Terrifying & Inspiring with Steve Moore
I had a chat with multi-instrumentalist, producer and composer Steve Moore. We spoke about his inspirations and the emotion and ideas behind his music. The New York state-based musician, father and husband is thoughtful and clear on how he does things and how he approaches music. It was great to get a little insight into the mind of an idiosyncratic producer like his, for a brief moment.
At Moon Roq, we were first drawn into Steve’s eponymous music: the more rhythm-based and uptempo works released on labels like Ron Morelli’s L.I.E.S., the legendary Kompakt, along with sub-label Spreicher 67 and a whole host of highly-esteemed North American imprints. His 2013 track, ‘Zen Spiders’, out on Future Times, was a particular highlight in Pete Blaker’s recent Moon Roq mix. It is not until you dive a little more into the body of his work that you are greeted by the realisation that Steve is not just a true master of synthesis and production, but that the breadth of styles he works across whilst maintaining his own distinctive voice is truly inspiring. Steve has one very rich and well stocked Bandcamp profile, by the way, so head over and pick an album at random for you to listen to whilst you read. You won’t be disappointed!
“Outside of my music, I spend most of my time with my family. We like to go out hiking and I find nature very inspiring, being surrounded and immersed in it. But, it’s not like I can just go out and find myself a nice stream to sit by and come up with some music in my head. It never really works like that. You kind of have to build up the inspiration, and you never really know when it’s going to hit. One of the chief ways that I write music is, I’ll just be doing something around the house and an idea will just pop into my head. Sometimes I won’t even realise that it’s a song that doesn’t already exist.”
And when these moments of inspiration come, do they arrive in the form of a complete melody, or is it more of a feeling?
“Sometimes it’s just a melody line, often it’s a bassline or some kind of rhythmic figures. But sometimes, I’ll hear a full arrangement, fully fleshed out, and then it’s like a race against the clock to get a demo recorded before I forget it.”
One of the most impressive features of Steve’s work, is the variety and the range of sounds and styles that he has released, under several aliases. It all shares some certain characteristics of course, his deep and spacious mixes create an undeniably spacey feel that really ticks the Moon Roq boxes. But that’s all before we get to his first real musical endeavour, being one part of the cosmic prog rock duo Zombi. Not to mention his sun-drenched, balearic-tinged alias Lovelock, or his award-winning horror film-scoring work. Make some time for Steve’s debut album as Lovelock, the glittering synth-pop masterpiece ‘Burning Feeling’, originally released on Prins Thomas’ Internasjonal label in 2012.
“All these pseudonyms are a source of a lot of anxiety for me, actually. Sometimes ideas could go in different directions. Sometimes I end up doing more than one version of a song, because I’m just not sure if it should be more of a solo, minimal synth song, or if it should be like a Lovelock pop song. I have folders and folders and hard-drives just full of ideas that I can’t get to fit anywhere. I’d love to do a classic Lovelock pop album right now, but I’m just not inspired in that direction at the moment.”
You’ve just realised a 6 track Lovelock EP entitled Washington Park. It definitely shares the sunny vibrations of Lovelock, but is still a much more downtempo affair. How does that fit alongside your other ideas of a more pop-orientated album for Lovelock?
It’s interesting because this was a case where I was writing this music, at the beginning of our quarantine, and everything was kind of going crazy, and I was getting these ideas in my head that just didn’t really make sense. I had to try to demo them out, and figure out ‘what is this music I’m trying to make here?’ So I actually posted some short work in progress videos up on instagram, and everybody starting commenting “Is this new Lovelock?” and I realised, you know what, maybe this is Lovelock now, maybe he’s mellowed over the years.
Well, it kinda makes sense! That was a sort of collaborative effort there, then.
Yeah, that was a case where I don’t think I really saw the connection until someone else pointed it out.
What about when it comes to pure collaboration, such as working on Zombi material alongside Anthony Paterra. How does this process of inspiration and capturing of ideas work when working alongside another mind?
