Maryland based psychedelic rock duo King Of The Moon create moving, sonic landscapes that are truly beautiful and down right otherworldly.
Their debut album “The Demolished Man” features twelve songs of some of most mind bending sounds you’ll ever hear and the musicianship, production and songwriting is nothing short of stellar.
I caught up with band members Sam Cooper & Michael Stettes to talk about their early musical experiences, how they got together and the making of the new album which you can check out here.
CMM-What was the first music that really made an impact on you as kids and what artists or bands did you all enjoy the most?
(Sam) My parents were hippies and huge music fans, so I grew up listening to a lot of 60s stuff. But it was hearing the Beatles that really turned me into a voracious fan of recorded music and, eventually, a musician myself. I was weaned on their poppier early stuff, but the song that sticks out most in my memory is “Strawberry Fields Forever”… I remember being 7 years old and listening to it obsessively. I had never heard something with so much imaginal space in the production, so much artistic freedom and such ineffable emotion. I think the rest of my musical leanings were totally guided by those qualities. Ever since “Strawberry Fields” I’ve always been into the spacey, ambitious, ambiguous, and spooky. But another big vein in my early musical taste was film soundtracks and musical theater. The drama! The melody! The cinematicness of it all!
(Michael) I grew up listening to a local oldies station every morning. “Oldies” at the time was music of the 50s and 60s–Motown, British Invasion, Haight-Ashbury stuff, etc. I loved that stuff, and then I got really into 80’s hair metal in high school, which was a point in time when no one gave a shit about that music anymore. All those ballads that are so easy to roll our eyes at felt absurdly deep to me at the time. All of the rockers hit really hard for me. In hindsight, I think it was the boldness, the pomp, the interesting combination of bombastic masculinity and feminine design, and the pure talent that sold me on the genre. They were loud when I wasn’t. They were ridiculous and didn’t care. Of them, my favorite was Steelheart.
CMM-How did the band start writing songs and developing your own sound?
(Sam) During COVID, all our live performance activities and rehearsals in former rock bands came to an abrupt end. Around that time, I had moved into a 19th-century farmhouse and set up a small studio in it that shared walls with my neighbor’s side of the house. I’m a nocturnal creator, and so found myself up late at night doing tape recording experiments, alone with drum machines and loopers, trying hard not to wake the neighbors. The goal was to make these super quiet sounds—fingerpicked guitar, whispered vocals—seem as huge as a full band. I was also trying as much as possible to get out of my own way in the process: entering into work in exotic consciousness states, improvising song structure and writing lyrics in real-time while recording. At a certain point, I realized that the way to truly transcend the creative limitations of the self was to invite someone into the project as an equal collaborator, and so I sent some demos to Michael with the explicit invitation to add anything he heard in the spaces between and around and inside what I was doing. His choices and additions were exquisite in the fact that they brought out qualities and potentials hidden in the songs, and in turn influenced additional ideas and additions of my own. In the place between our taste and idea sets is where the sound of King of the Moon was born.
CMM-You all recently released an album called “The Demolished Man”. What was the writing and recording process like and were there any particular pieces of gear you used to get the sound you were looking for?
(Michael) Sam hits these periods where he’s just writing all the time. On this record, I’d usually come in about halfway through the writing process to start providing counterpoints, moments, elevations, etc. We approach songs differently, but sometimes we find that we are both exactly on the same page, regardless. A good example would be on “Nail Down the Waves.” Sam had a section with large gaps between the lead vocals, so I started providing synth melodies in between them. By coincidence, they were very close in melody to background vocals that Sam hadn’t even told me about yet, and both are included in the song. Sometimes, I bring in something unexpected that Sam says completely changes his mindset around a song. An example there would be the synth lines that come in the final chorus in “Neptunian.”
(Sam)The heart of the sound of the record comes from two main sources: a downtuned 1934 Gibson L-00 guitar, and a haunted Tascam 388 tape machine from the 80s. The lion’s share of the record was composed and tracked on that machine. The spirit that resides inside seems to create a certain amount of entropy in the circuit architecture that leads to happy accidents and nonstandard frequency printing. Although we recently took the Tascam to Long Island to get serviced, we’re happy to report that the haunting seems to have not been entirely eradicated by the maintenance. And throughout making the record, although there were some final overdubs, edits, and mixing done in Logic, we really tried to commit to an analog workflow as much as possible. Vocals, guitars, and drum machines were run through an old Moogerfooger analog delay and a couple of cheap vintage analog rack preamps and compressors. Drum sounds and patterns came from a TR-909 and a little toy Korg drum pad. Most mono synth bass were from a Moog Sub Phatty, and poly sounds came from the Prophet Rev 2 and Korg Minilogue. There are other tricks and arcane relics that played a part in the sound of the record, but some secrets must be kept from the uninitiate for their own safety and sanity.
CMM-If King Of The Moon could do a score for any film director, who would it be and what would the film be about?
(Michael) Super excited to answer this question. If you’re at all familiar with the works of Quallet Clamsong, you know their films are best known for being thematically, aesthetically, and emotionally dynamic–a quiet moment (like the infamous seed sorting scene in I Fell for Eiffel) being punctuated with loud, dissonant horns, for example. Clamsong routinely worked with esteemed composer Defton Leen in every film until Leen’s passing in 2007. They were an exceptional duo. Since that time, Clamsong has only made one film, 2015’s Thin Librarian, without Leen and frankly, composer Viwala Sedgewith’s instinct, while normally on point, just clashed with Clamsong’s vision too much. That’s not just my opinion; Clamsong was very vocal about their displeasure with the score in the final film and hasn’t done a film in the decade since. I would absolutely love to get Clamsong back in the mix and score something for them, ideally their shelved project, Bet on a Balloon, Lose a Fortune to the Wind, since it’d be their first foray into animation. Leaks revealed the film is about the owners of three pet shops competing in a zeppelin race, but I don’t know any more than that.
(Sam) Werner Herzog, hands down. Preferably a documentary. It could be superficially about anything really, since all Herzog films are ultimately about the same things: unfathomable questions, human indefatigably, madness.
CMM-Anything coming up?
(Sam) There are some secret things in the works, the bonds of silence around which should not be tampered with by mere mortals. But expect collabs, audio-visual performance, and video drops soon. What we can say is that we’re excited to be releasing footage of this mysterious new age tape recording we found at a thrift store that directly inspired The Demolished Man and basically formed King of the Moon. We can only hope it changes others who hear it as much as it changed us.
