New Website: Moon Recordings

New website for AM + LYON: www.moonrecordings.space

Cosmic Trigger Records

Thrilled to announce that my full catalogue will be distributed to iTunes, Apple Music, Amazon, Spotify, Pandora, and other digital retailers by Cosmic Trigger Records of NYC (which already distributes the catalogue of my instrumental music project LYON) as of January 26, 2018.

Misadventures in Radiology (2004)
Please Kid, Remember (2009)
As Long As We're Together (2009)
Victory in Passing (2009)
Grey Light of the Season (2011)
Slanting Rays of the Setting Sun (2015)
Moon (2016)
Nocturama (2017)

In the meantime, please enjoy "Inscription (I)" -- a magic spell that opens Slanting Rays of the Setting Sun and features Dostoyevsky, fluttering leaves, harp, sleigh bells, violin, and piano sustain.

How Swiftly I Fell (from MIR Archives)

This instrumental -- recorded in spring 2003 on a German pipe organ on the fifth floor of Murphy Hall in Lawrence -- was originally intended to segue to "Brushes to Bronze" on Misadventures in Radiology.  Transposed to a different key and performed by a string quartet in 2007, the piece ultimately appeared as "For a Little While" -- the segue to "Three Months in Cook County" on Please Kid, Remember.  As with "Rue des Allobroges," this recording was lost for fourteen years.

The above photo, of my friend Sam Kingsley and I standing on Oxford's High Street just beyond Magdalen Bridge in summer 2002 is from the same period in which the music was written.

Photography: Phil Kunz

Rue des Allobroges (from MIR Archives)

I'm going to be sharing some things from my archives, the first of which is "Rue des Allobroges" -- an instrumental that was, for a time, intended to segue to "This Awful Room" on Misadventures in Radiology.  I had entirely forgotten about the piece -- here in harpsichord form -- since its recording in spring 2003, but found it on a CDR this month while on the final stretch of more than a year of sifting through and archiving ProTools sessions, CDRs (some labeled, some not), cassette tapes from my high school four-track days, and hundreds of glossy 4 x 6 photos that I feared were forever lost. Rue des Allobroges is a street in Geneva, Switzerland that I came to know while visiting a friend the same summer that the MIR sessions commenced at the late, great Elliott Smith's studio in Los Angeles.  The above image (also newly unearthed after spending fifteen years on a CDR in a cardboard box) is from the same series as the MIR cover photo -- in front of Oxford's Radcliffe Camera on a walk home from the Purple Turtle late one night in summer 2002.

Photography: Phil Kunz

MoonStone

LYON-TRAILS-12-MoonStone

“Among all words I knew there is one

With the power to record and to re-present

The secret, I see, is with humble intent

To use it simply. Moon.”

     -J.L. Borges (excerpted from “The Moon”)

Alex Doolittle - Drums
Audrey Herren - Cello
Andrew Morgan - Ocarina / Piano / Guitar / Electric Bass / Triangle / Feedback
Anne Schneller - Violin
Chris Shaw - Upright Bass
Erin Wood - Harp

Recorded summer 2012, Chicago, Illinois // fall 2016 and spring 2017, Lawrence, Kansas.
Mixed and Mastered by Matt LaPoint.
Original Release Date: 22 June 2017.

Image: unknown (from Thalman family archives; restored by David Marquardt).

Darkening

LYON-TRAILS-11-Darkening

Suddenly the city was empty, its residents in mass holiday exodus.  Green pharmacy crosses flashing all the more brightly for the lack of headlights on the boulevards below.  The fountain at Place du Maréchal Lyautey burbling all the more clearly for the lack of early evening drinkers on the patios of bars nearby.  And the sky over the chimneys of Croix-Rousse all the more otherworldly when seen alone in the south meadow of Parc de la Tête d’Or, the light fading and the summer darkening.

Kristina Dutton - Violin
Andrew Morgan - Guitar / Piano
Mike Giffin - Percussion

Recorded fall 2013, Lawrence, Kansas // El Cerrito, California // Astoria, New York.
Mixed and Mastered by Matt LaPoint.
Original Release Date: 4 January 2015 (Moorworks // Japan).

Image: "Flood of 1908" (from Thalman family archives).

First Light, Stoneback Drive

LYON-TRAILS-10-First Light, Stoneback Drive

Being able to drive again was a godsend.  I had originally planned on driving out to LA from the Midwest so I’d have my own car for the sessions, but it had met its end the preceding winter on a downtown bridge over the Chicago River.  The car had been my grandfather’s, and he had passed just a few months prior, so it felt like losing him all over again.  Before it was towed away, I pried a plastic insignia from the dashboard to have as a keepsake – of my grandfather’s car, the car I learned to sing in, the car I drove to New York in, the car I kept all of my possessions in for four months in Chicago before my best friend and I got our first real apartment. 

Michalis Koutsoupides - Violin / Viola

Recorded spring 2008, Lawrence, Kansas.
Mixed by Mike Giffin.
Mastered by Doug Van Sloun.
Remastered by Matt LaPoint.
Original Release Date: 31 July 2009 (Broken Horse // UK)

Image: The North Carolina (from Thalman family archives; restored by David Marquardt).