Gig #171: Mauricio Moquillaza, Pharmakon, Mong Tong, Mordant Music, Buñuel, Thurston Moore, Ekoplekz, Furze, Harry Cloud, Mount Eerie, Klara Lewis, Yara Asmar, DAUFØDT

Mauricio Moquillaza
Pharmakon
Mong Tong
Mordant Music
Buñuel
Thurston Moore
Ekoplekz
Furze
Harry Cloud
Mount Eerie
Klara Lewis
Yara Asmar
DAUFØDT

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Mauricio Moquillaza Audio sebastiansuarez.net-Video
‘Emerging from Lima’s experimental music scene, Mauricio Moquillaza is also a bassist who has developed his sound practice at the intersection of noise and free improvisation. He is the founder of the collective Deshumanización, which has served as a platform to showcase a new generation of experimental music artists in the city. This perspective is crucial to understanding his work with the synthesizer, which he views as an extension of the spontaneous nature of improvisation. Consequently, his pieces have an irreproducible quality and explore the ongoing tension between control of the instrument and its generative possibilities.’ — Buh Records

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Pharmakon Methanal Doll
‘The album stems from a profound disgust with humanity’s dysfunctional relationship with the environment and other life forms. It explores the loneliness resulting from this broken bond and challenges us to acknowledge our personal and systemic responsibility. In grappling with grief and loss on both personal and global scales, Margaret sought solace in the idea of rebirth through death, celebrating the beauty of regeneration through decay. However, she had to confront the stark reality of the disconnection from the earth under oppressive systems. Pharmakon is here imagining a path where the final act is to give back what was received from creation, offering our lives and deaths to sustain existence.’ — Sacred Bones

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Mong Tong Fire Wind Wheel
‘Mong Tong is a Taiwanese psychedelic music band formed by brothers Hom Yu and Jiun Chi. The name “Mong Tong” is derived from the brothers’ childhood nickname, which can mean something totally different in different languages from Burmese, Cantonese to Chinese. Mong Tong’s music is heavily influenced by Southeast Asian culture, including its mythology and folklore, as well as 60s and 70s psychedelic music. Their sound is characterized by hypnotic rhythms, dreamy melodies, and otherworldly atmospheres.’ — SXSW

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Mordant Music Soft Plastics
‘When I finally lowered the Mordant Music portcullis after 20 years of sauntering alongside the mainstream I signed off with an EMS-based album entitled Mark of the Mould several tracks from which I re-worked for a Sony/KPM online-only library music release entitled Synthi Spores…during the ensuing C-19 castaway phase I composed a further hefty batch of library-style tunes intended for a mooted album with Sony/KPM, which was looking distinctly likely until my contact there vamoosed and corporate ‘reshuffles’ left the music abandoned and huddled in a folder on my desktop – classic ‘industry’ fayre I’ve witnessed many times and KPM itself has now moved St. Elsewhere…enter CiS, who had also previously re-released the Dead Air album and an eMMplekz 12” , to resuscitate ’n’ rally my underscores ’n’ jingles with their renowned gusto…myself and Phil Heeks fashioned a classic KPM-style ‘1000 Series’ sleeve and a random web pop-up provided the ad-hoc title (I was searching for raw plugs at the time)…I’ve made untold library tracks over the years for firms such as Boosey & Hawkes, Cavendish, Universal and Pifco etc and these are certainly some of my favourites, running a gamut of dinky styles for adverts, film and Netflix, whatever that means these days…njoi/endure.’ — Baron Mordant

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BUÑUEL Class
‘BUÑUEL take every opportunity to stretch their musical tendrils towards discomfort, surrealism and the deconstruction of tradition, as they reach absolute abandon. “Mansuetude” dives into the eye of the storm and beyond, encompassing many moods, from post-hardcore to avant-noise, hard blues to post-industrial, from symphonic thrash to metal to free-jazz, all played at great cost.’ — Overdrive

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Thurston Moore We Get High
‘In 1988 the artist Jamie Nares painted an image titled Samurai Walkman which featured multiple tuning forks sticking out of a helmet. That same year Sonic Youth released the double album Daydream Nation with Gerhard Richter’s painting Kerze (‘Candle’) on the front cover. Thirty-six years later Samurai Walkman has been realised as a physical sculpture for the album artwork of Flow Critical Lucidity, Thurston Moore’s ninth solo record. ‘Let’s Get High’ is a slow sex stomp. Frontal lobe-tickling chimes ping like raindrops off a frozen pond and, in the background, a great machine-like grinding of guitar strings blasts out, as if someone is dragging an industrial oven across a cobbled stone floor, 10cm at a time.’ — Jon Buckland

