Space travel, we all love it, it’s inviting, it’s magical, it’s repetitive and it’s fun, just like Duncan Moore’s sonic addition to the genre, “Magnetic Earth”. The journey traverses from the loud and exciting to more sparse and quiet, while consistently utilizing tightly wound synthetic ascending and descending pitched tones. Moore and his psykotic Baltimore band, Needle Gun, produced a visual (and sonic) space epic of their own, “The Kip Dupree Story”, which Moore expands on, with these laser and space ship-esque sounds. Blurry nuggets of noise and reverb laden shots appear to the left and right of the listener as the Navigator (track two) drives out of the A-side and onto the Magnetic Earth (track three). There are no lyrics on the tape and the sonic similarities to the sci-fi sound design canon are loose, the spacialization of the sounds only vaguely referencing the world of film. The audience is free to imagine whatever is intriguing at the given moment; the voyage has gone bad, the listener is an alien of sabotage, the ship has waged war on a peaceful alien planet and the listener is left behind the commands, or headphones, wondering how it got to this, or it is all just a linear-leaning electronic music composition. Spoiling an ending is never the intention, however, it can be said that there is a twist which invites inquiry into whatever happened to the last crew, and how their ship managed to keep record of their log, listen to find out!
credits
released April 20, 2018
All material was composed and recorded by Duncan Moore between April 2017 and February 2018 in Baltimore, MD.
Magnetic Tape and Computer Processing were used to achieve novel sonic effects.
Other tools used in the recordings include a tamping bar and singing magnets.
Special thanks to Max Eilbacher and Tom Elder
“With Julius, he was based in repetition, but here was a spirit of openness and improvisation. His scores, if they were written out that way, were often like jazz scores. He loved multiplying instruments – four pianos, ten cellos – so there was a real feeling of the presence of the instrument, not just using an instrument in some kind of equation, as a means to an end.” ~ Mary Jane Leach
Enough said. pt