Author: Moone Records

  • caleb dailey

    caleb dailey

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    Growing up in the Californian sprawl and the vast suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona, Caleb Dailey largely dismissed the country and western music that surrounded him. Instead, he was drawn to independent rock, experimental zones, and other genre-defying forms, which led him to create skewed rock music with Bear State and establish the “minimal art label” Moone Records with his brother Micah Dailey in 2013. But in the early half of the 2010s, Dailey began to hear things differently. Drawn into the left-of-center works of artists like Gram Parsons and Blaze Foley, a more idiosyncratic take on country, folk, and roots music began to swirl in his imagination.

    Wandering into the form’s cowboy chords and lonesome scenes, Dailey found himself wondering what his own country album might sound like. The result is his debut solo album, a collection of covers called Warm Evenings, Pale Mornings; Beside You Then. Produced by John Dieterich of Deerhoof, Keiko Beers, and Dailey himself, it’s a melancholy charmer, rooted in traditional ideas but free roaming in its scope. Laced with synths, pedal steel, acoustic guitars, and commanded by Dailey’s full and woozy voice, it owes as much to the busted waltzes of Lambchop and the homespun lo-fi folk of Little Wings (whose Kyle Field appears on the album via a spoken intermission) as it does to the songwriters and performers who provide its source material, which include Parsons, Foley, Elvis Presley associate Chips Moman, steel guitarist Buddy Emmons, and others.

    “The subversive nature of country music isn’t as much at the surface as some other genres,” Dailey says. “But the deeper down the ‘country hole’ I went, the more I wanted to be part of it. It is truly a strange world.”

    The hands of Dailey and his collaborators, which includes a wide roster of DIY experimentalists like James Fella of art punks Soft Shoulder, Jay Hufman (Gene Tripp), Lonna Kelley of Giant Sand, Japanese DIY hero’s Koji Shibuya and Tori Kudo, Nicholas Krgovich, Markus Acher of The Notwist, and more, that strangeness is accentuated. Dailey doesn’t aspire to retro Nashville fetishism or sanctioned notions of “realness” so much as a genuine outsider authenticity. Take his version of Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind” for example: a highlight of the record, it pairs familiar genre signifiers like pedal steel and guitar strums with warbled synths. Then there’s his read of “Dreaming My Dreams,” originally made famous by Waylon Jennings (who also did time in the Arizona desert), which morphs from a mournful ballad into a wash of far-off sonic noise.

    The attention here is on the songcraft itself, with Dailey inhabiting these songs and turning them inside out to reveal unexpected tenderness and playfulness.

    Recorded at home with an acoustic guitar and 4-track, Dailey began open correspondences with his collaborators, who fleshed out ideas and added touches, often working with skeletal frames before Dieterich and Dailey shaped it into a cohesive whole. “John is the reason this album exists,” Dailey says. “He sculpted all these parts together in such an otherworldly way. He is truly a magician.” Deeply allergic to insincerity, Dailey avoids any trace of irony. He’s created a cohesive gem out of disparate parts, uniting Americana songcraft with experimental disassemblage. From this bric-à-brac, he’s made something touching and beautifully strange.

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    "Warm Evenings, Pale Mornings: Beside You Then" by Caleb Dailey

    “Warm Evenings, Pale Mornings: Beside You Then” by Caleb Dailey

    $28.00

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    "Tough Darts, Tender Nights" by Caleb Dailey, Tori Kudo, & John Dieterich

    “Tough Darts, Tender Nights” by Caleb Dailey, Tori Kudo, & John Dieterich

    $16.00

    Out of stock

  • ever ending kicks

    ever ending kicks

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    Ever Ending Kicks is the solo project of Paul Frunzi (New Issue/Hungry Cloud Darkening) of Anacortes, Washington— a trodden and quaint island community basically absent from anything resembling a music scene. Trading manual labor for the time and the expertise of recordist Nicholas Wilbur (Angel Olsen, LAKE), Ever Ending Kicks offers a new album called Small, out March 11th. These 11 songs explore a faltering emotional path to forgiveness in a drawn out love triangle involving a mentor. The narrator struggles to escape a cartoonish and sticky anger— sometimes totally stepping in it, other times zooming out beyond the realm of individuality to get some relief from it.

