Moon Duo & Emmanuel Biard Present Stardust Highway: Experiments in Stoner Disco

In an exciting new collaboration, synth-driven psych band Moon Duo team up with live visual projection artist Emmanuel Biard to deliver a unique performance. Part of Samarbeta’s innovative residency programme, the artists have just ten days to pull together a collaborative live show, to be performed in a disused industrial warehouse in Salford on the 26 April. The show, entitled Stardust Highway: Experiments in Stoner Disco, will explore ideas of time and ritual, as well as the human desire to transcend material reality.

Founded in 2009, San Francisco’s Moon Duo is the project of Ripley Johnson (who also plays with Wooden Shjips) and Sanae Yamada. Influenced by the likes of Suicide, Spacemen 3 and Silver Apples, the pair make swaggering, sinister psych rock, featuring trance-like vocals, fuzz-drenched synths/guitars and motorik, kraut-inspired rhythms. Their most recent album Occult Architecture is a hymn to the invisible structures found in nature’s cyclical rhythms, and a particular ode to day and night. Made up of two volumes, the album first explores the lightness and then explores the darkness within Moon Duo’s sound.

The band find a brilliant collaborative partner in Manchester-based AV artist, Emmanuel Biard. Well known in electronic music circles, Biard produces stunning live visual installations for producers and artists all over the world. He’s worked extensively with Fabric in London as well as the Warehouse Project in Manchester, and in recent years has created live lighting concepts for the likes of Evian Christ, Daedulus and Fatima Al Qadiri.

Though the details are to be worked through when the artists get together in April, Moon Duo and Emmanuel Biard’s live show will cultivate a perception-shifting visual environment inspired by 70’s discotheques and the psychedelic experience. They will also explore the conceptual commonalities between performance and ritual, with a focus on sonic repetition and “the merging of particular human energies in the physical space shared by artist and audience”.

We can’t wait to see how all of this transpires!