A century of iamthemoon substack posts! A momentous time to outline some plans.
The video is me playing “Hekate”, by Traveller.
Traveller
Yeah. I’ve been in a band for the past few months - “Traveller”. We’re a two-piece, at least for now - she is raVen and I am, well, the mOOn. It’s mostly a spoken-word metal project. It’s experimental. It’s really fun.
We’re working on a 13-song album and have 11 of them almost in the bag. raVen brings the words, and we collaborate over the music (it’s mostly guitar and drum with no bass, with some exceptions, but there’s a few other instruments when needed.) I do the production.
We even made a music video of Hekate - go watch! (and please subscribe to our youtube channel - we have much more like this to come!) That video was fun because it cost zero dollars (we shot the footage in 2 hours, and I basically did the effects using some python and bash scripts that I wrote.) We even won some schtuff for it, courtesy of Santa Cruz LNCC. See below (we was robbed haha).
The album version of the song will be a little different … more like the video above. It’s easier to perform live, basically, than the video version. The guitars are a bit more structured, and the drums more simple and spacey.
Yes! Live. Did I mention? As well as the album, we’re slowly getting things together for live performances. We’re lucky we have a few opportunities around here for open mic in cool spaces — the Blue Lagoon, the Ugly Mug, Lille Aeske, to name but three. Watch this space …
This is basically why I didn’t post for a few months. I was working on Traveller songs. When you are the moon, you slip in and out of visibility.
iamthemoon
At some point in the past couple of months I decided that heavier music was a good direction to go in for iamthemoon, too. Hence my first two EPs back in June, ‘ahmOOnite’ and ‘Drink Mercury’, which are mostly spoken word efforts with heavier music. And that’s also why I hit pause on my album as previously planned - I have posted many demos on this substack (see below), but the collection of songs didn’t all quite fit into a unified theme.
Recently, after making many more songs, I decided I will organize them into two albums with separate themes. Those albums now have working titles (ooooh!)
‘Chmess’
and
‘Butchers or Meat?’
The former is named after an essay by the late Daniel Dennett that has heavily influenced my thinking in the past year or so (I’ll just put it there for now. Also, thanks Evan for the recommendation and discussions.) The album will consist of mostly sung songs about my experiences in recent years. The second is more a political/social commentary album that is part spoken-word, part sung. These songs have been penned more recently. Hopefully it’s obvious from my lyrics why it is so-named.
So, current thinking …
Chmess (maybe not in this order): 1) Human animal, 2) 4 player superbomberman, 3) Wraps at the poles, 4) Electricity, 5) Exactamundality (need to finalize the words and music), 6) Those first rays are brave, 7) Sex for immunity, 8) Push me out to sea, 9) Mycelium me, and 10) Sea frolic. Many of these I want to re-record so they are more consistent with each other, and simpler and shorter in some cases.
Butchers or Meat? (maybe not in this order): 1) Radiate, 2) Spectacle, 3) Comedians as Leaders, 4) Umvelt, 5) Grift (working on finalizing this demo), 6) Simulation B, 7) The Map has Become the Empire, 8) Mars madness, 9) Fighting Time (working on the music now, no lyrics yet), and 10) Beauty.
I continue to sketch all this out and work towards these two albums simultaneously - well, actually right now I’m just working on Butchers, but I’ll get back to Chmess soon. Hopefully it will all come together soon enough. I find it easier to work on all the songs as demos first, then go back and re-record. That’s because my playing and production skillz get better over time, but also because I like to let things simmer. So, plans may still yet change (of course). When you are the moon, you wax and wane.
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