9 June 2011
Articles | Interviews
Interview: The Soft Moon
Darkwave troupe comes rolling off the San Fran hills like bad-vibes fog
Words Luke Turner
Photography David Ma
The dealers and pimps of the Tenderloin district, clouds of Pacific Ocean fog rolling past skyscrapers, yachts on the blue water of the Bay, the tranquility of the hot Californian hills… San Francisco is a place of contrasts. Yet The Soft Moon, with their intense synths and moody tones, don’t sound like a group you might normally associate with the city.
“A lot of people say that,” says founder Luis Vasquez. “Maybe we have a different perspective, or we’ve extracted something deeper.”
“Music has always been really fragmented here,” adds bassist Justin Anastasi. “You had the psych thing, but then bands like Chrome or Tuxedomoon… and the hippies are still trying to blow your mind, man.”
“We love The Units’ post-apocalyptic synth punk,” says Ron Robinson, the man responsible for group’s visuals.
“The Soft Moon is the past coming into contact with my current environment,” continues Luis, who originally conceived of The Soft Moon as a solo project in 1999. “It’s all subconscious — things would appear in my music and then I’d recognise them in the city. Like the hills — the synth waves are very much like them. There are no straight lines in San Francisco. Then there’s the atmosphere in the Tenderloin, and the terrifying sounds at night…”
‘Parallels’
Although their presence on the Captured Tracks label points to an affinity with the gothic, you can hear a broader set of influences in the anxious pace of tracks like ‘Parallels’ or ‘Sewer Sickness’. Luis was influenced by punk, Slayer and jazz, but, he adds, “I’m Cuban, so I grew up with a lot of Afro-Cuban funk. Our rhythms may be repetitive but they’re a little more spontaneous and nuanced, because in Afro-Cuban music, it’s freeform.”
What isn’t freeform is the band’s power structure. Luis formed a band around himself after realising it’d be hard to take the project out on tour alone, and although he says that he welcomes now being part of a group, he’s still very much in charge. And the others are happy to follow a dictator. “We don’t believe in intruding on the creative vision, or a democratic process,” says Justin. “It’s really important that Luis’s vision is driving the music and we fall in behind that.”
But that doesn’t mean Luis isn’t open to spontaneity. “Anything can happen,” he says. Just as in San Francisco.
* * *
Soft Moon is out now on Captured Tracks.
