Moenda More Than a Feeling by Bryan Reed “To quash any assumptions, there’s very little improvisation in what we do,” says Robin Doermann, one-fourth of Charlotte noisemakers Moenda. “Everything we do is very, very rigorously practiced.” But you can be excused for assuming that Moenda’s work was the product of extemporaneous and intuitive collaboration. Their songs might be meticulously revised and practiced before they’re revealed to an audience, but the process by which they’re created is definitely not about following a formula. “It’s very much looking for the feeling of what everyone else is saying,” says Steven Pilker, who along with Doermann provides the electronic sounds that create Moenda’s unique timbres.
At first, they’d intended to find a way to breed dub with noise. But after assembling a score for Lawrence Jordan’s surrealist film Sophie’s Place, they decided, as Doermann puts it, “the dub-noise thing didn’t really work, but the noise thing worked.” So the four set out to explore as many sounds as possible. Pilker brought a background of sequenced electronic music; Davey Blackburn had been developing a more soulful, tropical style of drumming; and guitarist Ross Wilbanks was experimenting with new styles of playing — including stringing his instrument partially with picture-hanging wire. “Davey’s always looking for a new rhythm, and we’re looking for new sounds,” says Wilbanks. “When we all like a sound that someone’s doing, it doesn’t sound like noise to us.” Indeed, across a tape and a split 7-inch with
Photo by Jeremy Fisher free-form combo Great Architect, Moenda has made noise sound more like music. Their pieces embrace harsh tones, and defy structure, but they counter their out-minded tendencies with a mastery of fluctuating momentum. The pieces progress logically, if not uniformly. “We really don’t recycle many ideas,” says Pilker. “It’s very inconvenient in that it doesn’t have a formula. But at the same time, it’s very rewarding because it doesn’t have a formula.” That unpredictability is what fools so many people into thinking Moenda’s an improv act. The songs are born of the intuition and instrumental communication that improvisation requires. “You have to be pretty flexible when we’re writing things,” says Pilker. Blackburn laughs, “I do a lot of stretching.” shuf8
Andrew Weathers Mood Music
Photo by Hannah Jones
by Corbie Hill Andrew Weathers is an optimist. And he makes pleasing, ethereal music for his kind. Sitting in Carrboro’s Open Eye Café, laughing among a small cloud of friends, he says he feels odd putting his own name on a T-shirt — this was easier when he performed as Pacific Before Tiger. His first thought: put his initials in the Van Halen logo. More laughter. “I think a lot of people misunderstand,” the Greensboro-based Weathers explains, “that things are funny and fun even though you’re making music that’s pretty grave or serious.” Weathers’ musical experiments trade in warm drones and slow, gentle builds. But he views his
work as accessible and non-threatening. “I didn’t want to be too monolithic, I guess, or too serious about it,” he says. “It is serious, but not exclusive or off-putting, like sometimes I think Eluvium or Sigur Rós is. [They’re] so epic. All the emotions in that music are so intense that it wipes out everything. Whereas I think what I made is more ambiguous.” His latest record, A Great Southern City, was recorded in the doldrums of late summer, 2009. Weathers had just returned from Italy, and the bright sun and Southern heat infused the process. “It’s a hot, lethargic kind of album,” he says, “as opposed to a lot of things that are done that are kind of cold and wintry.”
Carefully placed acoustic timbres and nonverbal shouts punctuate music that tended, in earlier treatments, towards obtuse soundscapes. For years Weathers’ live show found him alone with a red Gibson SG plugged into a laptop, where mysterious processes transformed the guitar’s sound into vague oceanic washes and slow swells. Now he’s grown up a bit, and with the help of his touring ensemble (a rotating cast of cellos, woodwinds, guitars, etc.) Weathers hopes to focus on the smaller emotions. “I don’t go into a lot of my music trying to make ‘this is a song about being sad,’” he says. “It’s kind of like, ‘this is the mood,’ you know?” shuf8 shufflemag.com 5