***While the idea of an album being born of finding peace with oneself is nothing new, in Micah Dailey’s hands it’s a beautifully symbolic harmonizing of past and present. Beginning with an instrumental opening, Flower Festival’s latest album Age offers up an invitation to tilt your ears between jittery analog texture and elegantly fluid drumbeats. But it’s the inward-looking songwriting that makes the best case for Flower Festival’s relatability from his professions of self-hatred to an overall detachment from common culture. Flower Festival’s third full-length album was written at two significantly different times in Micah Dailey’s life, taking music recorded over 8 years ago, revisited and finished with lyrics written today. Much of the album’s influence came from a newfound peace and appreciation for his upbringing. Having grown up in the Middle East, Micah moved back to Arizona in 2011 where an internal tug-of-war rooted in guilt and inadequacies made for some significantly self-deprecating songwriting, as you might imagine being that his album at the time was entitled “Cry Baby”. The push and pull of this mindset made Flower Festival’s album full of artistic parallels that marry the new and the old, without forcing the two. Becoming a father and husband, Micah’s way of living-room-recording had to be adjusted as well, getting to a point of contentment that there might never be a moment of complete quiet, but embracing that there may be faint samples of kids playing or guests chatting. Having created an album in a way that both...
LP $25.00
01/26/2024
***"I recorded the album after a conversation with Caleb about doing an album for the label and talking through ideas of what it could look like—compared to my previous release, Heart Music (2022, Where to Now? Records), which was written and recorded over 1-1.5 yrs, Recall the Dream Breath was written and recorded within the span of 2 weeks in March 2021. Heart Music was written in quarantine more or less, so that album became very dense as I wasn't too concerned with thinking about how to perform it live. I really wanted to strip things down for Recall and to see if I could similarly create thoughtful and inviting worlds for the listener, but with a more simple sound palette (pedal steel, drums, bass, banjo for the most part). After the careful deliberations and constructions of Heart Music, this album somehow felt freer and looser (more like 1st idea is the best idea). The first two tracks are more thoroughly 'composed' pieces and for me, highlight new approaches for how I am writing music for the pedal steel. The 2nd half of 'Lorraine's' and the final three songs were more or less improvised/written while recording. So I kind of hear the album in this sorta reflective way, Side A & B of similar palettes, but with some different intentions behind them. The other kicker with this album is the collaborations with fellow Moone artists Kyle Field & John Dieterich, two people I have looked up to for a while....
LP $23.50
01/27/2023
***New York-based band Mushfoot release their debut album, Time Before Land, on Moone Records. This 8-song collection began as a remote collaboration in the early days of quarantine between Greg Albert (TheRainbows, Spite FuXXX, Holy Wisdom, LLC.), Ian Davis (Relatives, Ian Davis: Rock Band) and Katie Vogel (Relatives). Albert and Vogel were staying together in Brooklyn and Davis was across the city in Northern Manhattan, and the three would share songs they were working on for the others to add onto and return. Through this process the songs slowly became layered and took on new forms. Mushfoot embraces messiness, vulnerability, and sounds created from simple means stretched and manipulated beyond recognition. Named after Ian's pet Mystery Snail, Mushfoot has yet to play a show but were they to... it would be very loud. Greg Albert mixed the songs and sent them to John Dieterich (of Deerhoof) who mastered them and connected us with Micah and Caleb of Moone Records. Time Before Land is a collection of homemade demos that gradually blossomed into a record. Soft vocals rest on top of beds of controlled chaos and dense textures; drum machines coexist with scrappy drumming; Greg Albert’s production approach incorporates MIDI and EQ’ing common sounds into abstraction. The record is messy and vulnerable with songs about love (“in the interval in between moments I’ve loved… is where we first met”), persistence in the face of a demoralizing world (“is there an order? how it’s supposed to be? Stay on it.”) and independent...
MC $12.00
10/21/2022
***The Sheaves are five of the proletariat's finest from the sun scorched SW of these United States. A shared love of punk (and all the pre-fixes in-between) informs the overall sound of the group. Starting as a home recording project, they began to play out in 2019 and have self released two tapes. The following year ushered in a period of pandemic home recording, which this album is the direct byproduct of. Influences include the usual host of US and UK punk, kraut, garage, etc., plus the more nefarious (or not so nefarious) music throughout the 20th century. With one foot planted firmly in the past, this is truly muzak to live, laugh, love to in the new roaring 20s.
MC $12.00
09/02/2022
***Spirit Fest is an underground avant-pop supergroup (for those of us that feel the weight of each member’s individual power), made up of Saya and Takashi (Tenniscoats), Markus Acher and Cico Beck (Notwist), and Mat Fowler (Jam Money). They have steadily been crafting and solidifying a beautifully surreal world since their inception in 2016. Their independent artistic selves have been stripped back to their rawest forms, and they then have become a centralized being. The building blocks used are made with materials that have already started to decompose. It’s familiar, but also “kind of off”. Their sounds become a part of our collective consciousness. Spirit Fest is more than a band. It’s an idea that we can all participate in. A spirit we can all conjure. The freedom and space they give is a gift. This is an invitation into a freedom we can all experience. But first, you have to follow suit, rid yourself of your preconceived ideas and become your rawest form.
