#ripley johnson

[dustedmagazine]

Rose City Band — Sol Y Sombra (Thrill Jockey)

Rose City Band albums typically arrive at the onset of summer, the first humid, budding, insect humming weeks of May for instance, where their indolent strumming and wistful melodies overlay the early days of summer with a sonic haze. This one comes in the dead of winter, still sunny, still breezy but with a frisson of chilliness somewhere in the mix.

The band, as always, is led by Ripley Johnson, the main proprietor of trance-drone primitive Wooden Shjips and airy psychedelic Moon Duo. He lays down the 1970s country rock foundation with a steady guitar pulse and drifting cirrus clouds of vocals. The cosmic part comes, in large measure, from pedal steel-ist Barry Walker, whose eerie, note-bending slides arc out over simple melodies, giving them a spiritual edge. John Jeffrey keeps the band grounded with rock steady, but unshowy rhythms, while Paul Hasenberg plays keyboards and Sanae Yamada (also of Moon Duo) sings soft, inviting vocal counterparts.

The band hits an effortless stride early on in “Radio Song,” with its luminous tangles of guitar sound, its billowy unhurried tunefulness, its ease. You could drive for days with a song like this on repeat, windows down and the miles blowing by, in no particular hurry for the destination. So far, prime Rose City Band, a good thing in itself.

Still there’s a ruminative melancholy in the slow, acoustic “Sunlight Days,” a song that aches and yearns and remembers what’s gone by. Walker’s pedal steel solo here is especially effective, winding and uncurling like cream poured into coffee as it swirls into the mix. The instrumental “La Mesa” is more urbane and less down home, grooving in a chilly, subdued funk manner, twinkling electronics scattered over, as in the last Moon Duo album.  

Rose City Band brings a little bit of summer into the year’s shortest days, but you feel it indirectly, through memory and reminiscence and nostalgia for other summers long gone.   Sure, you could put the whole record on and drift off in a hammock, even now, with ice on the ground and a sharp wind blowing, but there’s a shadow falling on this sun.  You might want a blanket.

Jennifer Kelly

[flankingmanoeuvres]

Listen to: Sunlight Daze by Rose City Band

[guessimdumb]

Rose City Band - Chasing Rainbows (2023)

Wonderful country psych. Rose City Band are basically guitarist Ripley Johnson (Wooden Shjips/Moon Duo) with various others, including Barry Walker Jr.  on some great steel pedal guitar. 

[falsestuff]

Rose City Band - Rivers of Mind (2019)

[rainingmusic]

Wooden Shjips -  These Shadows 

[killianbroderick]

Moon Duo // Button Factory, Dublin. January 2018

[peachmelbaesunpostre]

Outtakes de la entrevista que le hice a Sanae Yamada, de Moon Duo. No se los pierdan en Nrmal.

"I think that attraction to repetition in music is really primal. You know, when I was a kid my mom used to play a lot of early Rock and Roll, and we would dance around in the kitchen, and I would not consider it psychedelic necessarily, but it has that repetitive groove that grabs you physically and makes you wanna move, and you find that in a lot of German music like Neu, and Kraftwerk and Can. You find it in a lot of dance music, and I think that repetition produce a physical response in people and that is what makes it so magnetic.

"In playing repetitive music, I can almost feel like it is some kind of mantra. Sometimes when we are playing, if John, the drummer, and I are really on with the rhythm I almost feel like I lose my body, like my head is losing, that I can’t tell that I’m making a move anymore, it is just about executing the rhythm."

[dustedmagazine]

Moon Duo — Stars Are the Light (Sacred Bones)

Moon Duo lets in the light on this airy seventh full-length. Where previous albums sat on a blistered, fuzz-crusted foundation of feedback-y drone, this one dances upward like dust motes caught in afternoon sun. Keyboard sounds flutter playfully around whooshing auras of melodic tone. Warmth and clarity surrounds guitar tones, while programmed drums keep time and vocals susserate in the background. The tunes feel as light as helium balloons, as bouncy as beach balls, their repetitions sportive rather than dogged; they are as hypnotic as Wooden Shjips songs but in an entirely different way. 

Moon Duo always felt like a sideshow to Ripley Johnson’s main gig with Wooden Shjips, tuning into that outfits heavy psych vibe with a slightly different cast of characters (just Johnson and Sanae Yamada) and other instruments. This time, though, the duo makes the break, finding a wholly distinctive electronic vibe that echoes Tangerine Dream, Stereolab and Peaking Lights. Cuts like “Fall (In Your Love)” skitter like brightly colored tops across a dream-world landscape; a rave-y atmosphere of empathy and unfocused excitement permeates soft, luminous interiors.

These tracks envelop you softly, rather than forcing your attention. They surround you with silky brushes of melody. The title track, for instance, has a billow-y expansiveness, a swelling in its murmur-y tune, as popcorn synths shoot off in sparkling arcs. It makes a sort of space for itself. You don’t listen to the tune. You live in it. Later “Eternal Shore,” wraps a silvery, soulful keyboard lines in a shuffling architecture of sand-papery percussion; it’s a space age bossa nova for a digitally rendered fantastic planet, world music for another world. “Fever Night,” has the slow, back-stepping rhythm of a Beta Band cut, polished to a dreamy, technological gloss.

Johnson and Sanae say they were thinking about disco when they made this music, and you can certainly intuit the sheen of polyester sensuality in these surreal, brightly colored landscapes. It’s not what you’re expecting from Moon Duo, but it’s nonetheless quite appealing, this magic, glowing sound space that isn’t quite real, but better.

Jennifer Kelly