Mars and ex-Variety Lights), and UK psych-folk guitarist Stephen Kent (The End Springs). The pair traded files via email, and MacLean reports that his parts were all created on a sequenced Minimoog, “using an old-school 8-step analog sequencer reminiscent of Tangerine Dream”, while Kent supplied “beautiful, much more organic-sounding guitars”, as well as some synths of his own. This past February we previewed the album’s first two tracks, “3 To The Power of Moog”, with it’s “smoldering cosmic acoustics”, as well as the “uncoiling…deep aquatics” of “Warp Jangle Stomp“; and those tracks, like much of the album, explore ambient, proto-psychedelic realms using meditative guitar phrasings and bubbling, cosmic synth work.
“Minimoon” begins with ominous bass rumblings, like a slow-traveling eruption from far out in space, before Kent settles in on a gentle, twilight lullabye amongst the cascading stellar scree. Similarly, “synth blues in #C (fade)” suggests galactic origins and simmering protean worlds, but the folk-tinged guitar melody of the proceeding track is replaced by something more sinister, as what sounds like single, bowed notes oscillate in spell-binding ways around the mounting stellar chaos. On “blue moths waiting at the gates of heaven“, MacLean and Kent pair an organically deconstructing guitar part with all-kinds of effects driven disarray, including the strange unwindings of a backwards guitar part; while the album’s brief closer, “seqmoogmonopaltron 1.48“, delves deeper into this disorder by unleashing the machines on one another, and they squelch and buzz with entropic delight!