Description

The reaction is instantaneous. It doesn’t even matter when they’re the opening act no one in the room has heard before — as soon as Moon Hooch starts playing, it’s as if the room becomes a living, surging, pulsing thing. They call it ‘cave music’: like house music, but more primitive and jagged and raw. But there are no DJs or laptops here — just one drum kit and two saxophones.

Moon Hooch — saxophonists Mike Wilbur and Wenzl McGowen, and drummer James Muschler — met while all three were students at The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York City. They found in each other a similar drive to work harder, practice more than anyone else, and put in eight hours a day in the school’s rehearsal rooms on top of their coursework.

They played their first ‘gig’ busking in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art before moving on to the L train subway platform at Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn initiating the first of many impromptu underground raves. (They’ve since been banned from playing in the Bedford station by a weary NYPD. Fortunately, there are plenty of other, friendlier stations.)

The ‘cave music’ sound developed around an organic approach to playing electronic dance music. The looping, frenetic sax melodies and James’s furious drumming are fierce and trance-like, as Mike and Wenzl rock back and forth, pushing and pulling each other from across the stage. Sometimes Wenzl switches over to a contrabass clarinet, or inserts a long cardboard tube into the bell of his sax to create the deep, throbbing whomp of a dubstep bass-line. It’s manic, and thrilling, and perhaps a little bit evil.

They recorded their self-titled debut album at The Bunker Studio in Brooklyn in the space of one 24-hour period in June 2011. Their fanatical rehearsal regimen and hours-long busking sessions had prepared them well; most of the 13 songs were recorded in a single take. Previously only available direct from the band at a gig in addition to their relentless busking in the NYC subways, the band has toured America extensively opening for the likes of Mike Doughty of Soul Coughing, Galactic, Lotus, and They Might Be Giants.

Moon Hooch has a mission statement: ‘As a band, we strive to use the universal power of music to inspire connection between people, to influence a sustainable culture in which basic human needs are met, and to contribute to the organification of all aspects of our lives.’ And every night, it’s the same story: they take the stage to a few hundred people who might have no idea what they’re in for, and leave the stage to the roar of a few hundred people who are going to tell all their friends the next day, ‘Dude, I saw something incredible last night.’