Lights On The Way

Ripley Johnson has three bands as going concerns- Wooden Shjips (a four piece psyche rock outfit), Moon Duo (a three piece kraut/ kosmische ensemble) and Rose City Band (a cosmic country duo). I'll happily listen to any and all of these. Ripley's guitar playing and song writing are second to none. 

Next year there's a new Rose City Band album, Sol Y Sombra, and ahead of it there is Lights On The Way, a gorgeous four and a half minutes of cosmic boogie/ kosmische Americana, chilled out guitar riffs, four four drums and Ripley's stoned vocals. There's some lovely, wigged out organ too, to keep it moving up and out. 

This is Dawn Patrol from the previous Rose City Band album, 2021's Earth Trip, a languid, spaced out, nine minute, six string serenade. Earth Trip was an album Ripley made after the being locked down in 2020/21, staying at home for an extended period for the first time in years and appreciating the simple pleasures- being outside, walks at sunset, the wide open spaces of the west coast of the USA, living with nature's rhythms. 

Dawn Patrol

Saturday Live

Moon Duo- Ripley Johnson, Sanae Yamada and drummer John Jeffrey- toured in 2019 to promote their album Stars Are The Light. They played from inside the lightship, a gauze screen around the four sides of the stage, with lights and projections beamed onto it and from within it. The effect was pretty sensational, adding to the hypnotic, motorik groove the three piece locked into as soon as they started playing. There was little audience interaction, the odd 'thank you', but mainly it was constant, fluid, propulsive pysche, the drums straight ahead, four four, Sanae's keys and synths adding texture and drones, twin enervated vocals and Ripley's guitar drizzled and dappled on top. We saw them when they played The Dancehouse in Manchester at the end of October and had our minds expanded. A month later they played The Wonder Ballroom in Portland, Oregon, a gig which was filmed in full. It finishes with the two chord cover of Alan Vega's Jukebox Baby.

Two years previously they played at KEXP, the Seattle based radio station that invites bands in to play in their studio and films them doing it. This half hour set is less blissed out and less spaced out than the 2019 shows, a four song set that concludes with the mighty ten minute White Rose (also played at Portland in the gig above, about twenty minutes in).

Forty Minutes Of Wooden Shjips

Wooden Shjips, one of three bands Ripley Johnson leads as guitarist and singer, are an ongoing psychedelic blur, Ripley's distorted, buzzsaw/ Crazy Horse guitar tone droning and riffing complemented by the motorik rhythms of drummer Omar Ahsanuddin and the swirly organ. The songs sound like the heat of high summer, the tranced out escapism of lying on your back staring at the hazy blue sky with nothing to do and nowhere to go. Ripley's voice sits somewhere inside the mix, a presence as much as a vocal.

Forty Minutes Of Wooden Shjips

• Red Line
• Contact
• Motorbike
• Rising
• Back To Land
• Eclipse
• Crossings (Andrew Weatherall Remix)

Since 2006 they've released five albums (plus two compilations) with 2018's V a peak of spaced out, shimmering psychedelia. Red Line and Eclipse are both from V. I saw them play live at Gorilla when they toured to promote it- they were in the groove and on fire.

Contact was a standalone 7" single in 2009, a cover of the Serge Gainsbourg song (originally sung by Brigitte Bardot in 1968 which later on was up on David Holmes' Essential Mix). It was later compiled onto Wooden Shjips Vol 2.

Rising is a slow riot of backwards sounds and is on 2011's West, the album where their numbed out repetition began to become warmer and more polished. Crossings is from West as well and was remixed by Weatherall, the 12" seeing the light of day in 2012. It's one of the pinnacles of his later remixes, a version that strips Wooden Shjips sound down, adds a hissy drum machine and some of his dubby/ sci fi sounds and a huge loop of bass guitar. 

Back To Land is the title track from their 2013 album, The Velvet Underground if they'd come from San Francisco and not New York. 

And if all this psychedelic rock isn't festive enough for you here's the band doing O Tannenbaum, adding sleigh bells to create a nine minute long, minimal, motorik Christmas, organ drone. 

O Tannenbaum

Thirty Minutes Of Moon Duo

Here's half an hour of Moon Duo, Portland, Oregon's finest cosmische, psyche three piece for Sunday. When I listen to Moon Duo (or Ripley Johnson's other bands, Wooden Shjips and The Rose City Band to some degree but Moon Duo just pip those two for me) I could quite happily argue there is no one currently making music who is doing anything better than this. Moon Duo's back catalogue stretches back to 2009, since when they've released seven studio albums and numerous singles and EPs. Putting together a thirty minute mix is not difficult- working out what to leave out is more so. What we have here is the slow motion blissed out beauty of In A Cloud from their 2015 Shadow Of The Sun album, an equally relaxed cover version of Black Sabbath from 2020, a crunchy guitar riff rocker Sevens from 2017's Occult Architecture Vol. 2, the twinkly, spaced out title track from 2019's Stars Are The Light and the monumental ten minutes of motorik pysche groove that is White Rose (2017, Occult Architecture Vol. 1).