MC $12.00
09/02/2022
***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. Features contributions from James...
LP $28.00
04/29/2022
***Ever Ending Kicks is the solo project of Paul Frunzi (Mount Eerie, 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. 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.
LP $20.50
03/25/2022
***Los Angeles musician and composer Aaron M Olson will be releasing Songs Album on Moone Records 11/9/2021. The 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...
MC $9.25
11/12/2021
***Montreal art pop group Freelove Fenner release their long-awaited album, The Punishment Zone. 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.
LP $19.50
02/12/2021
***In 2005 after the break up of legendary slow-core band, DUSTER, and throughout his tenure playing with BUILT TO SPILL over the past decade, HELVETIA has been the primary creative output of JASON ALBERTINI. In January of 2020, Helvetia quietly uploaded a new album titled Fantastic Life to bandcamp. Their first new music since 2017’s Sunchaser EP. Albertini returned to his roots and recorded/produced this album entirely on a 4-track cassette recorder. Fantastic Life is a slow churning wave with bursts of agitated fits. The aesthetic feels as if it is cut from the same cloth as their 2007 album The Acrobats. Woozy off-kilter experimentation littered with moments of sweetness and pop gems. Albertini’s guitar playing and effortless vocal performances have always lived in another plain. Everything is loosely tied together but elegant. Even if everything fell apart, it would be embraced. Helvetia’s sincerity is unmistakable and unforced. In contrast to the album title and sonic emotion, the lyrical themes are dark and defeated. However, it feels as though he is at peace with the present. “What a fantastic life” Albertini repeats nonchalantly, but almost sarcastically while smirking, throughout the title track. As if to say, “Things are fucked, and will always be, but I really do love being alive.”
LP $19.50
10/02/2020
***CAUSTICS is YASI PERERA (BREEZY DAYS BAND, PARK DETAILS) on voice/electronics, JOSIAH WOLF (WHY?) on drums/percussion, DEVIN HOFF (JULIA HOLTER, GOOD FOR COWS) on acoustic and electric basses and JOHN DIETERICH (DEERHOOF, GORGE TRIO) on guitars/voice/electronics. This unlikely assemblage of personalities (some of which had never met before the first session) was created as a vehicle for exploring a spontaneously and collectively invented ritual music, a conduit for the casting of spells. Through the multiple recording sessions represented on Touch, the group turned the lights out and agreed to try to forget what music was in service to this simple idea. Sounds bleed into each other, meeting in some unrecognizable space. Voices float in and out, emotive yet never quite intelligible. Gestures are limited in breadth but achieve an otherworldly power in their simplicity. The result is a claustrophobic miasma of disjointed electronics, pounded rhythms and trance-inducing swirls, honed razor sharp in its focus. There is no pretense to preconceived ideas of musical sophistication or aspirations to virtuosity. This, rather, is a group of fellow travelers rubbing stones together in order to generate a new kind of heat.
MC $8.50
07/31/2020
***LITHICS is a four piece punk band from Portland, Oregon. Since their inception in 2014 they have crafted concise and sharp recordings for labels like Water Wing, Kill Rock Stars, and Thrilling Living. While avoiding the trappings of historical reenactment, Lithics remain solidly informed by the sounds and conceptual underpinnings of late '70s post punk, as well as the obscure logic of proto art rockers Red Crayola and Captain Beefheart. The songs are composed of tightly wound bass lines perfectly in sync with unwavering/uncluttered drums, piercing duel guitar riffs, and singer ABUREY HORNOR's calm and disaffected vocal delivery. The Wendy Kraemer EP was never supposed to be more than a homemade tape that accompanied them on their 2017 tour. The EP is comprised of audio collage, practice demos and improvisations that eventually took full form for their Sophmore album, Mating Surfaces. However, these recordings have a life of their own. Raw overblown sound quality and stripped back takes on the songs offer a deconstructed immediacy impossible to conjure in the formal confines of a recording studio. Process itself becomes object; all the rough edges are left in. It’s an audio archive of intimate song construction and discovery.
12" $15.25
02/07/2020
***Since the '90s, KYLE FIELD has been crafting non-traditional fusions of warm alt-country and dreamy folk music under the moniker LITTLE WINGS. Inspired by surreal aspects of his life on the American west coast, his songwriting weaves amusing wordplay through tales of unknown legends, deep inner reflections, and fantastic descriptions of seaside cities and landscapes. Through the years, Kyle’s music and art have proven his prestige as a singular patron of coastal Americana. In 2002, Little Wings released an album called Wonderue, the first of several early collaborations with acclaimed independent label K Records. Wonderue reinforced Kyle’s knack for loosely structured, yet deeply resonant compositions. Each recording on the album had a way of welcoming listeners in to reflect and sing along as if in the company of his band. There was a magic Kyle conjured throughout the course of Wonderue—a wide-eyed optimism and ease that he imparts to his listeners to this day. In its totality, Wonderue was an album that effortlessly billowed and spilled over with sounds and imagery that evoked festivity, meditation, and a theme of Wonder. Moone Records has teamed up with Little Wings to bring this beautiful album back into print. Remastered by RICHARD HOUGHTEN, and featuring reshoots of Wonderue’s 2002 photo locations, this edition is sure to appeal to your insatiable analog desires. A classic collection of Little Wings splendor, this album’s magic and charm endures 17 years on.
