It was raining bucket-loads the night Moon Duo played at the Northcote Social Club, supported by Pets with Pets and Tiger Choir. But that didn’t stop a fairly sizeable turnout to see Ripley Johnson of Wooden Shjips fame, teaming up with Sanae Yamada to create their signature psychedelic whirlpool sound.
Arriving just in time to coincide with the start of Pets with Pets set, we enjoyed their steady noisy jams with pedal-laden vocal. Fitzroy fraggle rock? Perhaps. Zayd Thring’s vocals ranged from a baritone thrum to the occasional high pitched scream – there was enough happening in the supporting instruments of drum, guitar, bass and organ to hold a yell, guttural word or string of half formed sentences, which Thring emitted in turn.
With a residency coming up at the Tote, Pets with Pets are worth poking your toe into, especially if you like tight drumming and drone rock with a nod-to-noise.
Moon Duo came on stage to a swollen crowd – many a glasses wearer was present. Not sure what that says about Moon Duo, but perhaps it is well suited to the myopic among us – you don’t need working eyes to enjoy their wormhole exploration of cocooning and simplistic repetitive sound.
That said, their visuals made a pretty perfect compliment – the visual representation of momentum/continuum – endlessly repeating lines of black and white zebra stripe, or blotches of black against white coursed over their faces and bodies as they played.
Sanae had a heavy set fringe and would often look over with bang-swaying glances at Ripley as she played synth, unleashing drum machine beats and organ-iastic melodies. Ripley evoked a softer, skinny version of a San Franciscan Hells Angel, with his long hair and truly astounding beard. Johnson takes salt and pepper facials to a whole new level, I tested this theory by googling ‘mad beard’ but surprisingly his face was not one of the top images.
Needless, his beard contains a black dagger surrounded by bushy grey side tufts – the moustache forms a hilt and the centre of the beard has a concentrated black dagger pointing downward.
Forgive the beard commentary. On to the music. Moon Duo make sweet soundscapes. Repetitive stabs at the organ perfectly matched the reverbed iterations of guitar and Johnson’s vocals. There was a lot to lose yourself in here, a cocoon of sound that was pretty damn cosy.
Johnson’s skill is evident in the precision of manipulating reverb with both his guitar and voice, letting each note have its utmost length before drawing it back so it is as if the notes tangle all over one another in an underwater mess.
It’s pretty delightful, a druid’s cosmic smokescreen against a steady beat and percussive organ. There was a lovely rapport between Johnson with his muted Aztec guitar strap, eyes closed, feeling every nuance of the fret and Yamada, tossing her hair askance to the pulse of funereal organ.
Indeed the organ seemed to provide a stability that perfectly complimented the explorative guitar, with its effects pedals, to travel sonically much further.
There are intricacies and complexities in Moon Duo’s sound that can seem endless, Johnson’s ability to manipulate each repeating stroke of the guitar to his will – leaves you as listener, floating in a stasis of sound.
When they launched into ‘Motorcycle’ there was something undersea about it, the thrust of drum track and organ, and the exploratory navigation of guitar evoked man and machine underwater.
Moon Duo is more than a lo-fi Wooden Shjips. Sure, the same philosophy may well apply – simple, repetitive melodies – but they have their own distinct, but certainly familiar, sound.
Moon Duo have something of the crunch of mountain debris falling from high, of moonlit deserts, and occasionally, the impression that water has swallowed sound.
These are some of the oblique descriptors I scribbled down while watching Moon Duo. They’re probably nothing more than lunacy (lunar, see) but Moon Duo were spectacular and are worth checking out if you haven’t encountered them already.
– Anaya Latter