Thirty Minutes Of Moon Duo

• In A Cloud
• Planet Caravan
• Stars Are The Light
• Sevens
• White Rose

Monday's Long Song

Ripley Johnson is the man behind three bands which have been taking it in turns to hit the spot in different ways over the last decade. The four- piece psychedelic groove of Wooden Shjips and the two/ three person blissed out motorik of Moon Duo have been complemented by his cosmic country outfit Rose City Band, now three albums in. This years album- Earth Trip- is full of sublime moments, melancholic country rock with a psychedelic tint, inspired and written during lockdown as Ripley started living outdoors more- as we all have. Dawn Patrol is the album's nine minute long closing song- a gentle, radiant kiss goodbye.

Dawn Patrol

Out

Shielding ends today. Our son Isaac is classed as an extremely vulnerable person and we have been in lockdown since the middle of March. The last few weeks have been very frustrating as we have watched the rest of the world start to go back to some kind of normality, people going to pubs and restaurants, people going on holiday, the roads filling up again, streets getting busy, while we feel left behind. I drove through the town centre last weekend and it looked like a bank holiday, people all over the streets, outside pubs and milling about. I'll leave to one side the rights and wrongs of all of this, or my perceptions of right and wrong. One thing I don't like about the last few weeks has been the way that it's got so easy to become judgemental about anyone doing things differently to yourself and I've tried hard to stop myself from doing it but I know I've failed at times. This isn't any easier when you see people whining about having to wear a face covering for a few minutes in a shop as if it's some major infringement of their civil liberties. Shopping, unless it's for food, is a leisure activity, something to pass the time, so to refuse to put other people's safety first by wearing a mask while shopping for something to cheer you up is just wrong. Of all the hills to take a stand on, refusing to wear a mask to slow down transmission of a potentially fatal disease seems a bizarre one. The libertarian right wing are a poor bunch with a shit value system- they take the view that their 'freedoms' are more important than everybody else's health.

The reality of stepping out of shielding is pretty worrying, going from no contact with anyone outside the household to some contact with other people, at a time when it's clear the virus has not gone away. On the other hand, he (and we) can't stay locked down forever, we have to start to step out into the world again. There is some advice from the government about this, opening up to a group of people in outdoor settings, going back to work or day care if they are Covid secure etc but frankly taking advice from the current government seems like the last thing you'd want to do. The ONS reported yesterday that England had the highest levels of excess deaths in Europe in the first half of 2020. The people responsible for that are the current elected government, the same ones giving us advice about coming out of shielding. It was much easier back in April and May when everyone was in the same boat and dealing with the same set of rules (and the government fucked that too with the Cummings episode). Meanwhile talk of a second wave and spikes is rife and rates are rising in various places, some not very far from us. The re- opening of pubs will inevitably lead to a rise in transmission. It looks premature to talk of a second wave when in England we don't seem to be out of the first wave yet. Further lockdown beckons. Grim.

We will be taking entry out of shielding slowly. We have booked a caravan for three nights in a remote location, South West Scotland, not so far away that we'll need a service station stop on the way. We can wipe down the caravan on entering it, take walks in some remote places and possibly risk buying fish and chips. I think it's fair to say the last four months have left us fairly institutionalised and risk averse but if nothing else the view from a caravan on the Solway Firth for three nights will be different from the view from our front room.

I've been enjoying the latest release from the prolific and talented Ripley Johnson, a man who just doesn't stop. After 2018's Wooden Shjips album and tour and the same last year as Moon Duo he now has an album out as Rose City Band. Psyche country and western, some very laid back late 60s Laurel canyon vibes crossed with that motorik drumbeat, droplets of guitar and those whispered vox. This one, album closer Wildflowers, is a beaut.



Edit: various changes to restrictions were announced last night affecting the north west of England. I find it hard it understand how the new restrictions mean you can't meet in people's homes but you can still meet in pubs. Where's the risk and where's the priority, public health or the economy?

Rip City

Something undeniably retro but also undeniably lovely today, a brand new slice of cosmic Americana from Rose City Band, residents of Portland, Oregon. This song comes ahead of a seven track album out in May and is produced by Ripley Johnson of Moon Duo and Wooden Shjips (and you can definitely hear him in the guitar tone and the vocals which makes me think he may be more involved in this than just producing). Rip City drifts through country and psychedelia in equal measures, finding comfort in melancholy and ends up feeling better for it for wallowing in it for a while.