LP $19.50
11/29/2019
***LONNA KELLEY (CHERIE CHERIE, GIANT SAND) is undoubtedly the queen of the underground. Anyone in-the-know would agree. She’s self-released albums since the early 00s. Quietly developing into a singular voice. In 2015, Lonna self-released Take Me Home Spiderman. This album was something of an awakening. A fully realized sound. A hot pot boiling over with lush pop melodies of the '60s and '70s, brutally honest lyricism, minimal instrumentation, and harsh noise. This album garnered praise by WFMU’s legendary music director, Brian Turner. This led to heavy play on the influential radio station, which caused the limited pressing of the album to quickly go out of print. For the past few years, rumors of mysterious B sides to Take Me Home Spiderman have spread. Lonna decided to finally dust off the old tape reels and unearth these lost classics, “Will I See You” and “Time Waits For No One.” They carry very similar nuances to Take Me Home Spiderman, however, these songs explore deeper the themes of loss, love and longing. Lonna collaborated with JOHN DIETERICH (of DEERHOOF) to solidify the sonic landscape. Not only did he perform mixing and mastering duties, but also sculpted the incidental noise throughout these tracks. This 45 is meditative and at times transcendent. It is still hard to believe that these songs haven’t always been around.
7" $7.25
05/24/2019
***NOW AVAILABLE ON VINYL!!! TASHI DORJI is a celebrated free-form/improvisational guitarist. Born and raised in Bhutan, but transplanted to Ashville, NC in the early 2000s. He is a musical force that is in a caliber of his own. The amount of originality in his playing could have only been summoned when one is forced to confront limitations and raise a big middle finger to the ‘status quo’. He is known to focus his attention heavily on tonal qualities over melody. Mellow harmonics that integrate interference of seemingly random items (such as a paperclip) turn into aggressive spasms and abrupt stops. He utilizes the silence and space between the notes, as if it is an instrument itself. Tashi’s latest album but a night that ends, as all nights end, when the sun rises is pieced together in a non-linear/non-hierarchical form. Every segment equal part fragile and intense. The album feels like it is addressing a dark political climate but from an anti-establishment perspective. It is a transmission from another dimension, to let us know we aren’t doing this “humanity thing” right. However, in its confrontation, it still arouses hope for a brighter future.
LP $16.00
05/14/2019
MC $7.85
10/26/2018
***Maher Shalal Hash Baz and Little Wings’ split LP Share brings together two highly idiosyncratic Japanese and US musicians. “We recently started working with Kyle Field post meeting in Phoenix while he was on tour with Big Thief,” says Moone’s Caleb Dailey. “Simultaneously, we have been working on multiple projects with [Maher Shalal Hash Baz leader] Tori Kudo over the past year. People who are aware of them both know that there isn’t anyone quite like either of them. They have singular musical visions and expression. We’ve been listening to them side by side for years and saw a unique connection between them long ago. With our newly formed friendships, we had the opportunity to help bring together the collaboration.” Japanese musician Kudo and North American folk singer Field are both prolific recording artists in their own respective DIY scenes. As well as heading Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Kudo has performed with Ché-SHIZU alongside erhu player Chie Mukai, and in the 1990s he led the experimental rock group Guys & Dolls, among many other projects. The California based Field formed the band Little Wings in the late 1990s and was also a member of Rodriguez, along with M Ward.
LP $19.25
09/07/2018
***STROBE TALBOT formed in 1999 in Portugal. Its members have never lived anywhere near each other at any point since then, yet they remain friends. Through its 18 years as an ensemble, Strobe Talbot has only become itself to ever-greater degrees. Their latest album, Funland, provides ample evidence to support this assertion. It can and will be said that at least ⅔ of Strobe Talbot are better known for other things. JAD FAIR is renowned for his wide-ranging musical collaborations (Teenage Fanclub, Danielson, R. Stevie Moore, Yo La Tengo, et al.) and his visual art, but he leads and sings for HALF JAPANESE—a group originally formed in 1974 with his brother, David, but vital and productive (with different members) to this day. One of those members, MICK HOBBS Hobbs, has played guitar in Half Japanese since 1990; Mick’s music career began with new-wave aggregate FAMILY FODDER and RIO-affiliated group THE WORK (featuring Funland guest, TIM HODGKINSON, late of HENRY COW), and has involved a bewildering variety of projects. His own group (OFFICER!) is now receiving attention for its marvelous oeuvre, after having existed for 35 years. BENB GALLAHER knows that no matter what he’s done, he’s really done it this time. Strobe Talbot started as it is now—a trio of Jad Fair, Mick Hobbs, and Benb Gallaher. They were younger in the past (this is typical), but their interpersonal and musical chemistry is very much the same as it was when at their outset. Generally, Benb gambols atop and plotzes...
LP $24.95
09/07/2018