    We find an uncharacteristically vulnerable Frunzi allowing sweet early influences like The American Analog Set, John Vanderslice, and Stereolab to come through in musical choices and moments, while also humbly channeling power from contemporary works like Lomelda’s “M” for Empathy, Tirzah’s Devotion, and Nicholas Krgovich’s “OUCH”.  At the same time, Small marks a return to the sparing yet impactful guitar/bass/piano/drum configurations familiar to longtime fans of EEK.

    On ’Wasabi’, soft distortion adds a pinch of salt to the sweetness of a lilting piano arpeggio and wood guitars played in unison by Paul and collaborator Eli Moore (LAKE). Tense strings played by Marit Schmidt (Cinderwell) jar listeners in ’Strangers’— a disillusioned tirade weighing close relationships against the low stakes surface level type. There’s freedom and playfulness in the futility of ‘Dilly Dally’, and the narrator finds some inspiration in a visit to his home state on ‘Arkansas’. But on ’Big’ we find our narrator slipping again, spinning his wheels on a petty dis track. When the old Hammond abruptly gives out with a crackle and goes quiet, the song takes a confessional turn. Paul’s love for those who he feels “wronged” him is the main feature of his pain, and that feels like a foothold.

    Finally, on ‘Epilogue’ a head-scratching Frunzi turns and addresses the audience directly: “I’d like to reflect on these new songs to provide some context”. This and similar wall-breaking choices throughout the album serve to strike a compromise between that evolved and lofty artwork every songwriter hopes to channel a heartbreak into, and the ugliness present in the reality fueling the hope. Which is to say Small, and all its small and big feelings, is allowed to exist in all its complexity and crudeness—more experience than product, more real than perfect.

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    "Small" by Ever Ending Kicks

    “Small” by Ever Ending Kicks

    $26.00

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  • aaron m olson

    aaron m olson

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    Los Angeles musician and composer Aaron M Olson is releasing Songs Album on Moone Records. His matter-of-factly titled Songs Album is a more complex and ornate affair than its title belies – full of vibrant and lush hi-brow arrangements, reminiscent at times of the pop/rock outings of Jack Nitzsche or Jim O’Rourke, while recalling in glimpses the pastoral moodscapes of Robert Wyatt. As a student of composition (literally has a B.A. in classical music) and an astute listener, Olson’s approach to pop music is delicate, slow churning, and intelligently crafted, yet his results are undeniably scrappy. His intoxicating and woozy body of work leaves the listener in a haze as it hones in on often overlooked intricacies.

    Aaron’s earlier years were spent as the bassist in Chris Cohen and Nedelle Torrisi’s band Cryptacize, and he has gone on to accompany the likes of Tara Jane O’Neil, Chris Cohen, Papercuts, Bart Davenport, SK Kakraba Lobi, Nedelle Torrisi, The Lentils, Nicholas Krgovich, Vetiver and many others. While ingrained in the music of so many others, his solo catalog is equally expansive and versatile. He has released a string of incredibly cinematic synth and guitar-driven music under the moniker, L.A. Takedown (Castle Face, Ribbon Music). He also co-founded and plays in the Grateful Dead cover band, Richard Pictures, and its offshoot project Mountain Brews, performs and releases experimental work with his project, The Musical Tracing Ensemble, and composes for film, television, and other visual media. 

    Songs Album marks Aaron M Olson’s debut as a solo artist in the medium of sung songs, and while some familiar sounds and sensibilities of his oeuvre shine through, the album delivers something wholly new and exciting.

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    "Songs Album" by Aaron M Olson

    “Songs Album” by Aaron M Olson

    $10.00

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  • Playlist Series 005 – [The Song Out Of The Party] by Koji Shibuya

    Playlist Series 005 – [The Song Out Of The Party] by Koji Shibuya

    At Moone Records, we love to collaborate with people that inspire us and motivate us to create, but what inspires and motivates them? With this series of playlists, we ask different friends and artists to hand-pick ten songs to ‘soundtrack’ various themes.

    We are honored to have Koji Shibuya for our 5th part in the playlist series. For many years, Koji’s project Yumbo has been a sort of ‘secret handshake’ between our close friends. Their album ‘Onibi‘ is always within arm’s reach. In fact, we’re going to go listen to it again now.

