Psychedelic Explorers Moon Duo on Performance as Ritual

Taking inspiration from the occult, natural weather cycles and much more, Moon Duo, the collaborative project of guitarist Ripley Johnson and keyboardist Sanae Yamada, aren’t satisfied adhering to one single conceptual or musical thread. Initially formed in San Francisco as a side project (Johnson still performs as part of Wooden Shjips), the pair have since established a distinct sound and style across six LPs for New York’s Sacred Bones label. On the heels of their latest album, Occult Architecture Vol. 2, Johnson and Yamada spoke to Henning Lahmann about the process of carving out a singular identity, the psychedelic rock community and the powerful possibilities of performance as ritual.

What was the impetus behind starting the duo?

Ripley Johnson

The inspiration came from wanting to tour lightly and to have a band that was nimble and compact, for an artistic challenge but also from a practical standpoint. We started around the time of the big financial crash – that was an influence in some ways – and I was in another band that couldn’t tour very much because everyone had to work to pay the bills. We lived in San Francisco and it’s a hard balancing act when you’re starting out. It’s hard to get a full band on the road with four or five people.

The idea was if we do a duo, a) it can be a really interesting creative challenge, and b) we can travel in a car, you only need one hotel room, you only need two flights, then you can say yes to more things. That was the other sort of founding principle, that we would say yes to everything as the initial thing. We wanted to be able to do as much as possible and not have any sort of practical things standing in our way, or as few as we could control.

Was there something that you could achieve with Moon Duo creatively that you couldn’t with the other project?

Ripley Johnson

I think anytime you play with different people it’s different inherently. Maybe some people don’t hear the difference, but for us I found that when it’s a duo it’s a conversation between two people and when it’s a group of three or more it’s this consensus among a committee.

Sanae Yamada

I think that our music started out more similar to Wooden Shjips because we hadn’t yet formed an identity as a band ourselves. Ripley is still in Wooden Shjips and I think that perspective was a very heavy influence on our sound when we started, but as we’ve gone on through the years we’ve developed our own sense of what we want to say as this particular band, this particular combination of people. Over time the two bands have come to sound more distinct from each other.

I’m interested in this aspect of conversation you mentioned – maybe it’s inherently more intimate if you’re just a duo than if you’re in a group. How does this affect you both in terms of songwriting and onstage?

Ripley Johnson

Well the music-making process is a better way to think about it, because songwriting can sometimes be very isolated. For me it’s always like there’s something in your head or some feeling you’re trying to get out that you can’t necessarily bring to words. When we started I would write something and hand it to Sanae and she would play with it and add her thing and then pass it back to me, and we would do this just passing back and forth. We almost could have lived in different cities in a sense, but now it’s much more collaborative. We just sort of evolved that way, to be more like a normal band, but initially it was definitely like, “Here’s this thing, see what you feel about it and add whatever comes to your head.”

I’ve read that now you have a touring drummer. Is that for performances only?

Ripley Johnson

We do a mixture of things for the drum recording. Three, four years ago we decided we wanted to try a drummer for the live situation because machines just aren’t as exciting live. In one respect it’s really amazing to play with a machine, because whatever you do it’s always in time. You can’t throw it off and it doesn’t react to what you’re doing, so you can play off it in this really interesting way. But we wanted to try a drummer so that we could actually play off the audience. His name is John Jeffrey, and with the last couple of albums he’s been working more on the records, and for this last album it was probably his biggest contribution to date. We definitely demo everything beforehand with drum machines and sometimes have specific beats that we want, but he is more and more contributing his own personality and ideas to the recordings.

Sanae Yamada

Having John involved has really expanded our palette in terms of recording, because we can do these hybrid things where we’ll either loop him playing live drums or he’ll play along on an electronic drum sampler kit, so we have these options now to mix analog drums with electronic drums and have the human element of his playing involved in both sides.

Ripley Johnson

When we started we were almost trying to make the programmed drums sound like analog drums. A lot of it was sampled from a drum kit and then playing it with your fingers on the sampler to get a really human feel. Like Sanae was saying, we kind of use him like a drum machine. We’ll sample him, we’ll loop him, we’ll have him overdub things, but yeah, we mix in a lot of electronic sounds with the acoustic sounds.

What’s the intrigue of the repetitive patterns that are kind of a fundament of your music?

Sanae Yamada

For me, repetition is a really primal thing. It’s something I respond to physically and it’s something that affects people psychologically. We play with the concept of repetition in music, but repetition is really in everything. It’s in the structure of matter, it’s in the seasons, it’s in all of these patterns and cycles and rhythms that make up life and reality. I think that’s why it has this sort of primal impact when you use it in a sonic way.

There was this brief moment when that whole psychedelic rock, psychedelic pop thing kind of blew up a little. Was there a sense of community back then, a scene where you could feel that you could engage with other artists?

