I’ve been waiting most of this year to encounter any recording of Philadelphia’s synth and cello duo, Pocket Moon.
They played at Comet Ping Pong in D.C. last January, in a tiny room behind the pizza parlor portion of the venue, which they filled with a spaceship’s worth of synth rhythms and the alien voice of a cello run through effects pedals. Austin’s synths construct strange worlds, through which the listener follows Kelly’s voice, hoping it will be a trustworthy guide.
The band has recorded “Good Animals” (and two other tracks) in a live session at Bug Sounds, about which I can find no information except that it is a “recording studio focusing on live sessions that highlight the philly scene” and is “always free for bands.” I’m equally frustrated and thrilled by the lack of information; it feels like Pocket Moon is moving in the same world where I move, the real one, the one that has cold January nights and strange music. Bug Sounds have given those of us not presently in the Philly scene the gift of a glimpse into that world, through our browser windows.
You can listen to the session here.
The song coils around the refrain, “I have the makings of a good animal.” The phrase suggests self-composition: the speaker has everything necessary to become a good animal. But we could take the phrase in a more Frankenstein sense. Maybe the speaker has the component parts to put a “new animal” together. The synths undertake this science fiction experiment, producing the squeaks, chirps, and gurgles of small unseen creatures, and at the end of the bridge, issuing a cyborg howl.
In the spare arrangement, Kelly’s voice stands out as the most human sound in an electronic wilderness. The voice seems trustworthy, and its sentences are simple. It’s just the ideas that are strange and unsettling. The lyrics are full of familiar things: fruit, water, the body, animals. But the speaker takes these ordinary things in unexpected directions, asking questions like “How to tell the body a lie?” What new animal might be constructed by a character who’s thinking about things like that?
The disjunction between the strange things the voice says and the everyday way it says them generates tension in the song. That tension animates the question of what the new animal might be. When the most human voice in a song tells us, “that’s me, a good animal,” we have to recalibrate our sense of what the rules are. Things are not in their usual boxes in this song.
Pocket Moon’s great gift is unsettling listeners enough to sharpen our attention, to make us really pay attention to the worlds their songs create.
These worlds, strange as they are, are not separate from the one we live in. The Bug Sounds recording emphasizes the continuity between our world and the world of the music by including the band’s conversation with their engineer before the song begins. In live performance, the continuity is even more evident. The band creates a pocket universe in the places where we hear them, bringing new possibilities into ordinary rooms.
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