Moon Duo - Live in Ravenna (2014)

After the release of 2012’s Circles LP, Moon Duo’s Sanae Yamada and Ripley Johnson relocated the band for the second time since its 2009 formation in San Francisco, this time from Blue River, Colorado to Portland, Oregon. Though the band had been initially conceived as an experiment in maximal sonic possibilities with minimal personnel and they had always toured as a duo, before heading to Europe in the summer of 2013, Yamada and Johnson decided to change things up and for the first time ever, try adding a drummer. That drummer ended up being John Jeffrey, who was hired sight unseen after meeting Moon Duo’s manager in Berlin. As it happened, Jeffrey joined the band just in time for a tour that “was defined by sweltering heat,” as described by Yamada. Despite shows every night during the most brutal stretch of summer, Yamada, Johnson and Jeffrey soon realized Moon Duo as a three-piece was gelling through the hot and hazy weather, and having a drummer in the mix added a dynamism and flexibility they had never experienced before on stage. They decided to document this new incarnation of the band and asked engineer Mattia Coletti to record the Italian leg of the tour. Live in Ravenna, due out as a limited, one-time vinyl pressing of 2,000 and digital only on August 18th on Sacred Bones, is the result of one of those nights of recording. It does an incredible job of capturing the emerging sound of Moon Duo as a three-piece. “Ravenna was memorable for a number of reasons, the most prominent being the really very intense heat, and the setting — Hanabi has an outdoor stage on the beach, the Adriatic Sea only meters away,” Yamada explains. “The show that night, and the recording of it, sort of encapsulates everything that was happening at the time – the heat wave, the journey, and the shift in the energy and composition of the band.”