Mo’ Wax — Where Are They Now: Psychonauts (1999)
Mo’ Wax was a record label started by James Lavelle in 1992, which closed about ten years later. Initially they released 12" singles and licensed a compilation from Japan of Japanese Hip Hop, until 1994 when they began releasing albums of their artists original work. While some of these artists such as DJ Shadow, DJ Krush, and Money Mark continued releasing music after Mo’ Wax closed, others have seemingly disappeared from the music scene. In this series I will look at each artist on Mo’ Wax and try to find out where are they now…
The Psychonauts formed in the early 1990’s when childhood friends Pablo Clements and Paul Mogg met Lionel Kisnorbo. The group took their name from an article in The Observer which mentioned Psychonauts, people who explore altered states of consciousness, and they soon began DJing together in clubs such as their own Night Of The Cookers nights held in their home town of Yeovil.
In September 1995, James Lavelle and Tim Goldsworthy had flown from London to LA with the intentions of recording an album as UNKLE. The sessions were abandoned, but while they were there Goldsworthy played a mix tape he’d been given by the Psychonauts. James Lavelle loved it, and according to Paul Mogg it was the Beastie Boys who told Lavelle to sign them to Mo’ Wax. By October, Lavelle had already booked Psychonauts to DJ as part of his Dusted club night, and then employed them to mix his selections for the Cream Live Two mix which was released in June 1996.
In September 1996 it was announced that Psychonauts were in the midst of working out a contract for an album with Mo’ Wax, but they had already begun contributing to other releases on the label, with Pablo Clements and Paul Mogg providing scratches to a remix of Palm Skin Productions’ The Beast, while Clements had applied scratches to UNKLE’s remixes of Butthole Surfers’ Pepper, and Tortoise’s Djed. All three members also contributed to 60 Min’s Of Mo’Wax Shit, a mix CD released in 1997 which was included in a special BAPE package in Japan.
At some point around 1997 Lionel Kisnorbo left the group, and at the beginning of 1998 Psychonauts were described by The New York Times as “a turntablist duo, D. J. Pablo and D. J. Paul, who use four turntables to manipulate funk vamps and choppy percussive rhythms; they draw extensively on the catalogue of the English label Mo’ Wax, which has put out some of the best and wackiest English dance music.”
As a duo Psychonauts continued to create mixes, and October 12 1998 saw their first release on Mo’ Wax, a mix CD titled Time Machine which featured songs from across the Mo’ Wax catalogue and which was described by All Music as a “near-crucial document for Mowax collectors”.
In 1996 Pablo Clements and Paul Mogg had moved to London and began work on what would become their debut album. Clements later explained, “We were signed to Mo’Wax without ever having recorded anything…And spent about two years…learning the equipment”. For this they were assisted by Tim Goldsworthy and Major Force’s Masayuki Kudo, who had worked together on UNKLE projects such as the aforementioned sessions in LA.
Psychonauts’ first release from these sessions, the 12" single Hot Blood, arrived in 1999, and was engineered and mixed by Kudo, who Clements praised heavily, telling Jockey Slut in 2003:
Kudo’s just amazing…He’s one of those guys who plays every instrument in the studio. Give him anything and he’ll be able to play it in an hour. To work with him was just incredible. He’s a really interesting mix engineer…Everything is done live…It’s hands on, dubbed out. We probably did about 15 takes on each track and then the track you hear are edited together versions. We’ve learnt so much from him.
Their original demos recorded with the assistance of Kudo and Goldsworthy remained unreleased, with Psychonauts instead taking the time to learn how to do everything themselves, and in 2001 they returned with Profondo. The new 12" was released as a test pressing, with an official release date only listed as “TBC” by Mo’ Wax in 2001 and 2002. Profondo was renamed as Circles in 2001 and appeared on the compilation MoWax Music For Films, but was otherwise left unreleased. At the same time, Psychonauts’ debut album was also intended for a Mo’ Wax release, with Pablo Clements later telling the BBC that they had completed the album in 2002. A test pressing was created by Mo’ Wax featuring songs from the album, and a catalogue number was assigned, but this too was never released as Mo’ Wax began closing down.
