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THE SOFT MOON (USA)
Dark grainy flashes, blurred vision, jerky montage, pictures torn to the edge of legibility, stroboscope, harsh texture, blinding gleams, desorienting flashes, devastation of goods, fragmentation of vision. Violent videoclips of The Soft Moon perfectly correspond with the music. The man behind the name, Luis Vasquez, declared, that his solo project is, first of all, supposed to help him get to know himself. As he says, he makes music to face personality problems, for self-identification. Many musicians nowadays try to explicate their work this way. Even if The Soft Moon is an individual means of self-therapy, it contains something unachieved by others.
From the beginning it was clear that, despite the ostensible deja vu, we deal with something special here. The debut album released in 2010 foreshadowed the new attitude towards, presumably already exploited themes. Neo post punk The Soft Moon integrated many elements in its music, which work together as a magnet. Excellent motor skills, space, trance, electro beat, noise, shoegaze sounds, characteristic, nervous drive – are only a few to mention. Besides, TSM's music is perfectly catchy, feisty and…danceable. The next releases Zeros (2012); Deeper (2015) showed The Soft Moon as melancholic, thoughtful, yet still unusually vital. A poetics of TSM contains also a doze of aggression, self-destruction, negativity, mal de vie. The power of contradiction translates here into a language of brilliantly constructed songs with catchy melodies, dirt, noise. The Californian sound artist resides presently in Europie (currently Berlin), on his own he composes and produces his music. It seems that here he had found many of his inspirations. Continental dark wave, post punk, cold wave and industrial – the historical but also the contemporary, had a positive impact on creating The Soft Moon. You can hear it especially on the latest album, Criminal, released for Sacred Bones.