You most likely haven’t heard of the schizoid zither. Or the buzzstick. Or the boing field. These are all names that semi-reclusive musician David Michael Moore has given to his selfmade instrument, a wood field with strings and keys that he describes as “a easy hybrid stringed instrument that mixes experimental percussion and melody on the identical soundboard. It may be plucked like a harp, performed with sticks like a santur, set as much as bend strings like a koto, or performed with a slide and finger picks. It’s mainly a decorative soundboard that one can arrange and play in several methods.”
Moore is an American unique, a carpenter and artist who lives in a rundown home in rural Mississippi along with his canine Bobo, plenty of books, a 200-year-old human cranium, selfmade furnishings and, in fact, his musical devices. In addition to the schizoid zither, he performs drums, piano, keyboards, accordion plus chainsaw, canine bones and witches’ pot. Moore has been making music for the reason that Seventies, and for the reason that mid-’90s started issuing CDs underneath the monikers Dayday Moemoe, David Michael Moore and David Moore. The very best of those recordings have now been collected by Indiana-based document label Ulyssa on Flatboat River Witch 1994–2015, which is out there to buy digitally or on cassette. The label has plans to comply with up with re-releases of a few of these unique albums.
Moore is likely to be uncommon however he’s a superb musician, and the songs on Flatboat River Witch are nicely recorded and superbly performed, basically semi-improvised folk-jazz that mixes the extraordinary sound of the boing field – a kind of all-in-one guitar, drum and keyboard that sounds concurrently wood and metallic – with extra standard devices. He borrows rhythms and textures from people and world music, peppers these with discovered sounds and infrequently sings, a bit of hoarse however heat and melodic sufficient. He calls his music “conventional however perverted”, however the rippling percussion of “Jungle Pie” or piano-led meditations like “Orion’s In The Bucket” and “Cottonwood Night time Coming Down” are transferring and accessible items of music. Many really feel semi-improvised, just like the 11-minute “Johnny Quixote”, however the humorous ode to the posterior, “Butt Deluxe”, exhibits he can hold issues quick and candy when he must.
His songs typically communicate of native individuals and locations he has identified – “No names have been modified to guard anybody. They may care much less anyway,” he says within the sleevenotes to 1 CD – however are equally impressed by the panorama and cadence of the mighty river that flows close by. That is music infused with thriller, humour and humanity. There’s one thing of Tom Waits or Dan Reeder about all this, and traces of the Southern Gothic of Jim White and Johnny Dowd, however it appears daft to search for comparisons with an artist so unforced, naturalistic and distinctive. Delve in: the weirdness is ready.
