Moon Duo

Shadow Of The Sun

Label: Sacred Bones

Genre: Post Rock / Avant Rock

Availability

LP €23.99

Out of Stock

Moon Duo began work on their latest album during a period in which they faced a curious new reality. Freed from deadlines and expectations, and suddenly off the road for a stretch, Ripley Johnson and Sanae Yamada found themselves each experiencing strange shifts in their perceptions of reality. Like the beginning of an acid trip, or the edge of dusk, when shadows converge mysteriously with light, life began to slip into a surreal dream, and then back, suddenly, without warning. Unstable in these strange shadows and light, the band turned to music to tether themselves to a kind of working sanity.

Shadow of the Sun is the result of a few months of wrangling with this new unsettling way of being. Working both in a dark basement in Portland, and above ground in sunny San Francisco, these new sounds and songs veered dramatically from groove to groove, revealing sonic textures the duo had not previously explored. The song “Night Beat,” with its woozy dance rhythm, is an attempt at finding joy and acceptance on this new, shifting ground, while “Wilding” plays off the familiar Moon Duo sound, taking refuge in a repetitive, grounding riff-scape. Elsewhere the band gives itself entirely up to the trip, cruising along on the fuzzed rhythms of “Slow Down Low” and “Free the Skull,” crashing into the clenched-teeth herky-jerk of “Zero,” and floating down, down, down, on the narcotic mist of “In a Cloud.”

To further coat the album in a fog of stoned confusion, the duo decamped to Berlin to mix with Finnish beat-meister Jonas Verwijnen of Kaiku Studios. There they managed to entirely reverse the clarity of the album, increasing the overall focus, and creating an unorthodox argument for sanity through extreme negation of proper technique and conventionality.

The result, at the end of the trip, is the album Shadow of the Sun.

New press. Galaxy vinyl.