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Ekoplekz Frampton Kotterell
‘Ekoplekz is Nick Edwards from Bristol, UK. He made waves in the 2010s with his distinctive brand of lo-fi analogue electronica for labels such as Planet Mu, Mordant Music, Punch Drunk, WNCL and Perc Trax, while also playing live around Europe. Recorded as always on four track cassette using hardware analogue synths and drum machines with minimal post-production, the tracks retain a raw immediacy and the dirty, dub-infused sound that he was always known for.’ — Selvamancer

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Furze Marrow Creed
‘We invite you to journey the 9th full length of FURZE – “COSMIC STIMULATION OF DARK FANTASIES”. Creating sounds where eternity is haunting mankind’s will for survival and barking answers seems echoing, twisting that same will to the point of hunting Man’s soul back through spectral infinity. The album pushes the personal edge of diverse Furzement to dark delights. Heavily brandished with oldish black doom metal spirit to breed new blood: Under the umbrella Cosmic Stimulation of Dark Fantasies you have songs like “Marrow Creed”, a psychedelic ballad of an inner self-motion/devotion, “Waswasah” – a Satanic groove with whispers from a devil so potent we wish only Kings in the beyond would, but do not hear!’ — Woe J. Reaper

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Harry Cloud A Thin Layer of Slugs
‘Hailing from Midland, Georgia on the border of Alabama, Harry Cloud’s first foray into music began in the MySpace years when he befriended a group of likeminded artists and moved upstate to Atlanta to join the experimental/noise scene under the name A Butterfly-Eaten Horsehead and later Single Mothers. Migrating out West to Los Angeles afforded a meeting with Roessler who helped him hone his sound with tighter production at Kitten Robot studios where he’s recorded 16 albums and EPs so far under Harry Cloud, Fannyland, Orphan Goggles, COPS and Harry Cloud/Paul Roessler.’ — Jammerzine

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Mount Eerie Non-Metaphorical Decolonization
‘Phil Elverum’s music, like the old-growth forests where the Washington songwriter has found work of late, is defined by cycles of destruction and rebirth. The first major rupture came when he blew up the Microphones after 2003’s Mount Eerie and took the album’s name as a new alias; the second came after the death of his partner, Geneviève, in 2016, on a series of austere albums that reckoned with his younger self’s poetic treatment of impermanence. Elverum’s monumental new Mount Eerie album Night Palace feels both like a third definitive rupture and a culmination of his work over the past 25 years. Its 81-minute embrace finds room for all the earlier Elverums: the Zen poet, the stark realist, the black-metal shaman, the kid tinkering with recording gear in the back room of The Business in Anacortes and teaching himself how to bring the sounds in his head to life.’ — Daniel Bromfield

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Klara Lewis 4U
‘This latest solo album from Swedish composer Klara Lewis is billed as “a heartfelt tribute to her friend, mentor and former label boss, Peter Rehberg” and a “precise homage” to his “methodology and spirit.” Notably, Editions Mego released Lewis’s debut album Ett in 2014 when she was only 21 years old and her vision has undergone some rather dramatic evolutions since then. For example, one of my favorite aspects of Ett was Klara’s near-complete avoidance of conventional melodies or instrumentation. While that stance has certainly softened over the ensuing decade, Lewis is still every bit as adventurous and unpredictable in 2024 as she was back then–her songs just happen to have stronger melodic hooks now. In keeping with that “anything goes” spirit, Thankful is fascinating miscellany that delves into everything from solo ukulele performances, unhinged techno mutations, Disintegration Loops-style slow-motion melody obliteration, and an achingly gorgeous elegy. Unsurprisingly, all are wonderful, which makes Thankful yet another characteristically excellent Klara Lewis album.’ — Anthony D’Amico

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Yara Asmar i am a terrible mathematician (and an even worse clown)
‘A box-shaped musical instrument invented in ninteenth-century Berlin has gained popularity worldwide due to its portability and unique combination of melody keys and bass buttons. This versatility has made it a staple across numerous musical genres and cultures. Over the past century, from the lively sounds of Latin American gauchos to the melodies of French café musicians, and through the vibrant music of Balkan Romas and Klezmer dances, the accordion’s distinct timbre and zestful sound have resonated worldwide. Yara Asmar, a Beirut-based multi-instrumentalist and puppeteer, uses the instrument’s singular qualities as an interlacing element, creating a solid foundation for a rich interplay of acoustic and digital sounds.’ — Aydin Khalili

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Daufødt Live @ Parkteatret, Oslo
‘Daufødt takes the temperature of 2024 from a young adult’s perspective. Their music features desperate cries about the end times while watching videos of cute dogs. There’s a new seriousness that comes with age, as critical thinking develops fully and fears about everything that could go wrong—because things have gone wrong—run rampant.’ — Sandnes Rockeklubb