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  • Playlist Series 004 – [Wyrd Visions] by Niall Breen

    Playlist Series 004 – [Wyrd Visions] by Niall Breen

    At Moone Records, we love to collaborate with people that inspire us and motivate us to create, but what inspires and motivates them? With this series of playlists, we ask different friends and artists to hand-pick ten songs to ‘soundtrack’ various themes.

    It has been some time since we last released a playlist in this series. The previous collections cataloged were special and have resonated with us. That being said, here is part 4.

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  • “Tenno” Companion Text by Zach Phillips

    “Tenno” Companion Text by Zach Phillips

    imagine, and be wrong to, ascribing to this album some kind of originary, authentic modality of that pungent austerity everywhere clinging to the contemporary formulation of “non-idiomatic improvisation” etc as a retroactively academicized and theoretically revitalized (as in pro-gentrification urban planning) set of argumentative methodologies for the “creation” of “free” music…

    next imagine, and be wrong to, ascribing to it the exoticizing, othering term “naivism” that has haunted tori and reiko’s music in the western press for decades: the keyboard here as daniel johnston’s ostensibly rudimentary chord organ, assumptively configured as “unlearned” in (misconstrued) relation to prevalent hierarchical valuations of harmonic orientation instead of as (for example) a mode of jubilant agnosis…

    imagine music to be so pinned-in by factitious frames like these that in language we know more the experience of what this music isn’t. imagine how beautifully little the crisis of representation engendered by said is interactive in any way with the experience of open-eared listening. and imagine that it could be so hard just to move from a descriptive understanding — that of this listening, that of its moment of emergence — to an understanding description of what are ultimately just moments of recorded music.

    recorded how, and by whom? these people were and are in love with each other. they were and are also mutually embedded in a religious context about which i know little. the songs would seem to be overdubbed, a practice tori has largely abandoned since “return visit to rock mass” for potentially exciting reasons. to understand the lyrics, it would be necessary to learn the japanese language. titles: water, sheep, the earth is blue, emperor, dead. there is at least one moment of someone i would intuitively configure as unrelated speaking, this accidentally or intentionally layered in. representationally, ambiguity is preserved between (1) the songs as compositions, (2) as recordings and (3) the role of what could be termed improvisation. i detect potential reamplification in what may have been the mixing process; i detect some reverence of reiko(’s voice) in tori’s environments; i think of the word pillows. i want to guess that some of the keyboard here is reiko’s. she told me that this band came about after she and tori met at club minor and joined a punk band started by a person named genet, but soon only they remained. tori told me that they met at a record shop in shimokitazawa, where he was already playing in a band called “worst noise,” later forming “noise” after meeting at a les rallizes dénudés show in fussa. 

    i think of the magnetism i’ve felt, as a musician, and as a permanent adolescent (i believe they were in their late teens / early twenties at the time of recording), toward making the “worst noise” possible, and how the character of that “worst noise” has changed: become harmonious, in fact. i think of the serendipitous role of people like mr. sato, who ran club minor where reiko says she met tori. i think of the collision of the inexhaustibly plural contexts operative here: tori’s return from new york to japan, where reiko had remained (other than a brief trip to new york where she told me she realized in a jail on bowery that she was not free); of their marriage; of their ‘activism,’ their religion; tori’s abiding interest in lacan, derrida, blanchot, etc; the udon bar in tobe where even haino smiled; the relatable trajectory from tori playing jazz standards at club minor to this album with reiko along with guys and dolls, tako, che-shizu, etc to both their work in early-80s-to-late-00s maher to last year’s “je est un autre”; i think of reiko’s hospice work; i think of pottery, of how reiko once told me when she sings she’s “like a bug before the setting sun.” i think too of my abiding fear of them as wise- and virtuous-seeming elders exemplary of a certain form of life i’ve sought to lead: an anxiety which should preclude my rendering this statement. i think of life in its plenitude, how recordings like this participate in “saving the phenomena” in uncertain form, inscribing the majesty of events in a provisionally fixed object. i think of the life span of these objects, and of all that cannot be object, and gladly.

    reiko in a 2010 interview with me: “i don’t want to make songs, i mean if a song is strong enough, it comes out no matter how hard i try to hold it.” tori in a 2004 (?) interview: “a piano improvisation is like an unmodulated sketch from nature. i used to worry that settling for that definition was like sitting on the fence. through thinking about how much one understands nature, with time i became able to take the reins of myself as a performer who embraced the negative realism aspects of jazz as the representation of personal experience.” like tom t hall said, i’ll leave it there ‘cause i suppose they told it pretty well.

