Ethereal, ritualistic and decidedly otherworldly, Moana make music the Old Gods could groove to. The first part of their latest project, the tripartite EP Trilogy Of The Black Monsoon Part One: Golden Orb/Magenta Dust, launches at The Bird this Saturday, April 18, with support from Antelope, Psychedelic Porn Crumpets and Mossy Fogg. We catch up with lead singer, Moana Lutton.
How has 2014 been shaping up for you so far?
It’s been wonderful! All the gigs have been exceptionally fun and well received. During the last six months we’ve added a fourth member (Beau Jones) which is really exciting and has seen us experimenting with our sound, songwriting and live performance. We also got in the studio to start recording our new material and have been engrossed in planning how the rest of this year will unfold with our next release.
You must be happy with the reaction to A Mouthful Of Birds…
Yeah, it’s a nice feeling to see people enjoying what we’ve created and to be recognized for the hard work we put into our art. For a home-made, shoe-string budgeted recording it’s done us pretty well! Now we’re just itching to get into the new stuff.
Tell us about The Black Monsoon – is it one EP or three? What lead you down this path?
It’s one EP, released in three parts – hence The Trilogy. It’s also a cross-collaborative project, so it’s pretty different.
When analysing the band’s latest collection of songs I noticed there were many diverse sounds and musical explorations that could be split into two separate “feelings” or “vibes.” One half is a musically heavier, chaotic, darker side and the other a contrastingly fragile, celebratory, dreamy side. The concept of a ‘black monsoon’ intermixes with these paradoxes as a mystical sticky tropical storm that sees all the elements collide and dance in their most fierce form, followed by the aftermath of stillness and fragility where rebirth and earthly cycles begin, again. Things just evolved from there. Each part sees the release of two songs – deliberately contrasting in mood and meaning, accompanied with a music video, an original artwork based on the two songs and a one-off theatrical live performance at each launch. This will all culminate into a six-track EP with a creative video series and a larger interconnected visual artwork.
The Black Monsoon gigs incorporate a lot of different art forms and media, not just music. What draws you to blur the lines like that? How do you decide who to invite to the party?
I have a pretty active imagination and creating music is always a fully immersive experience. When I write lyrics there’s poetry and stories and whole other worlds in there, and I see visual images and physical movements and hear the voices of characters and performance that could go with it. So it’s a natural thing for me to want to mesh all the elements together, and this particular collection of songs lend themselves so well to that as they exist in such symbolic, otherworldly and fantasy realms.
What’s on the horizon?
There’s plenty of madness happening right now in all our worlds. But this year is pretty much full with working on that release and pushing ourselves with it. Plenty of gigs and hopefully another tour. We’ll probably be somewhere on the other side of the world after this release living out our pirate dreams. But for now we’re caught up in the black monsoon…
