Moon Hooch don’t play your granddaddy’s jazz.
They’re inspired by the crushing wubs of dubstep as well as Kind of Blue. The men of Moon Hooch — James Muschler, Wenzl McGowen and Mike Wilbur — have just released This Is Cave Music, an album that has both some of Moon Hooch’s most gorgeous moments as well as some of their most brutal. The three met at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, but one imagines that the sort of future looking music Moon Hooch makes isn’t the product of what they learned in their school days. Instead, it’s an insane mashup of EDM, dubstep, jazz, and progressive rock that melds together thanks to the pitch perfect chemistry between the three.
McGowen and Wilbur are both woodwind players, saxophones being their weapons of choice, but they play them in a way alien to most subgenres of Jazz. They attack their instruments, making unearthly sounds with them. Moon Hooch have been known to throw shows that border on raves, and holding it all together is drummer James Muchler, whose drumming prowess resembles the manic work of an octopus.
PopMatters talked to Muschler about the new record, his drumming inspiration, and why the endgame of music can be something as simple as personal happiness …
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You guys do an impressive job of balancing abrasiveness and beauty. On the new record “Bari 3”, which is super harsh, is right next to “St. Louis”, one of the album’s more lush moments. How do you make that balance work?
When we were in the studio, we were just tracking material that we had gathered for the session we hadn’t really figured out an order for the album at that point. It wasn’t until afterwards once when we had all the mixes that we decided what songs would go well before and after each other.
I guess sometimes we’ll write an abrasive song and then other times we’ll write something a little more soothing, and it’s not until afterwards that we decide which should come first.
In your recordings you bring in this great physicality that reminds me of the sound you produce live. Many bands go flat in studio, but you bring a great punch to the sound. Is it in the recording process or the way you play?
I think it’s definitely both. In the studio we’re able to have access to a lot of set-ups and experiment with timbres that might spice up the soup a bit [laughs]. The intentionality of the musician is really important. It’s definitely both. When we’re in the studio recording you have to really go in with the mindset that you’re playing for lots of people that are feeding you energy. Because if you go in there and play just like, “Oh, here’s my part”, it’s going to sound that way. So to get more intensity — I can speak for myself, but I know the other guys feel the same way — you have to go into the studio with the intention of playing the kind of energy you have at a live show and that live energy is gonna come across. I used to in the studio a lot lay down tracks and not really play with that kind of vigor and you can really tell the difference, or at least I can with the drumming.
Going off of that, saying that the crowd is giving you energy, what do you want the crowd to be doing during your shows? It seems like it would be easy to dance, but just as easy to mosh.
I would want the crowd to do whatever they want to do [laughs]. If they want to stand there and listen that’s cool, if they want to dance, that’s great. I guess what’s more important to me is that people are listening and they’re engaged somehow, that’s always really gratifying.
In the past you’ve been infamous for getting crowds too rowdy. Is there a certain frequency you hit while playing live that makes people go insane?
[Laughs] I think when me and Mike and Wenzl get together there’s a kind of chemistry. When we play with each other, it’s really full force and we’re really going through a journey together. And I think that energy just kind of translates to people. People feel that… what’s the word… they feel music [laughs]! In the case of music, when you have a group of people that get together for the same purpose and they do it full throttle with no inhibitions, it creates this really unique kind of energy — almost like this cosmic energy. I feel like people just loose themselves in that energy.
That chemistry and energy between you three, is that derived from some friendly competition? The first song I ever heard from y’all was “Number 9” which would have you doing a drum solo, followed by a horn break, and it felt a bit like you were trying to outdo each other.
No I wouldn’t say that. We try to collaborate, but part of collaboration is allowing sounds to happen and not letting your own sounds to get in the way. If there’s a hole missing somewhere — then a musician can have entitlement to fill that space with whatever they deems as necessary so you could look at it from a competitive stand point but that’s not really how we view it, it’s more of a collaborative…
Your drumming on the new record doesn’t ever stay in one place. Obviously, Moon Hooch isn’t a straight up jazz band, and you play through different filters, but “St. Louis”, for example has this odd stuttering rhythm and these 16th notes—is there an influence your looking towards in your drumming, or is it more inward; playing off of your bandmates?
I think it’s a mixture of going inward and outward. I know what inspires me about music, so I try to play those things that inspires me, and hope that I find that inspiration elsewhere, but I also like to keep things fresh. So if there’s a song on the table that needs a drum part on it, let’s say; I first like to hear the song and, in my head, listen to what would be appropriate and I sort of start from there! [Laughs] It’s kind of a weird answer, but I guess the simplest way of saying it would be to say I play what I hear and as I play what I’m hearing I’m hearing different things and that the drum grooves kind of evolves in the direction of the song. And the sound definitely comes from Mike and Wenzl, they might write something and then, after playing it a million times, they might think ‘oh ok this actually might be a little bit better if we played it this way’ even a song like, I know we were talking about “St. Louis” off of the new album, but you take a song like “Number 9” the evolution of that song — it’s like not even the same song any more. The melody is the same, but the bass notes are a little bit different, the chorus is different, the structure of the drum solo is totally different. I know I’m answering a totally different question right now. [Laughs]
That’s cool that you bring that up because I was thinking about the difference between a song like “Number 9” that feels like a jam and a song like “5-Sax Piece” off the new record which is full of overdubs and a wall of saxophones. It feels like “5-Sax Piece” is a lot more composed and thought out as compared to the jam structure of “Number 9”.
Yeah that’s true that’s true. Some songs that are composed sounding and the beauty of the song is in the arrangement and not so much in the raw energy per se I would say I feel a little more inclined to write a drum groove that sort of emphasized the arrangement, where as a song like “Number 9” is a free for all like a blast of energy and anything goes.
What happened at South by Southwest this year when y’all were playing on the streets and the police shut down the performance?
I think the cops were freaked out about, they were rightfully freaked out about, the accident that happened where this guy got drunk and hit a bunch of people. I think they were just afraid of crowds forming in the event of an emergency. So I totally understand, if half the street’s blocked up and something terrible happens. It wasn’t anything personal from the cops, like they didn’t like our music or anything like that. They all have the boss telling them what to do and if they don’t do it they get fired. But yeah, we got shut down and we said why and they said “Oh well because I said so and my boss said so”.
There’s a group called BADBADNOTGOOD, a modern jazz group, and at the end of their debut album there’s a clip of their drumming talking about John Coltrane’s Giant Steps and he says “fuck that shit. Everyone’s played it, it’s 50 years old, it sounds like crap, write a new song”. What’s your take on that? Is jazz in the place where everyone needs to move on, or can we still look to the past? Or do you just want to play?
I just want to play. I think the role of the musician is to know what inspires them about music and translate that music and their own personal life. Whether they do it playing “Giant Steps” or whether they do it playing new stuff. Yeah I don’t know…it’s kind of like [laughs] this may be oversimplifying the answer but…life is about finding happiness. If you have a musician that’s totally happy and content playing “Giant Steps” and old jazz that’s cool, if they’re not, if they’re more content with breaking the boundaries and trying something new you can say all the better. I guess the answer is it doesn’t really matter.
Let people play what they want to play.
Yeah totally, what right does someone have to say, “Hey you shouldn’t be playing ‘Giant Steps’ any more that’s old shit man”, and the girl playing “Giant Steps” says, “Well it makes me happy. I like this music! Why should I have to stop playing it?”