On m00m‘s self-titled debut, the synthesists Jack Hertz and Christian Fiesel take a Moog powered trip into outer space as they search for the “Berlin” of their Krautrock dreams. Earlier this month we introduced you to Hertz, the West Coast-based musician who runs Acousmatique Recordings, as well as the label Aural Films–while releasing over fifty records of his own since 2010 on labels like Treetrunk Records, Buddhist On Fire, and Aural Films. Fiesel, for his part, hails from Germany, and his Discogs page finds him active since 1997–with many releases available on excellent net-labels like Petroglyph Music, Webbed Hand Records, and Spheredelic–as well as Hertz’s own Aural Films.
While this will be m00m’s debut, Hertz and Fiesel have worked on several projects together before. In 2016, the pair released End of the Steam Age–a trip into the past to explore a time in which heat and water “powered commerce, industry and innovation.” In addition, the two musicians were joined by Scott Lawlor for 2017’s The Great Attractor, an incarnation of Hertz’s Time Spinners‘ project in which the trio merged their interests in ambient music with their love for Prog and Krautrock. As m00m, the pair continues the Kraut revival with a Moog fueled trip to somewhere in the Laniakea Supercluster.
With Hertz working out of San Francisco and Fiesel located in Trittau, Germany, the pair reports they used file sharing to record their debut. While End of the Steam Age and The Great Attractor found the players crafting tantalizing fields of sonic drift, m00m takes a funkier, bass-driven tact into outer space. This is immediately evident on the opening tracks “For A Snowflake” and “Klick und Klack,” where buzzing basslines propel the proceedings with oscillating weirdness. The former strikes cosmic tones that shadow and bubble, while the later’s madly skipping arpeggiation runs amok robot-style. Both tracks are immediately more “busy” than the pair’s ambient-leaning work together, and they introduce the listener to an ever-evolving palette of inter-planetary sounds. A sense of drift still exists, but weird elements of melody and warped rhythm also now vie for prominence in the sonic soup.
By the time we arrive at “Walking in the Shade of Giants” and “4 Fat Guys in a VW Bug,” it seems we’ve reached the atmosphere of a distant, Earth-like planet. “…Giants” finds us on a wary descent thru ominous clouds with head-spinning shifts in pitch and vertigo-inducing rushes of noise making for a wild ride, before “…VW” continues the trip down through a chaotic storm layer of boiling electric activity. Forced to take shelter, when m00m finally finds itself “Run Aground,” the doors of their craft open on a jungle of strange creatures. Chirping and bird-like, they warble in warm washes of sound as the storm’s fast moving clouds pass. Initially, the landscape feels familiar, but it’s not long before the cut’s more pastoral strains give way to the sense this planet’s dense foliage might hide more malicious intents.
“Stranger on Second Thought” confirms caution might be the best strategy here, as the track bounces along at a frenetic pace while electric serpents hiss in the tall grass. “A Box of Marbles” is no more reassuring, as a blistering bassline marauds like a hungry swarm of locusts before a host of more subtle creatures eventually emerge from the brush. Facing the growing realization that this far away, undiscovered world might prefer to remain undiscovered, Hertz and Fiesel fire up their spacecraft for further journeys. If “Scavenging for Trouble” led them to this remote outpost of life on the Southern Supercluster in the first place, then the track’s strident gliding tones might be once again sounding that Siren call for adventure and the unexpected.
M00m closes, then, with this promise of future trips on “Every Tuesday Morning” and “No More Clouds.” The former strikes a haunted tone as it rises thru obscure origins before turning into a trippy space traveler’s delight complete with a flute-like melody that ponders a bucolic life from a place high in the clouds, while the later leaves those billowing atmospheres in the dust. Firing up their Moog once more just to make sure the spacecraft’s still in working order, “No More Clouds” issues forth a noisy funk as the duo blows out the jets on this nighttime drive around a haunted cul-de-sac. And then, just like that, m00m is gone–off to continue their Moog-inspired search for that extra-planetary “Berlin” of their Krautrock dreams.
