Arthur Moon is the moniker of award-winning composer/singer Lora-Faye Åshuvud, who lives and works in Brooklyn, where she was raised, and collaborates on the Arthur Moon project with musicians like Cale Hawkins (Quincy Jones, Bilal, Wyclef Jean) and Martin D. Fowler (a composer forThis American Life). Åshuvud’s musical origins were in folk and rock, and with Arthur Moon she takes those influences — an intentionally out-of-tune banjo, or a familiar refrain — and explodes them through the filter of electronic pop to make something totally unique. The result is poignant, raucous and perfect.
As for her new song, “I Feel Better.” Lora-Faye explains, “I wrote this song while I was on an artist residency in the desert of New Mexico, sleeping in a single bed in a windowless room. I was reflecting on my life in New York, the propulsion of anxiety, and how to harness that anxious energy toward being a self-critical member of an artistic community.”
The new single makes frequent use of a vocoder braided and twisted into live vocal harmonies, a motif in Arthur Moon’s continuing theme of “incorrect” art and composition. The self-titled album dives into the concept of “incorrect music” and how it is in itself a queer impulse: breaking the rules, and finding the power that comes from doing things “wrong” by celebrating it, owning it, making it the center of the music. The music, like the artist, gleefully strikes back against normativity.
Åshuvud often writes her lyrics using cut-up newspaper articles, and describes the process of composing the band’s rollicking, iconoclastic arrangements as similarly collage-like. A stubborn autodidact, Åshuvud is the rare multi-instrumentalist and composer who doesn’t read music, which means her queer compositional voice sounds both totally fresh and a little tilted, guided by intuition and improvisation rather than formal training. Åshuvud’s metier is what she calls “incorrect music” and “odd theory”— music that feels good and strange in equal measure. (She also hosts “Odd Theory,” a show with New York Public Radio’s New Sounds.) Her debut full-length, Arthur Moon, will be released exclusively on vinyl record this June 3 via Vinyl Me Please, later available digitally on August 2.
