Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on March 2013
Take the Eastern psychedelia of a late-era George Harrison sitar solo and the fuzzbox transcendence of strung-out Velvet Underground. Set it to some purposefully tinny rhythm box beats and you’re getting close to the sound of Oregon pair Moon Duo.
Attesting to the mystical bona fides of singer-songwriter Ripley Johnson and synth player Sanae Yamada’s music are the literary references underpinning their new album Circles. “When I was writing the album, we were living in Colorado, and Sanae had left town so I was all by myself in the woods,” Johnson explains by phone from somewhere near Portland.
“I was reading an Eduardo Galeano novella, and there was an Emerson reference in there. So I got an Emerson anthology and was really captured where I was at the time living in the countryside by his idea of the cyclical nature of things,” he continues. “It was something I got really into and it came out in the songs. It’s not a concept album by any stretch, but I drew inspiration from that for sure.”
The title, Circles, derives from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay of the same name, which begins, “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.”
Despite the serious-soundingness of it, Circles is also laced with humor. The video for the opening track “Sleepwalker” is an absurdist satire of fitness mania and the fad for all things Eastern and mystical, wrapped up into one bizarre package.
“We lived in San Francisco for a long time and the whole West Coast is ripe for satires of New Age lifestyles,” Johnson says. “I’ve never had any experiences with cults but have heard lots of stories.”
From their hippy-dippy name to their neo-psychedelic sounds, Moon Duo are redolent of vintage San Francisco psychedelia. “I went to school in Santa Cruz and moved up to the city after graduation,” Johnson relates. “For me the big artists were Neil Young and the Stones, but also ’60s SF groups like Blue Cheer and Quicksilver Messenger, music with a bit of an edge.”
Did actual psychedelic drugs play a role? “When I was younger I was into psychedelics and the whole idea of trying to push your consciousness to another level,” Johnson grants. “I think it’s common. Maybe I was more into it than the average American—but also the literature and culture of the era, the Beat Poets and movies. I grew up on the East Coast and going to college in California was like a wonderland, because it had been built up to be this mystical era and time.”
Interestingly, Japanese psych-rock also looms large in the music of Moon Duo. “Actually when I moved to California I got really into Japanese music, even more so than the California stuff. The psych ’80s and ’90s stuff—High Rise and Fushitsusha and the PSF scene,” Johnson recalls. “When I was in college psychedelic music wasn’t easy to find, it wasn’t covered in the media. Finding the PSF label, for someone who’s into Blue Cheer and Quicksilver, and knowing there was a scene in Japan, was totally inspirational.”
Yamada’s father is Japanese, and the pair has been to Japan once to meet her relatives. They’ve scheduled some downtime in their upcoming tour to meet family and explore the country, a rare holiday for a band that’s used to a hard routine.
“Usually it’s just town to town,” Johnson quips. “You go to some great places, but you usually don’t get to see anything except the club, which is actually an interesting way to travel, because you do get to meet a lot of people and get to talk to them,” he says. “But for this trip we have three or four days off in Japan. We like having freedom of time and not feeling pressured.”
Earthdom, Mar 27; SuperDeluxe, Mar 29; Ongaku no Jikan, Mar 30
