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!