The Soft Moon Weaves Songs for the Post-Apocalypse

The Soft Moon “Breathe the Fire” (128 kbps) [audio:http://www.thehydramag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Breathe-the-Fire.mp3] We at Hydra have been blowing up the speakers with The Soft Moon’s uncanny soundtracks for the post-apocalypse. The effort of Bay Area musician and visual artist, Luis Vasquez, The Soft Moon just broke a debut 7″ record, Breathe The Fire, on Captured Tracks. And, it’s quite stunning. Lucky for Hydra, Vasquez graced us with permission to put “Breathe the Fire” up for download, although I need to get a copy of that vinyl anyway, at least for that amazing cover art, not to mention the B-side. From the bio (and for full disclosure, I indeed wrote it):

Through The Soft Moon, Vasquez consolidates his disparate musical talents for playing both analog equipment and live instruments. Frigid synth chords, foreboding bass-guitar riffs, and vintage drum machine hark back to the experimental sonic palette of early 80s post-punk. But, Vasquez invests that raw electronic sound with the frenetic pathos of Afro-Cuban music, fracturing the familiar in a strangely resonant way. Hypnotic songs weaving lonely, nearly apocalyptic tales, hinge greedily on demanding more out of life — on sucking the marrow out of the vast desert skies. Repetitive vocals chant in a haunting whisper over hazy atmospherics, spinning like whirling dervishes around a cold glimmer of redemption. The Soft Moon manages to inspire warm revelry in the midst of such a stark environment, allowing a merciless freedom to emerge from a landfill of discarded memories.

Vasquez sees the effort as an “introspective ritual,” one that forges personal release and restoration. With each song he reconciles with the rubble from his past, unveiling a disjointed story of self-discovery. Yes, nostalgia colors every recess of The Soft Moon, from its inception to its aesthetic, but this sort of life-affirming nostalgia prefers hope to paralysis. It undertakes to revive innocent feelings dulled by the grind of adulthood. It longs to channel the driving indigenous rhythms clouded in the dance of Diaspora and assimilation. It reaches for something necessary and permanent in the throws of fleeting desire. And although Vasquez may not regain what he lost, he ends up creating utterly engaging and moving music in the process.

While as the sound harks back to 1980s analog punk, I’d also suggest that it channels something of the early 20th century experimental film that put into play notions of geometry and industry in the sequence of moving images. Perhaps this strange feeling of the post-apocalypse, a sort of aesthetic mood shaped by the likes of John Carpenter and Philip K. Dick as much as Thomas Pynchon and the Book of Revelation, also refers to the pervasive sterilization running rampant in our post-industrial city landscapes. Hinting towards these associations, Vasquez placed the song “Parallels” over a short, abstract animation by Hans Richter, Rhythm 23, (1923).

To my contemporary ears, Vasquez’s collage rejuvenates Richter’s work. The rigid structures underlying geometrical shapes move in undulating rhythm, as maybe, music might allow us to shift the frameworks according to which we perceive, feel, and live. The post-apocalypse as such is not only an end but also an open beginning, one that may not be as foreboding as we might imagine.