a-Musik is honoured to present a new album by one of our all-time favourites, Anthony Moore. We’ve been faszinated by his work, both with Slapp Happy and solo, since quite a long time now, and are happy to release this LP with wonderful live recordings he did with The Missing Present Band in Cologne in late 2015.
“In a surround-sound melee of songs, soundscapes and electrickery, time is sonified in an affectionate tribute to Laika, Belka, Strelka and the rest of their canine comrades who gazed into the heart of our galaxy. At the close of the year on a dark night, Anthony Moore & The Missing Present Band took to the stage of the Stadtgarten Cologne. It was the 7th November, 2015. Opening with ‘PianoWaves’, a fine gloom filled the sonosphere as the auditorium sank beneath the waves; the audience submerged in a bathyscaphe tri(e)ste; darkness is where you see most, out beyond the horizon and innerly. This first piece (originally assembled on ancient machines in the basement of New York underground movie-maker Steve Dwoskin and featured in David Larcher’s first film ‘Mare’s Tail’) was followed by ‘The List’. The text, like a diary, recounts the processes that went into the making of the piece itself; a recursive, dry recitative, but embedded in a fertile landscape of electronic plantlife. Songs emerged; ‘It’s Fear that makes you weightless’, a homage to the early EMS synthesizers of Peter Zinovieff. Next, ‘Pulmonary Breath Sounds’, a breathless rendition of a training manual for doctors studying the art of auscultation; listening with stethoscopes. Then came the immersive, multichannel salute to the Russian space dogs; a barkophonie orbiting planets in the black ocean of space.” (Anthony Moore, from the liner notes)