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 – released their exceptional self-titled debut album earlier this year. Today, they’ve shared a kaleidoscopic video for “The Habit” from the record, shot in California during the super bloom this year and in the Mojave Desert. Premiered on LA’s Grimy Goods, the video comes ahead of the band’s west coast tour with Oh Land kicking off next week, plus a San Diego show with Sunset Rollercoaster. Arthur Moon also recently reworked tracks from Oh Land’s latest album Family Tree into a lush new electro-pop landscape for the Replanting Family Tree EP.
Lora-Faye describes making the video: “The flowers really looked like this – straddling a line between a kind of grotesque artifice and natural beauty. I can’t imagine anything better to speak to the tension at play in this song, which to me is a kind of dirge for the individual in the age of the internet – both depressed/isolated but also at the same time vital/connected.”
It was directed by Zach Stone and Gerard Marcus (director of Thrdcoast), who also directed Arthur Moon’s stunning video for “Reverse Conversion Therapy.” This along with album singles “Homonormo,” “I Feel Better,” “Standing Wave” and “Wait a Minute” gave listeners a taste for Lora-Faye’s deconstructed pop music, celebrating “incorrect music” and the queer impulse: breaking the rules, and finding the power that comes from doing things “wrong” by celebrating it, owning it, making it the center of the music. Lora-Faye recently received a prestigious New York Foundation for the Arts grant as part of their Artist Fellowship Program, as well.
Catch Arthur Moon on tour with Oh Land & stay tuned for more!
Tour Dates
10/20: Seattle, WA @ Columbia City Theater*
10/21: Portland, OR @ The Church Concert Hall*
10/23: San Francisco, CA @ The Independent*
10/24: Los Angeles, CA @ Bootleg Theater*
10/27: San Diego, CA @ Soda Bar^
* w/ Oh Land
^ w/ Sunset Rollercoaster
Arthur Moon is the moniker of award-winning composer/singer Lora-Faye Åshuvud, who lives and works in Brooklyn, where she was raised, and 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. Åshuvud’s musical origins were in folk and rock, and with Arthur Moon she takes those influences — an intentionally out-of-tune banjo, or a familiar refrain — and explodes them through the filter of electronic pop to make something totally unique. The result is poignant, raucous and perfectly “incorrect,” as exemplified on the 2017 Our Head EP.
Åshuvud often writes her lyrics using cut-up newspaper articles, and describes the process of composing the band’s rollicking, iconoclastic arrangements as similarly collage-like. A stubborn autodidact, Åshuvud is the rare multi-instrumentalist and composer who doesn’t read music, which means her queer compositional voice sounds both totally fresh and a little tilted, guided by intuition and improvisation rather than formal training. Åshuvud’s metier is what she calls “incorrect music” and “odd theory”— music that feels good and strange in equal measure. (She also hosts “Odd Theory,” a show with New York Public Radio’s New Sounds.) With support from the likes of NPR, BBC Radio 6, Spotify’s New Music Friday, Refinery 29, Billboard and more, their debut full-length Arthur Moon is now available everywhere and on vinyl via Vinyl Me, Please.
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For more on Arthur Moon, feel free to reach out:
Shannon Cosgrove, shannon@girlieaction.com, (917) 470-9713
Mia Berrin, mia@girlieaction.com, (917) 470-9420
Photo Credit: Ebru Yildiz
