‘Eva Luna’ and Moonshake’s Continental Drift — or, Pangea’s Death
“You wanna know why your culture stagnated? // Because you locked your garden gates // It’s the genre guards that separate”
So wails Dave Callahan on the first track of ‘Eva Luna’, the debut record from his band Moonshake. ‘Wanderlust’ is perhaps the most emblematic of Moonshake as a whole: not only are its grooves reminiscent of German krautrock and Caribbean reggae, it has the gumption to completely lose itself to guitar noise after two verses (one after another) and directly call out the stupidity of categorization terminology that the media loves to throw around, much to the artists’ chagrin. It’s no surprise that they found themselves in the company of many other bands with similar goals and aspirations, what with Stereolab and Long Fin Killie being among their labelmates in Too Pure.
It’s also no coincidence that they, among many others in the British rock underground, were sequestered under the catch-all term of “post-rock” when the media got a hold of Simon Reynolds’ coinage. Their sound contained it all: The characteristic blurring of song structures, meditations on singular bits of song, sampler usage, and no doubt a hefty reliance on the influences of many a region like Jamaica or the cities of America where hip hop production was being revolutionized. It was the early 1990s, and where American alternative acts sought fit to be pop-oriented and narrow in on songwriting prowess, quite a few British acts sought abstraction. With acts like Robert Fripp, Brian Eno, and The Fall setting a precedent for this deconstruction of rock music, plus the advent of MIDI technology and sampling, a new generation of avant-garde musicians were set to pick up the mantle.
Unlike a lot of the formative bands within the British post-rock underground (what would later be called the ‘Lost Generation’), Moonshake sought to create the repetition and atmosphere through noise. This is more geographically significant than it is sonically, strictly speaking. For example, Sonic Youth and their totalist tutor in Glenn Branca had already formed the frameworks for the style of formless, building and grinding guitar noise within the New York noise-rock/‘pigfuck’ movement in the early 1980s. The closest parallel from the time period would be acts like Jesus and The Mary Chain and A.R. Kane, whose noise-pop drew more from acid rock and the burgeoning neo-psychedelia scene than strictly noise.
What made Moonshake different was that noise rock wasn’t really explored all that often in the UK. Industrial and noise music were surely alive and kicking, but they never quite congealed with rock music in the same way Americans idealized it around the 80s, especially not in 1992 when Moonshake were most active and noticed. This emphasis on noise as the atmosphere was especially prevalent on the push-pull dynamism of ‘Sweetheart’, whose interstitial riffs between verses (is it even pragmatic to call that a ‘chorus’?) are entirely atonal.
Where Moonshake did fit in with their contemporaries, however, was the psychedelia. Their namesake was taken after the first song off krautrock giant Can’s ‘Tago Mago’, and as such they played the motorik beat with impunity. Where their first EP was a run-in with the neo-psychedelic Shoegaze of artists like My Bloody Valentine, ‘Eva Luna’ was the synthesis of other, more out-there styles of psychedelia. Namely, Callahan and Fiedler took songwriting inspiration from dub reggae and the steadily-blooming space rock revival of Spacemen 3 and Spectrum. Where the typical dub bassline permeated nearly the entire album, the soaring guitar noise of space rock would appear at random. ‘Spaceship Earth’ was emblematic of both aspects within this paradigm, its main riff on bass syncopating with the rhythm of the drums while the guitars slid and sung with an incredible amount of reverb.
‘Eva Luna’ could also be considered a type of stylistic tug-of-war. On one of my first listens I remarked to myself how the album frequently felt like two bands creating one album. On the tracks where Callahan sings, they’re always more lenient towards the dub-rock, Public Image Ltd.-esque indie rock that leans a little less heavy on the electronics. On the tracks where Fiedler sings, it is closer to the still-booming trip hop, given expressive jazzy flair through sampled drum fills and looped synths. There’s an ebb and flow generated on the album that waves between the bombastic pain of city life and the insidiousness of empty houses. The original sequencing does this dynamic justice, juxtaposing these songs right next to each other. The lyricism from both songwriters contrast in a much similar way, with Fiedler diverting from her relatively conscious counterpart by creating whispery poetry around odd, uncomfortable imagery like pot-bellied she-wolves and animals eating other animals.
