Moon Duo
Mazes

The Velvet Underground paved the way, tilled the initial groove, fertilized their own plot; over the years, many have tried with varying fortunes to cultivate their own field in the same way, favoring some seeds over others, yet remaining semper fidelis to a basic conception of rhythm. 4/4 and pedal, for 4 or 40 minutes, it doesn't matter. It's the zero degree of rhythm that counts, that obfuscating fixation of the senses which, even if narrow in its vision, has incredibly opened mental autobahns for wildly diverse groups over 40 years and more.

The Spacemen 3, to cite one of those cultivators less faithful to the Velvet dogmas, but tilling the same field, were among them. Today the Wooden Shjips distill the hypnotic delirium for new generations of psych-heads, finding a way to make even more basic both Velvet fathers and Spacemen 3 sons. Impossible, you might say. Yet the Moon Duo of the aforementioned Wooden Shjips guitarist, Ripley Johnson, assisted by the Japanese Sanae Yamada, manage the improbable feat.

“Mazes” is the second album, following the more kraut-dark “Escape”, and it's anything but labyrinthine in the unfolding of its 8 tracks. Faithful to what was written above, the two create hypnotic mental landscapes based on elliptical and self-same rhythms and phrasing (“Scars”), with Lou Reed and Sonic Boom on the bedside table in most tracks (“Seer”, “Fallout”, and the final “Goners”), but relishing the challenge of moving the game to less easy territories, managing to give a "semi-pop" cut to the whole. “Run Around” is all grater guitar and drum machine, but is practically a dance-like piece (beware, a remix album of Mazes has already been released accordingly), “When You Cut” revolves around a Bontempi organ trapped on a-one refrain-one, adding a very lazy singing and hand claps along with an acid guitar. A usual final mention for the title track, always Reed on guitar, a robot on the Farfisa, Klaus Dinger on drums and Alan Mc Gee on the mixer.

If seasonality permits, and they follow this small variant of the groove to till, the next release could be their personal “Parable of the Arable Land.”