    — zach phillips

  • noise

    noise

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    For over four decades, Reiko Omura and Tori Kudo have endlessly woven themselves throughout the avant-garde and underground scene of Japan. While internationally appreciated in countless incarnations and contexts (Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Guys & Dolls), if one were to seek out an early moment in which the two artists created something truly awe inspiring, 1980’s Tenno would be it.

    As Noise, the duo experimented with the juxtaposition of Kudo’s extended organ based dirges (be they eerie and/or harmonious) and fragile, meditative harmonies found in Omura’s voice and more abstract moments of minimal trumpet, sparse drum and atonal guitar. Simultaneously tense and beautiful, echoes of Tenno can be found resonating in the work of their contemporaries and countless others spanning the past 40 years and an infinite amount more to come.

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    "Tenno" by Noise (Reiko & Tori Kudo)

    “Tenno” by Noise (Reiko & Tori Kudo)

    $20.00

    Out of stock

  • niall breen

    niall breen

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    Niall Breen is an Irish cartoonist hailing from the small coastal seaport town, Sligo. He has heavily been involved in the indie comic community for years. Sharing hundreds if not thousands of comic strips across Tumblr and Instagram. Steadily finding himself a cult following devoted to his beloved character, Dog. It has now evolved into an unlikely family including Frog, Bear and Alien. 

    The true magic Niall possesses is in his ability to grapple with darker existential subjects within his sweet and simplistic visuals. The approachable imagery draws the reader into feeling the dull ache of life. Breen’s characters are stripped of age, gender and many human norms. This removal of excess, creates space for us to see ourselves in them. We then find ourselves inside the panels of the comic. Their heartache, joy and silliness suddenly becomes ours.

    Thank you Niall, for giving us all this gift.

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    "Froggy Bends Their Ear To Hear The Tune" by Niall Breen

    “Froggy Bends Their Ear To Hear The Tune” by Niall Breen

    $15.00

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  • freelove fenner

    freelove fenner

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    Montreal art pop group Freelove Fenner will release their long-awaited album, The Punishment Zone, on Moone Records. The 14-song collection is an exercise in pleasing sounds, diaphanous textures, and concise song structure. The group listened to a century’s worth of experimental, often cacophonous sounds and reshaped it into a mellow pop music.

    The group’s workshop is the strictly analog Bottle Garden Studio, a small room full of tape machines and homemade equipment that is integral to the group’s sound and process. Avoiding 21st century technology not out of any sort of snobbery or nostalgia but rather a desire to avoid the work habits inherent with contemporary tools, the band embraces the different results that come with a slower, more tactile process: the happy accidents; the absence of visual stimuli (no screens); the difficulty in attaining high gloss finishes. 

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    "The Punishment Zone" by Freelove Fenner

    “The Punishment Zone” by Freelove Fenner

    $20.00

    In stock

  • nicholas krgovich & friends

    nicholas krgovich & friends

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    Nicholas Krgovich is a songwriter and multi-instrumentalist hailing from Vancouver, Canada.  Described by the legendary Robert Wyatt as “quite beautiful, very touching… human.” he has been releasing records and performing since the early aughts, crafting sonically diverse albums under his own name and as a key member of the highly celebrated No Kids, P:ANO and Gigi. A string of chamber pop albums, girl-group inspired R&B, and in recent years other-worldly pop gems: Krgovich clearly draws from the well of Sade, Prefab Sprout and Stephen Sondheim, but in his commitment to exploring the vast world of pop music he has carved out a city of his own. They are formed within his intricate vocal melodies, lush orchestral arrangements, layers of analog synths, slinky guitars, tight rhythms and idiosyncratic yet honest lyricism. Hot on the heels of his latest collaborative LP with Joseph Shabason (Destroyer, War On Drugs), we are releasing a limited edition cassette of the incredible Pasadena Afternoon. An easy breezy album compiled solely of covers of his friends and collaborators (Dear Nora, Little Wings, Chris Cohen and more). The album was recorded in a day in Los Angeles last February, for fun and all for love.

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    "Pasadena Afternoon" by Nicholas Krgovich & Friends

    “Pasadena Afternoon” by Nicholas Krgovich & Friends

    $10.00

    Out of stock