upcoming confirmed dates in Europe:
Helsinki - 15 June Kuudeslinja
Berlin - 08 June Tresor, Tresor
Groningen - 03 June TBA
Turin - 26 May Gamma, Stereo
Maastricht - 19 May Nox
Nijmegen - 12 May Vasim, Drift Festival
Moscow - 08 May Arma 17
more soon. for bookings please contact dion@octopus-agents.com
When it comes to post-Basic Channel dub techno, Brendon Moeller is one of the go-to guys. Since leaving his native South Africa for New York City in 1993, the dub technician has been proudly laying down his musical legacy on labels like Astralwerks, Mule Musiq and Six Degrees Records; working with revered vocalists like Paul St. Hilaire, Mikey Dread and Mutabaruka and fomenting relationships with scene institutions like fabric, Berghain and Francois K.
''My parents detected my interest in music at an early age so sent me for piano lessons. However, this kinda alienated me from my desires as the teacher ended up trying to impose all this classical stuff on me when all I was interested in playing was Hall & Oates and Queen. After 2 years of piano I quit and spent all my time playing tennis before I began playing drums in a band when I was 19, at which point the fire was ignited once again.''
''The band was fun for a few years but was never as serious for the other members as it was for me. About the same time I was hearing early acid house and ambient stuff, so in late 1993 decided to sell my car and buy a ticket to NYC. I worked as a waiter six days a week and, in mid 1994, purchased my first drum machine, sequencer and synth...''
Since then, the dub landscape has been for ever changing at his hands: sometimes under his own name, sometimes as Beat Pharmacy (almost exclusively on Francois K's Wave Music) and sometimes as Echologist, he is behind seven full length albums to-date, each of which has breached the musical boundaries of what went before. Taking cues from jazz, techno, dub, afrobeat and psychedelia, Moeller's aims are simple.
''My goal is, first and foremost, to create timeless, quality music that resonates with people from all walks of life. I want to evolve musically. I want to be able to continue making music and support my family with it... and if all goes well, would love to make enough money to purchase all my time favourite analogue synthesizers.''
Listen to his music - or that which his label, Steadfast, has so studiously released since 2009 - and you'll understand that Moeller's music has a knack for making you think whilst you inescapably give yourself over to its infectious grooves, and his most recent Ecologist album only confirms that: Subterranean is a deeply experimental record that explores a throbbing, swollen underworld of subconscious sounds which, in its conceptual referencing of everything from shoze-gaze to ambient to rock, marks Moeller out as an essential pillar of not only the dub techno community, but of the electronic music world as a whole.