Following the closure of Mo’ Wax, the Psychonauts debut album Songs for Creatures was finally released on October 27 2003 by International DeeJay Gigolo Records, a German record label owned by DJ Hell. The album featured some songs previously released by Mo’ Wax, such as the single Hot Blood, as well as Life’s Swift Charger, Circles, Empty Love, and Hips For Scotland which had each appeared in some form on Mo’ Wax test pressings, but hadn’t been officially released.
Songs for Creatures was preceded by the single Fear Is Real in July, which peaked at #194 on the UK Singles Chart on August 21, outside of the official Top 100, and is the groups only appearance in the charts. A second single World Keeps Turning followed the albums release in 2004.
Reviews were good, with their Fear Is Real single awarded Single Of The Month by Jockey Slut, who also considered the Psychonauts album “one of the strongest albums this year”. The Guardian called Songs For Creatures “a gorgeous record showcasing cinematic soundscapes and seductive ethereal ambience alongside pastoral folk-pop songs and electro disco”, while Mojo wrote it was “an album to love and fall in love to”. In France Les Inrockuptibles felt Songs For Creatures was a beautiful record, but with some clichés, and in the USA Orlando Weekly wrote the album was “fully built on modern ideas, but is unmistakably infused with a sort of mellow organic sense that owes as much to grassy fields as it does to bags of grass.”
Following the albums release, Pablo Clements and Paul Mogg told XLR8R in 2004 that they weren’t in a rush to get back into the studio, with Clements explaining, “To get to the next level you need money, and no label is handing that out at the moment. Bjork said it was one of her favorite albums-we might consider making another one if she comes knocking at our door.”
Unfortunately a second album was not forthcoming, but in 2010 Songs for Creatures was re-released and Pablo Clements and Paul Mogg regrouped to tour the album, with Mogg telling Resident Advisor at the time:
Pablo and I are close friends and have been since we were 5 years old — that relationship will hopefully never die. As for The Psychonauts being a dead entity, I don’t think so. Pablo was here in Berlin recently and we spent quite some time discussing new ideas that we have for songs. We are both busy for the next couple of months, but sometime in spring we will produce a new single, and if that goes well then the new album will follow.
The album received a fresh look by the press, with Clash Magazine giving it 9/10 and noting how it had influenced artists such as James Murphy and DJ Hell since its initial release. Resident Advisor wrote, “Albums of this calibre rarely come along in any era”, while All Music called it, “one of the best records to appear from a former Mo’ Wax act in several years.”
For the re-release, the album was remastered and repackaged with new artwork and one new song Wild In Your Eyes, which had previously appeared on their Fear Is Real single in 2003, and was described as “a downtempo cosmic Krautrock workout of shimmering resonance” upon its initial release. New remixes from the album were released in 2010 and 2011, but no new Psychonauts music has appeared yet, and instead both members have kept busy with their other projects.
In 2004 Paul Mogg moved to Berlin and released music as Italian X-Rays with Jason Rowe. The new group released a second single in 2006 before Mogg began collaborating with Xaver Naudascher. Mogg and Naudascher released two 12" singles starting in 2007 before forming the band Moon Unit with Rosalind Blair. Following the release of their sole Moon Unit single in 2009, Paul Mogg and Rosalind Blair regrouped as Boy Of Girl and released their debut single in 2010 on Mogg’s label, Off The Uncertain Button, which he co-founded with Simon Owens. Since then Paul Mogg has focused his attention elsewhere, and in 2012 he started a Jewish-American Deli in Berlin with Oskar Melzer, which they called Mogg & Melzer. When Melzer left in 2015 the deli was renamed to Mogg and, although there was a short closure in 2020, Paul Mogg has continued to serve his renowned sandwiches and cheesecake into 2021.
Meanwhile Pablo Clements has remained in the music industry, and prior to Mo’ Wax shutting down he had several credits on the label, remixing South and Quannum, and providing programming on UNKLE’s second album Never Never Land. Clements would again work with UNKLE on their 2007 album War Stories, and remained with the group until 2011’s Only The Lonely EP after which he left and formed Toydrum with another UNKLE collaborator, James Griffith. Toydrum released their debut mix album Just An Illusion in 2012, which was followed in 2014 by their first album of original songs, Distant Focus Vol 1. Several projects followed, including a collaborative album with Gavin Clark, another with his son, and their first soundtrack on the 2016 horror film Prevenge. Most recently Clements and Griffith have continued to focus on soundtracks, working across TV and movies, and have more to come, with a new Toydrum album also due in 2021.
