Moon Duo at Rough Trade East Tonight

Moon Duo was formed in 2009 by Wooden Shijps guitarist Ripley Johnson and his partner, Sanae Yamada. Ripley says that, as a guitarist and songwriter, delineating between Moon Duo and Wooden Shijps “happens naturally. I focus on one project at a time, and the way the two bands operate is very different. And there are certain limitations that Moon Duo is forced to accept, not having a drummer for example, and I really like that. I like the creative challenge of working with limitations. Having done so much home recording cultivates that. Working with one other person is much different from working with four.

“We wanted to do something in a more rock’n’roll band style, something a bit fuller than our previous recordings.” In terms of recording this meant that Moon Duo “used more tracks on this record, in order to get a denser, layered sound to make this our ‘rock band’ record. I grew up a huge Stones fan, so I’ve always liked that dense sound, with multiple guitar tracks, percussion, piano, organ – anything you can squeeze into the mix.”

“I think a lot of our music has something to do with the mythology of the road,” muses Moon Duo’s Sanae Yamada. And if Mazes is a quest, a journey through American landscape and music, Johnson concludes that its key is “finding one’s place in the world; moving forward, and the different paths one takes moving through life, trying to reach various goals, literally moving; love; pain; change. Or just getting by, and making sense of things.”