***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