Moon Duo "In the Sun" Live @ The Funhouse/LIVE EYE TV

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 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 their newest work aptly titled Mazes Remixed (Sacred Bones) and it finds a slew of like-minded psychonauts reworking the album like Pete "Sonic Boom" Kember, formerly of Spacemen 3, Purling Hiss, which is the solo project of Mike Polizze, guitarist for Philly jam-punks Birds of Maya as well as psychedelic nob-twisters Psychic Ills

Category:

Music

Tags:

• live music
• moon duo
• psych
• the funhouse
• seattle
• sacred bones records
• in the sun