Brendon Moeller – Blue Moon: From Dub Techno to Drum and Bass :: Ondarock reviews

Born in 1968, originally from Johannesburg but permanently transplanted to New York from the first half of the nineties, Brendon Moeller started writing music only after the transfer, pushed by Afrobeat, Shoegaze and Dub suggestions. Also known as Echologist and Beat Pharmacy, for decades he modeled his sound lexicon between the brume of the Jamaican echoes, reflections in the sidereal beat of the techno and adhering to minimalism in all its declinations: from the brighter and techno-go aid of the first two thousand to the martial and granite rhythms of the aesthetic Berghain and Tresor. Yet, the polymorphic vein of his tastes had never emerged completely: compressed in the obsessive combination between tip case and mantrics Derive Dub, in an orthodoxy that looted the basic channels reducing the verb to the shots coincided and reduced to the core.

In recent years, however, something has changed. An inversion, surprising after decades passed to forge the same blocks. “Blue Moon” marks a new trajectory: weaving the doubtful sensitivity with the rhythmic lexicon of the Minimal Drum and basschiseling one atmospheric-jungle who looks more to Looking Good Records than at the CV313 and Deepchord catalog.
In reality, the Acerbo “Further”, released at the end of 2024, had anticipated the mutation, but it is “Blue Moon”, to represent its epiphany: a range of floating landscapes that rewrites the coordinates of Seba, Lotek and Pfm (not the Italian prog group, but Mike Bolton, key figure of the Drum and Bass, also known as Progressive Future Music). Here, the DNB It is destructured in kind harmonies and impregnated details of a aquatic and futurist imagination (“Signals”), who seems to explore a suspended planet in a remote millennium (“Ruins”).

In just six songs, Moeller manages to re -founding his own path, rediscovering the contemplative ecstasy of Aural unbeat and Deep Space Organisms, filtered through the broken geometries of the Riddim jungle And the numerical abstraction of the IDM. The echo of the nineties resonates strong, but is refracted by the sober and measured gaze of those who have crossed that season to the end. A peaceful wandering between still unknown galaxies, whose only sore note is to enclose in just thirty -two minutes.

26/04/2025