Moon Duo

Formed in San Francisco in 2009 by Wooden Shijps guitarist Ripley Johnsonand Sanae Yamada, Moon Duos first two critically acclaimed EPs, KillingTime (2009) and Escape (2010), fused the futuristic pylon hum and transistorreverb of Suicide or Silver Apples with the heat-haze fuzz of American rock nroll to create tracks of blistering, 12-cylinder space rock.

Their debut album Mazes, recorded in San Francisco and mixed in Berlinduring 2010 as the band prepared to move to the mountains of Colorado,explores a far broader, lighter, sound. Thats most clear on the dreamy organand skipping riff of the title track, which recalls the Velvet Underground, or thehandclaps and swinging organ bloops over the potent shredding and gutturalriff delivered by Johnson in When You Cut. Throughout, Mazes is the soundof Moon Duo carving out their own identity, looking to the horizon, andmoving forward.

Late 2011 saw the release of the darker, mostly instrumental Horror Tour EParound the bands fall tour of Eastern Europe; Record Store Day 2012brought a limited edition LP Mazes Remixed which featured remixes by thelikes of Sonic Boom, Psychic Ills, and Purling Hiss. Now Moon Duo are set torelease Circles, their second full-length LP with Souterrain Transmissions.The band will also set off on a worldwide tour in support of the album inOctober and November.

Circles is the product of a long winters isolation in the Rocky Mountains,though the road to its fruition stretched over six months and severallocations. The groundwork for the album was laid at the bands home in BlueRiver, Colorado in the early months of 2012, where all songs were written,and the preliminary tracks recorded. For two weeks in early April, Moon Duomoved into a small apartment above Lucky Cat Recordings in San Franciscofor an additional recording session with engineer Phil Manley (Trans Am, LifeCoach). Like its predecessor, the album was mixed and tweaked at KaikuStudios in Berlin.

Inspiration for many of the songs themes, as well as the title Circles, camefrom Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1841 essay by the same name, on the symboland nature of "the flying Perfect." From the opening lines: "The eye is the firstcircle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature thisprimary figure is repeated without end." And so it goes. Rust never sleep.