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p.s. Hey. While we await hopeful repairs from my blog’s hosting site, two people managed to break through the Cloudflare bug and comment here yesterday, and they offer these suggestions: jay recommends setting your VPN to Eastern Europe, and one of his friends who uses WordPress a lot recommends changing your Cloudflare SSL/TLS settings to Flexible. Steve used VPN set to Poland, and that worked. Maybe try those methods if you like? ** Dominik, Hi!!! Fingers crossed re: the tricky thing because we’ll need them. Despite the supposed serious with which the French take yesterday’s holiday, supermarkets were open, so I wasn’t famished after all. Visual snow syndrome … is that real? I’ll find out. Mixed blessing, it sounds like. Love giving you a million euros to make a music video, so start writing a song, G. ** jay, Hey! Excellent that you aced the bug! Hopefully others can follow you through the wormhole. Even I seem to know about the Scott expedition in unusual detail come to think of it. Must be the UK’s doing. Yes, this Cloudflare problem isn’t only happening on my blog, it’s been causing problems for all kinds of sites and blogs and so on for more than two months, and they don’t seem to have lifted much of a finger to fix it. Hacker needed. ** Misanthrope, Yeah, I hear you. Well, I hope he continues to want to try that method long enough to get himself enlisted. He does seem pretty flighty. We have military guys walking around in Paris with AK-47s or whatever ever since the Bataclan attack, and they seem nice enough. Back to work! ** kier, I would suggest that basic chocolate chip cookies are the best cookies. Lean and mean and to the point. No artsy-fartsy bullshit, no fancy dress-up nonsense. So you did good. I can’t cook for shit, but when I open and close and push the buttons on a microwave it’s like a fucking ballet, seriously. I’ve been very wary about ‘The Substance’, warded away from it by friends who seem to know what I like, so I don’t know. Hm. Yesterday wasn’t much for me. Email chipping mostly, blog post constructing, … yeah, kind of a blank of a day. This guy I know who seems like the last person who would write an autobiography or even who should write an autobiography did anyway, and he’s reading from it tonight at a bookstore, and I might go to find out why in the world he did that. And you, maestro? Bear hug without the claws, me. ** Lucas, Hi. I’m not sure what he wants to do with the reedited film. Zac and I are going to have a coffee with him and find out. He’s a fashion model, so maybe it’s for some fashion thing. I’m glad you’re seeing your doctor if you think you should. How did it go? My day wasn’t much — see my description to kier above — but it was nicely chilly and a little rainy outside, but not in a bad way. I have this weird gut feeling that it might actually snow here this winter, but my gut is an optimist just like me. xo. ** Steve, Welcome back! Good old Poland, who’d have thunk? Right, those fires and their stink, heard about it. In SoCal too, but smoke-scented skies are pretty normal there. Okay, ‘Red Rooms’, I’m on it. I’ve heard a little of seo, and I liked it. I’ll get more. Thanks! ** Uday, Hey. A broom, nice. We don’t have a broom. We rely on sucking air, but brooms are cool, and they look great somehow. Good, a bit of a qualifier on ‘Red Rooms’, so I won’t get too anticipatory. Wow, you have, like, your life planned out. That’s interesting. How does that feel? I just used to think, ‘I’m going to be writer’, but then I had no idea what would actually happen other than the writing part. That is some title there. I guess the problem with really long titles is that the book in question will always be referred by whatever nickname it ends up being given. But maybe that’s okay. But I agree with you. *thinking* ** Tyler Ookami, Wherever you used worked, happily. Hey! ** HaRpEr, Hi. I had a feeling you were caught in the commenting death spiral. Glad you broke though. Maybe it’s a sign. I’m waiting to hear from my hosting site. They’d better do something. Or else. Although I don’t know if there actually is an ‘else’. I adore Roussel. When people say Proust, I say Roussel. I did this kind of odd post about him years ago that’s one my favorite ever posts here for some reason. This. As far as fiction goes, yes, I feel bereft of sufficiently exciting ideas. I should probably focus my mind more intently toward that, but I’m kind of focused on ideas for Zac’s and my next film right now. It’ll come: the exciting idea. They always do. Thanks for nudging my muse. What are you working on or thinking about in that regard? ** Steeqhen, Hey. Sorry to hear about your friend’s dad, but the bungalow and its surrounds/inhabitants sound pretty enticing. And you’re writing! Writing -> everything else in my humble opinion. Hoping our weeks are bosom buddies in the goodness department. ** Stella maris, Hi, Stella! How great to meet you, and I’m glad you conquered the Cloudflare beast. I am unfortunately its helpless captive in here. Thank you very much about the blog. If luck holds, our film will screen in LA early-ish next year, and we’re working on NYC. I’m intrigued by your Notley-using film. What became of it? Are you still making films? What do you do, I mean with your talents, etc.? Thanks for coming in. I hope I’ll get to talk with you more. ** Okay. I made one of my gigs featuring some music I’ve been liking and playing of late, and there it is up there, and hopes are that you’ll find something pleasurable in your own regards therein. See you tomorrow.