It’s only fitting that San Francisco would birth a band like Wooden Shijps. Serving up space rock with a visceral, raw and punishingly repetitious and otherworldly edge, founding member and lead guitarist Ripley Johnson and his shipmates have managed to seize the reins of what we know to be dance rock and subsequently turn it on its ear and turn it into something that’s innately recognisable yet aloof and alien at the same time.
And it is this sensibility that Johnson brings to his side project, Moon Duo. Through a clutch of EPs and two solid albums – the most recent of which, the bewitching Circles, was released late last year – Johnson and his longtime partner Sanae Yamada have crafted a sound that fuses lo-fi fuzz and sonic reverbs that, simply put, are heavy.
Yamada, speaking by phone from Moon Duo’s world headquarters in Portland, Oregon, explains to me that Moon Duo was formed in 2009 originally out of a sense of frustration. “Wooden Shijps were starting to get a lot of really interesting offers for tours and shows,” she explains to me, “and it was really hard for them to all tour at the same time – and I think that was particularly frustrating for Ripley, so he had this idea that if we were to start a band it would cut down on all those problems. So when [Moon Duo] originated, the idea was that we would say ‘yes’ to everything!”
Circles is a particularly impressive piece of work – a heady, crunchy and delicious maelstrom of organs, percussion and squalling guitars that surrounds the listener in a steely embrace of feedback, noise, and fetching rhythms. It’s like primitive dance music on an epic scale.
“We’re into music about repetition – I think that certainly the early rock‘n’roll was a great example of early dance music, and modern dance music is so predominantly electronically-orientated,” Yamada says. These days, it seems, if you want dance music, you go to a techno or a rave, and you expect electronic music to inspire the bodies to move. “But people don’t expect that from rock‘n’roll necessarily anymore! It’s a primal thing,” she continues, “it’s the essence of rock‘n’roll, dancing.”
For the writing of Circles, Yamada and Johnson decamped to their on-again/off-again isolated cabin in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, where their imaginations could run riot. How did that isolation amongst nature influence their sound?
“[We were] up in the mountains, and we didn’t know anybody up there and there was really nothing going on,” she reveals, “so we would just sit in this house we were living in and look out at this beautiful natural scenery. Most of the time we spent there was in the winter, and it was really peaceful to take a break from touring and it was gorgeous there, because there was a lot of snow, but there’s also a lot of sun.
Taking its title from the 1841 Ralph Waldo Emerson essay of the same name, Circles expounds on what is called “the flying Perfect”. From its buzzing opening track Sleepwalker to the epic (in scale and in length) Rolling Out, this new record is a product not only of time and place, but also of love and trust. Yamada and Johnson, who’ve known and been with one another since 2004 make amazing music that swirls and drifts and encircles the psyche like a shark on the scent of blood.
“It’s interesting,” Yamada admits when asked if the musical language she and her partner share influences the sound they make together. “It’s interesting because there was already enough time and history in that our relationship within the band is only one facet of how we know each other – a history is helpful in terms of not letting the band become … everything.”
BY THOMAS BAILEY
