Moon Duo’s most recent LP, Mazes (Sacred Bones), has been one of our favorite listens this Spring, so we’re super-excited to feature the band with tasty audio and video selections from their recent April visit to Seattle at The Funhouse! Great live audio for the tracks “Motorcycle, I Love You”, “In the Sun”, and “Goner”, as well as technicolor visions of “In the Sun”. Stream the audio and video below, or join our podcast series to get the newest, the fastest…iTunes, Podcast.com, and Podcast Alley. And now, you can also find us on Soundcloud! CONTINUE READING
STREAMING MEDIA LINKS:
MP3: Moon Duo Live @ The Funhouse “Motorcycle, I Love You”, “In the Sun”, and “Goner”
VIDEO: Moon Duo “In the Sun” Sacred Bones Recordings [YOUTUBE]
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Wooden Shjips guitarist Ripley Johnson started Moon Duo in 2009 with his partner Sanae Yamada, and what began as a more stripped down and mobile version of the Woodn Shjips project has grown into a distinctive unit with it’s own particular tact across the wavy seas of psych and drone. Using the concision of this two person unit, with a stripped down instrumentation that includes Johnson on guitar and vocals, Yamada on organ, and with beats provided through sampling or drum machine, the duo makes the most of these tighter confines while pulling into ever greater focus the sprawling and spacious territories traveled by Johnson in Wooden Shjips. The inspiration for these two projects was born of a time when Johnson had taken a break from playing music. Still an ardent fan, his listening had lead him to an interest in free jazz and improvisational music, as well as the more minimal, mantra-like work of Terry Riley. Seeing a creative opening offered in the melding of these approaches, he launched his own brand of space rock using droning organ work, spiraling guitar, and repetitive, motorik drum rhythms to create an all-absorbing take on psych music. While this formula is evident in both projects, as well as musical nods to eminent predecessors such as The Velvet Underground, Silver Apples, Suicide, and Spacemen 3, Moon Duo’s approach is necessarily more focused and less jam oriented than Wooden Shjips. The bands newest LP, Mazes (Sacred Bones Records), recorded mostly at home in San Francisco over a series of weeks in April of 2010, and later mixed at a friend’s studio in Berlin, sees an evolution in the bands sound as the vocals are given more prominence in the mix, and with this extra attention paid to Jonson’s lyrics the songs almost seem to take on a pop dimension. The band also recently released a remix album of this newest work aptly titled Mazes Remixed (Sacred Bones), and it finds a slew of like-minded psychonauts reworking the album. Folks like Pete “Sonic Boom” Kember, formerly of Spacemen 3, Purling Hiss, solo project of Mike Polizze, guitarist for Philly jam-punks Birds of Maya, psychedelic nob-twisters Psychic Ills, and more take these songs apart and put them back together creating a strange loop by which the serpent seems to swallow it’s own tail. Tasty!