One moment that particularly sticks out to me upon each listen of ‘Eva Luna’ is ‘Bleach & Salt Water’. It’s an insidious song, its entire length spent developing on this relatively quiet assembly of drum loops and uneasy melodies repeated hypnotically. Margaret Fiedler’s vocals are reduced to such a whimper that you can barely make out what she’s saying beyond individual words — and then, about two and a half minutes into the song, you can hear what sounds like a distant screaming. It’s layered right next to the main vocals in the mix and is similarly inscrutable for lyrical context, but it quickly grows intense. The mixing doesn’t allow it to supersede any of the other instrumentation, but as the song fades out the yelling gets so ferocious that I have to wonder if Fiedler tore her vocal chords to get it on recording — it’s an incredibly chilling song for this one juxtaposition and it acts as a very potent example of the things I love about this album.
‘Eva Luna’ was also the beginning of the end for the original incarnation for Moonshake — the creative differences between Fiedler and Callahan only further widened with time. 1993’s ‘Big Good Angel’ was arguably defined by this dynamic, the vibe and genre dictated entirely by whoever was the main songwriter. Shortly after that EP was released, Margaret Fiedler left out of a lack of fulfilled ambitions. She went off to form trip-hop project Laika with Guy Fixsen, a much more philosophical and slow-burn cerebral take on the sampledelia that her tracks on Moonshake projects set the blueprint for. Their debut album, ‘Silver Apples of the Moon’, still has remnants from her post-rockous neuroticism, but it’s tempered significantly more with electronics. The same year, Moonshake, now primed with Callahan as the core writer, released ‘The Sound Your Eyes Can Follow’. PJ Harvey among others lead the charge in Fiedler’s stead while Callahan went full-force into sample exploitation. It flopped in comparison to its predecessor, critics calling it messy and disorganized. The next and final Moonshake album barely appeared on the map.
In this sense, Moonshake’s debut album was like lightning in a bottle that escaped shortly after capture. It was a snapshot of a band in the eye of two storms, one within their community and one within themselves. While the archived history of the band didn’t highlight much internal tumult, give or take the confused label fiascos plaguing them since birth, it was certainly unstable. This volatility lead to some of the best music in the 90s, however — certainly rhizomatic in their influences but clear in its modus operandi of transgressive sonic art through the distortion of convention. It also has the uneasy, almost unfinished discomfort that I feel is sorely missing from music these days: one that isn’t afraid of being loud in the cityscape, that is dissatisfied and angry at the daily wrongs that hostile urban governments force upon you. It’s extremely resonant, especially after a decade thus far defined by global disgust at increasing authoritarian sentiment. If you cannot know thy enemy, how are you ever going to love thy city?
Thanks for reading.
This article would not have been possible without the plethora of writers and zinesters documenting this band’s existence during their heyday and after. Below are all the sources and some further reading:
- “Fearless: The Making of Post-Rock” book (2017), pages 5 + 17 + 82 + 136–146 + 166-172. Written by Jeanette Leech.
- “Flipside” zine (1994), issue 92, page 21. ‘Big Good Angel’ CD Review by Royce.
- “Kaleidoscope Eyes: Psychedelic Rock from the ‘60s to ‘90s” book (1996), pages 222–223. Written by Jim DeRogatis.
- “Maximum RocknRoll” zine (1994), issue 135: ‘Punks in the Military’, pages 19–21. Letter & Reply by Gerard Cosloy and Greg Lane respectively.
- “Milk It!: Collected Musings on The Alternative Music Explosion of The ‘90s” book (2003), pages 174–175. ‘Adventures in Stereo’ section (1993) by Jim DeRogatis.
- “The Rough Guide to Rock” encyclopedia (2003), page 577. Laika entry by Ben Smith and Peter Buckley.
- “Maximum RocknRoll” zine (1994), issue 135: ‘Punks in the Military’, pages 19–21. Letter & Reply by Gerard Cosloy and Greg Lane respectively.
- “The Rough Guide to Rock” encyclopedia (2003), pages 1182-1183. The Wolfhounds entry by James Robert.
- “The Encyclopedia of Popular Music” encyclopedia (1998), volume 7, page 5015. Snowpony entry edited by Colin Larkin.
- “The Wire” magazine (1994), issue 123, pages 26 + 53. ‘Youth of Today’ article and WireWinner review both by Jakubowski.