Sanae Yamada

I think there’s a sense of community that comes from years spent on the road and running into people over and over in various parts of the world. It’s funny how you can have spent very little time with someone, but because you’re both sort of moving in the same realm you have this instant rapport, and when you run into them again that rapport is still there. It feels like not a geographic community but a loose community in spirit.

Ripley Johnson

A lot of people in these bands never thought they would be going anywhere, and a lot of people in these bands have been in multiple bands that didn’t do anything or never released a record. So when you find yourself in England at ATP Festival and you’re hanging out with people that you know from San Francisco it’s really kind of amazing. There’s a sense of, “Wow, I can’t believe we get to do this,” and that’s cool for sure.

When I listen to your music and other psychedelic rock from past years I would describe its sound as Californian, or generally say it’s West Coast. Would you agree? Is this sound connected to that region?

Ripley Johnson

I feel that, yeah. It’s sort of like generalizing German music in the ’70s, so-called Krautrock. You know, two bands can sound completely different but at the same time they’re both krautrock. You can hear it somehow, which is pretty fascinating. There’s definitely something in the west and maybe even down in the southwest, in Texas, where you have these wide open spaces. You can live in a city, but once you hit the road everything opens up and there are just these massive landscapes, this natural beauty and this penchant for travel. It pulls at you even if you’re not in a band. A lot of my friends in San Francisco, we would go up to the Sequoia [National Park] or up to Yosemite or up the coast and these amazing places to camp and hike and have adventures. A lot of that involves the myth and the reality of the open road, where you’re driving down the highway, tunes cranked, windows down. That’s a big part of the California music scene.

Sanae Yamada

To me the allure of the road goes back to the establishment of the west as a part of US society which was really difficult and bloody, but it was still this really powerful attraction where people who felt it couldn’t resist it. I think the west is still a bit that way. It’s still full of transplants from other places and people who didn’t fit in other strains of American society. I think that flavors the culture there in many ways.

For many people psychedelic music has a relation to spirituality and new age beliefs, maybe even practices of the occult. Is that something that speaks to you personally, too?

Sanae Yamada

Definitely. I think of the occult as being about the exploration of hidden knowledge or the search for hidden things, the contemplation of possibilities that exist beyond the human senses. I think that music is a big part of that because music is like that: Music is mysterious, nobody knows where it comes from. It just comes. It’s powerful and moving and to give it body in the world is a really amazing experience. Having that experience makes the idea of other unseen forces really fascinating.

Ripley Johnson

I think part of the appeal of new age music, cosmic music, psychedelic music, is that it’s not street music. It’s not like hip-hop or jazz or even blues, which are based in some concrete reality and are powerful in that way. These other musics are about mystery and things that are unsolved or unexplained, but things that people want to understand. People use religion or philosophy or drugs to try to understand or explore these things, and so there’s a depth to it that you can’t put your finger on sometimes. There’s all kinds of imagery and interesting ideas that people explore in those genres that we’re definitely really into, including in literature and film and art. All of the psychedelic and cosmic, fantastical stuff we get inspiration from.

I wanted to ask about the influence of literature, because I read that, especially for Occult Architecture Vol. 2, and Occult Architecture Vol. 1, there were particular texts that played a part in inspiring that work.

Ripley Johnson

I was reading a couple of books on the occult at the time, so that just sort of naturally fed into my mindset. We’re not conceptual musicians. Sometimes there’s a loose concept, but oftentimes the concept comes to us as we’re making the record and we realize, “Oh, this is what we’re doing.” You start to understand the structure as you build it. In this case there was this concept of darkness and light that we were exploring from a natural standpoint. Most of the inspiration was coming from nature, from living in the Pacific Northwest where it’s very dark and cold and wet in winter, and then the summers are amazing and beautiful and there are these really strong cycles that you can’t avoid. It affects your life so strongly. So we pretty early on decided we were going to do two records, one dark, one light, and that was really fun because then you’re like, “Let’s use some tones and some timbres and textures that we haven’t explored before.”

Playing live opens this conversation up with the audience. Especially with your songs that tend to be longer and have this repetition element, do you sometimes feel like you induce a trance-like state in your audience?

Sanae Yamada

People have talked about trance-like elements in our shows, which is great. It’s always different for everybody in the room, but on a really good night I feel a bit tranced-out myself. Sometimes I’ll look at my hand and it’s moving, but I feel like I’m not even doing the moving. I think we play for each other in that way, to try and create the space where we can get into that state of mind.

Ripley Johnson

Yeah, I almost fell down the other night playing. Sometimes I just get so out of it I don’t even know which way is up, which is great. This is going to sound kind of obnoxious, but in a way the performance is like a ritual. It’s kind of like casting a spell in the sense that we try to transform the space. We try to do it visually as well, so that people feel like they’re transported by the music, but also they’re not distracted by, like, a beer sign.