I’ve been ready most of this 12 months to come across any recording of Philadelphia’s synth and cello duo, Pocket Moon.
They performed at Comet Ping Pong in D.C. final January, in a tiny room behind the pizza parlor portion of the venue, which they crammed with a spaceship’s price of synth rhythms and the alien voice of a cello run by results pedals. Austin’s synths assemble unusual worlds, by which the listener follows Kelly’s voice, hoping will probably be a reliable information.
The band has recorded “Good Animals” (and two different tracks) in a stay session at Bug Sounds, about which I can discover no data besides that it’s a “recording studio specializing in stay classes that spotlight the philly scene” and is “all the time free for bands.” I’m equally annoyed and thrilled by the ignorance; it appears like Pocket Moon is transferring in the identical world the place I transfer, the true one, the one which has chilly January nights and unusual music. Bug Sounds have given these of us not presently within the Philly scene the present of a glimpse into that world, by our browser home windows.
You may hearken to the session right here.
The music coils across the chorus, “I’ve the makings of a very good animal.” The phrase suggests self-composition: the speaker has all the pieces essential to change into a very good animal. However we might take the phrase in a extra Frankenstein sense. Possibly the speaker has the part elements to place a “new animal” collectively. The synths undertake this science fiction experiment, producing the squeaks, chirps, and gurgles of small unseen creatures, and on the finish of the bridge, issuing a cyborg howl.
Within the spare association, Kelly’s voice stands out as essentially the most human sound in an digital wilderness. The voice appears reliable, and its sentences are easy. It’s simply the concepts which might be unusual and unsettling. The lyrics are filled with acquainted issues: fruit, water, the physique, animals. However the speaker takes these extraordinary issues in sudden instructions, asking questions like “Methods to inform the physique a lie?” What new animal is perhaps constructed by a personality who’s desirous about issues like that?
The disjunction between the unusual issues the voice says and the on a regular basis approach it says them generates pressure within the music. That pressure animates the query of what the brand new animal is perhaps. When essentially the most human voice in a music tells us, “that’s me, a very good animal,” we have now to recalibrate our sense of what the foundations are. Issues aren’t of their ordinary bins on this music.
Pocket Moon’s nice present is unsettling listeners sufficient to sharpen our consideration, to make us actually take note of the worlds their songs create.
These worlds, unusual as they’re, aren’t separate from the one we stay in. The Bug Sounds recording emphasizes the continuity between our world and the world of the music by together with the band’s dialog with their engineer earlier than the music begins. In stay efficiency, the continuity is much more evident. The band creates a pocket universe within the locations the place we hear them, bringing new potentialities into extraordinary rooms.
