Moon Museum
Moon Museum began as a collaboration between Ian Zazueta and Ryan Joseph who knew each other from the small, close-knit San Francisco music scene. They hadn’t collaborated previously, but were brought together by shared influences including Slowdive, Chameleons, and Doves.
The pair reached out to Olivia Barchard with some early demos. Olivia was working on material at the time and was struck by the sonic similarities in style. After writing a few songs exploring female and male vocal counterpoint, they recruited their good friend and accomplished drummer, Aaron Hazen.
2019 proved to be productive, with the band writing songs and exploring their collective sonic capabilities. The band teamed up with Ben Hirschfield of NuTone Recordings and recorded 3 songs, which included a night of debauchery and dancing with a taxidermied bear in a small town.
As 2020 rolled around, the band set to mix and release a few singles, but the arrival of the pandemic changed the landscape and overall course for Moon Museum drastically. Meetings went virtual and providing feedback remotely extended the mixing timeline. With an unwavering belief in the sound, the band charged forward and focused on creative ways to collaborate and keep things moving.
Moon Museum emerged from 2020 with 3 songs mixed and mastered, feeling a little rough but wiser for the experience. They are now ready to share their sound with the world... and you. Members hail from San Francisco and Oakland and come from previous outfits Breakdown Valentine, NRVS LVRS, and Vela Eyes.
Contraptions
Synth-sounds eröffnen das Stück, man kommt an, steigt aus und die Gitarre leitet dich zu den Vocals, Vocals die nach Ewigkeit klingen, perfekt eingebettet zwischen Synthesizerklängen und melodischen Gitarrensound, als ob man sich auf einer Wolke der Harmonie befinden würde.
Die Drums bauen eine Art Spannung auf, welche sich dann im Refrain entlädt und für genug Drive sorgt um das Ganze in Fahrt zu bringen. Ihre dritte Single „Contraptions“ ist melancholisch und zurückhaltender als ihre Vorgänger. Ein esoterisch angehauchtes Liebeslied, im Bann der bittersüßen Sehnsucht, das elektrisierend wirkt. Ein Song bei dem man die Augen schließt, sich treiben lässt, treiben in einem Fluss aus Sehnsucht und Ewigkeit mit Moon Museum als Steuermann. So we have to say Achtung: some will call it good, we say it's perfect.
The Interview
Moon Museum are...?
There are four of us:
Olivia Barchard is on guitar, synthesizers and vocals;
Aaron Hazen is on drums;
Ryan Joseph is on guitar, synth, bass and vocals;
Ian Zazueta is on lead guitar
(Ryan Joseph) Moon Museum is the name of a miniscule artistic piece by 60s artists including Bob Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol & Claes Oldenburg to name a few. According to legend it was attached to the leg of the lunar module of the Apollo XII mission and actually left on the moon. In addition to the name sounding spacey and exotic, I love the concept of this collaboration and the willingness of the artists to take their creation and fling it into space.
Everyone in the band possesses great creative talents so it’s hard for me to speak for us all. The San Francisco music scene is pretty small so we’ve all been friends for some time and involved in other projects. I really enjoy thinking Moon Museum has attained a gestalt status due to the nature of our creative process.
Who inspired you to make music in general?
(Ryan Joseph) In addition to the influences that are more clearly evident, I’d say we owe a great debt to the Britpop scene of the 90s, American psychedelia acts like Brian Jonestown Massacre, Scottish bands from Teenage Fanclub to Doves.
Our music takes a good deal of inspiration outside of music as well-- there’s a lot of poetry and painting and foreign cinema that goes into our sound.
...and especially to the song "Contraptions"?
(Ryan Joseph) I’m going to try to explain this without getting too long winded! There’s a Frank O’Hara poem titled “Why I Am Not a Painter” ( https://poets.org/poem/why-i-am-not-painter ) where the poet narrates going to a painter friend’s studio and watching the evolution of a painting, which is a process of building up and then taking away.
He then describes his own writing: “One day I am thinking of a color: orange. I write a line about orange. Pretty soon it is a whole page of words, not lines. Then another page. There should be so much more, not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is and life. Days go by. It is even in prose… My poem is finished and I haven’t mentioned orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call it ORANGES”
This is the perfect allegory for Contraptions because it started with a simple phrase on a 12 string and then through our natural creative process, other elements were brought in and others taken out so that the finished product has a totally different character than the original concept.
The word contraptions appeared in an early version of the lyrics and then was replaced with other bits of language until only the song title remained.
"Contraptions" has this great melancholic and psychedelic touch, can we expect more songs like that in the future?
(Ryan Joseph) I sure hope so. Many of us were involved in electronic music to some degree so from the onset of Moon Museum I wanted to set us off in a different direction by using acoustic guitars as a foundational sound. We use a jumbo Gretsch 12-string that evokes Echo & the Bunnymen or The Church as soon as you hear it.
How much work is it to get that experimental sound out of it?
(Ryan Joseph) Haha, we have a few perfectionists in the band and I am proudly not one of them! Ian and Olivia both employ a great deal of precision in how they want to represent a sound. Contraptions in particular uses a lot of synth sounds from the 70s and early 80s that kind of swoon in and out of pitch--
Ian absolutely hates them but I think they came across as very warm on the recording. All of our songs feature a lot of guitar that were recorded with many pedal effects and classic amps with healthy doses of reverb.
We owe a lot of credit to Ben Hirschfeld at Nu-Tone studios for capturing these sounds as well as doing an excellent job mixing.
What is your creative process like?
(Ryan Joseph) We’re not a jam band and we really do tend to use the studio as a canvas. We come in with an idea -however basic- record that and then see where it takes us (ie: the Contraptions analogy). During the pandemic we were able to collaborate digitally using shared files. We never had a Zoom concert, sadly.
What is the most useful talent you have?
(Olivia Barchard) Contagious….. laughter.
(Aaron Hazen) I do a pretty solid Yoda impression.
(Ryan Joseph) I have a positive psychic capability and can predict major earthquakes if I am located within 10 miles of the epicenter.
(Ian Zazueta) I’m competent with nunchaku.
If you could change anything in the past, what would it be?
(Ryan Joseph) Without getting too political I think we could all do without the previous presidential administration.
How do you feel the Internet (especially Social Media platforms) has impacted the music business?
(Ryan Joseph) We all gripe about it. It’s hard for any performing artist to have a positive view of streaming platforms, Spotify and Apple Music really are the worst and of course they’re the ones everyone uses. If you love a band you should be buying their albums directly from their Bandcamp page or from the artists directly.
In terms of social media, we are the opposite of Very Online, but we've been releasing singles during a pandemic with no opportunity to perform them in public. So social media and the blogosphere in particular has operated as an important bridge to get us out there. We haven’t left the West Coast but were featured recently on terrestrial radio in New Jersey, so obviously something about it works.
That said, I think we all miss seeing a flyer for a show outside a record shop or bar and finding out about things more organically, instead of being fed information based on algorithms over which we have no control.
What’s next for you?
(Ryan Joseph) That’s the big question! Ian and I recently relocated to Los Angeles, which really is just a few hours from San Francisco. I think we’re still just trying to get settled before figuring that out. We learned a lot from the release of these singles in terms of how “seen” an unknown band can be without performances. I know we all miss the exhilaration of the live dynamic. There’s a lot of material ready to record and if Slowdive is reading and need an opening act… get in touch with us.
