Moon Diagrams is the project of Deerhunter co-founder and drummer Moses Archuleta, last week he shared the second single “Fifteen Shows at One Time,” a track from his forthcoming album Cemetery Classics. Moses describes the track as “digital marching band funk” and it features Anastasia Coope doing her best Lizzy Mercier Descloux impression, with guitar by Josh Diamond of Gang Gang Dance.

Cemetery Classics is a co-release between Sonic Cathedral (UK and Europe) and Angus Andrew from Liars’ new label No Gold (US and ROW) and was mixed by James Ford. It is Moses’ first new music since 2019’s Trappy Bats mini-album and the follow-up to 2017’s acclaimed debut Lifetime of Love and everything seems a bit more extreme – from Basinski-esque degradation to Faustian industrial noise via postmodern pop, trip-hop, shoegaze, Jan Hammer, Depeche Mode and late Leonard Cohen. “It’s about finding out your arms are too short to box with god,” says Moses of the emotional force that courses through it.

The album started its life in 2019, with Moses holed up in Tokyo following a Deerhunter tour with some drum machines, a keyboard, an eight-track and his laptop. Inspired by the experimental edge of the city’s Bar Nightingale, he started making new songs and new sounds that fused machine-like industrial music with the intimate warmth of bedroom tape experiments and a quiet sense of spirituality.

“My writing naturally shifted, being in a different physical space,” he explains of the album’s genesis. “So, naturally, these songs held a bit more immediacy or severity than what I had written in the past.”

Over the next year, he would revisit these recordings again and again, gradually gathering parts from other artists – drawing on the creative relationships he has fostered over two decades as a working musician – and putting together an impressive ensemble cast. There is guitar from Gang Gang Dance’s Josh Diamond and former Women, now Cindy Lee mainstay Patrick Flegel, plus vocals from spectral folk singer Anastasia Coope. Perhaps the most startling addition is James Ford, the storied producer and former Simian Mobile Disco man who has famously worked with Arctic Monkeys, Blur, Depeche Mode and the Pet Shop Boys, among many others.

“We met at Primavera a long time ago,” explains Moses. “We kept in touch and reconnected around the Trappy Bats release. We had a beer and ended up listening to the record I had demoed out. About a year later, during Covid, we decided to work on it together, remotely.

“James and I had talked about industrial noise and the tape experiments going on in some Faust recordings and the rudimentary appeal of the first Daft Punk record. I was also thinking about massive sculpture – Richard Serra and stuff like that – and trying to create music that takes up space.”

Moon Diagrams
Cemetery Classics
Sonic Cathedral/No Gold

1. NRG
2. Mousetrap
3. Fifteen Shows at One Time
4. Metallics in Fur
5. Big Ref
6. Rewop
7. Brand New Effie
8. Neptune
9. Very Much My Promise to You
10. Listen to Me
11. Left Hand of God
12. Fragment Rock

Pre order Cemetery Classics by Moon Diagrams HERE