Bringin’ it Backwards: Interview with Arthur Moon

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We had the pleasure of interviewing Arthur Moon over Zoom video! 

Arthur Moon – the Brooklyn avant-pop group fronted by Lora-Faye Åshuvud alongside collaborators Cale Hawkins (Quincy Jones, Bilal, Linda Perry), Martin D. Fowler (a composer for This American Life), Dave Palazola and Aviva Jaye – shared a surreal dreamlike new single, Chaos! Chaos! Chaos!” The cool slice of electropop is also the title of their just-announced new album, out this fall – which will accompany a hometown Brooklyn show at Elsewhere Zone 1 on September 29 (tickets here).Directed by Garrett Weinholtz, the haunting video features spellbinding idiosyncratic dance moves to match with Lora-Faye Åshuvud and partner Jordan Kisner. Weinholtz explains: “This video started with Lora-Faye telling me she saw herself dancing with a solo audience member to ‘Chaos! Chaos! Chaos!’ which also played into the realities of live music during Covid. From there, I took cues from David Lynch’s ‘Mulholland Dr.’, ‘Twin Peaks’, Anna Biller’s ‘The Love Witch’, a bit of Lucio Fulci’s ‘City of the Living Dead,’ and the painting ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ to create a mix of kitsch and chaos.” 

Åshuvud continues: “Chaos! Chaos! Chaos! is a queer date wandering through New York as it burns, a new love growing up in the ruins of an old one, a debauched night walk across a scorched earth. We started the instrumental on this one in the summer of 2019, and then it sat untouched on my hard drive for a year until I reopened it again last summer. Hearing it for the first time in all those months, I was captivated by its swampy energy, and immediately heard these thick, tickling vocal harmonies that would float on top of the instrumental, never quite resolving, always wanting more. Initially it was called ‘Hieronymous Bosch,’ for context, but we ended up changing it to the title track of the album, because writing this song was a moment that really solidified for me what the album would end up being about – a chaos theory of pain and love, our deep connections and their utter incoherence.”

Arthur Moon is the moniker of Lora-Faye Åshuvud, a multi-instrumentalist from New York. Åshuvud takes an intuitive and unusual approach to rhythm and harmony, queering pop, electronic, and experimental sensibilities to make music that is as unpredictable and playful as it is intricate and controlled. NPR’s Bob Boilen says Arthur Moon “has the quirky freshness I first heard from New York artists such as Laurie Anderson and Talking Heads in the late 1970s and more recently with Dirty Projectors.”  

Åshuvud collaborates on the Arthur Moon project with musicians like Cale Hawkins (Quincy Jones, Bilal, Linda Perry), Martin D. Fowler (a composer for This American Life), Dave Palazola and Aviva Jaye. The 2019 debut full-length Arthur Moon was met with support from the likes of NPR, BBC Radio 6, Spotify’s New Music Friday, Billboard and more. Arthur Moon’s next full-length is forthcoming later this year.

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www.BringinitBackwards.com

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