Brian Slattery Photo
Moth at Cafe Nine.
“On Time,” the opening track to Sam Moth’s Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, starts with a single programmed hand clap that, within seconds, has blossomed into a lurching beat powered not only by glitchy electronics, but a wave of Moth’s sampled breaths. And then comes Moth’s vocals.
“I need you right now,” a raspy single voice calls. In response is a startling arc of a processed chorus, one voice after another coming and going. For how simple it is, it’s a foot-stomper, a late-night jam, and the next step in the New Haven-based Moth’s musical experiments.
And it’s not alone on Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. The next track, “Moon Keeps Waning,” lets a computerized voice devolve into a rhythm element before bringing in a stuttering siren that suggests a pounding dance floor track. But there are no drums at all; just slow, chiming harmonies in the background. Yet somehow you feel the drums anyway.
The experiments continue. “Sine Synth Song” is a 10-minute ambient chillout, followed by “HDYK (When The Day Starts),” a song that builds, simply but ingeniously, from a sampled voice chanting “how do you know when the day starts?” It pulls its rhythm from the natural cadence of the words to move from a slinky, jumping melodic line to a pulsing, peaceful synth pad before putting them together to create a dance track.
Then there’s “Falling Into Place After a Long Time Up in the Air,” which takes a pulsing chord that could almost be a car alarm and makes it into a thing of peace, as it provides the spine for a slowly moving melody on an organ that takes turns with a sample of a hard rain falling. If “On Time” is late-night music, “Falling Into Place” is for the early morning. Which, to this listener, suddenly makes the album’s title make a lot of sense. It’s the soundtrack to a long night, whether going out or staying in (or both). Track by track, we’re taken through those subliminal hours, until the first light of day.
In the past year, over a series of releases and live shows, Moth and her partner in crime, Nick Grunerud, a.k.a. Underwear, have been cutting an original musical streak across town. They’re set to do a few out-of-town dates at the end of the month. When they come back, who knows what they’ll do? We’ll have to watch this space to find out.