Part of the collaborative process for me is figuring out if the idea that I’m working on is even worth working on. A lot of the ideas that I come up with for Zombi, I’ll send to Tony, and we just can’t make it work so we put it to one side. But we’ll start by just coming up with an idea and sending it over to one another. When we started, we could never get together and play in the same room, so we’ve gotten used to this way of working, being so far apart and I kinda like it now. I’ll send him a bassline, and he’ll record some drums, then when I hear the bassline with some drums it’ll give me some ideas for some keyboards and maybe guitars. And it’s the same with Tony, we’re really flexible these days, the way we write. Recording like this has it’s limitations but it also opens you up to a lot of new ways of collaboration too.
So it’s like a sort of turn-based collaborative process.
Yeah, is it “Exquisite Corpse”, that thing? Where you start a sentence and hand it over to someone else to finish and take it wherever they want? It works with words, music and art. I really love collaborating with people in that way.
When listening deeply to Steve’s music, there is a number of aesthetic and emotional features that come across quite consistently. There is the undeniably epic sound of Zombi, or the more subtly and melodically epic sound of his recent album released under his real name, ‘Beloved Exile’. There is a clear love of melody in Steve’s work, alongside a clear penchant for airy and spacious sounds that recurs in a lot of his work. This mixture of drama, of scale and of melody, combined with the regular use of synthesisers, create an undeniably space-like atmosphere into which the listener is invited.
I always joke about one of my favourite quotes from a movie, from David Cronenberg’s “Scanners”. [Which is a 1981 science-fiction horror film where "scanners" are people with telepathic and telekinetic powers.] There is this one scanner that has learned to control his abilities and has become sort of a famous artist, and a young scanner asks him, “how do I make the voices in my head go away?” and his answer is “my art keeps me sane”. And I feel that way about music, I think that a lot of my sanity depends on expressing my emotions through my music. I think melodrama is as close as I could get to it in one word.
The musical choices that you make to express yourself, particularly when it comes to your eponymous work, the combination of the instruments used, the epic-ness of the melodies and the aesthetic style create a distinctly spacey feel - and we like that a lot at Moon Roq. Are you interested in space?
Yeah, absolutely, I’m fascinated by the scale of it, and how we can only speak about it in these conceptual terms. It’s just so unapproachably large. That said, I find I’m more inspired by other things, that are themselves inspired by space. I’ll go through phases where I’ll read a lot about different astronomical events, and it’ll give me a good ideas for song titles, but I don’t go too deep into researching it because I want it to be mysterious to me, I still want to view it with child-like wonder. So I’m no space aficionado.
There’s definitely a clear correlation between the scale of space and the scale of your music. And through these expressions of other worldly sounds, there is some definite escapism going on, is that something you think about, in creating another for someone to escape into?
Yeah, I think that’s absolutely the case. I escape through my music, and I definitely hope that other people can as well. That’s the idea, really. And I feel it now, I’m getting a lot of messages right now from people saying thanks, and I really appreciate that.
One way in which Steve achieves this impeccably spacious and often spacey sense is through his hard-earned production and mixing knowledge. The quality of sound in his music is one of the stand-out features of his recent releases on the likes of Kompakt.
My love for production was something that I had to learn, a lot. In the ‘90s, I always had some type of keyboard and I was always making music, but it wasn’t until 2000 when were recording the first Zombi album that I really had to learn how to mix and produce something. We had this digital recording unit, this 8-track recorder, I hated it so much, all I wanted to do was play our music. But it’s all evolved from there. I’m just self-taught, I’ve done a lot of reading and research and put some time into learning how to do it right. And it’s funny, because now the actual producing is what I love the most. In the last few months, I’ve realised it’s like I’m making music to produce it. It’s a different kind of creativity, it’s not the creation of ideas, it’s the refinement of ideas.
In our conversation, we barely touch on another very important side of Steve’s output as a composer, that is, his film-scoring work. He has provided synth-heavy, immensely dramatic and suspenseful compositions and soundscapes, for a range of movies mostly within the horror genre. Indie movies like the brutal Belgian horror Cub or wild slasher Mayhem sit alongside Hollywood thrillers like 2014’s The Guest. In many cases, his music elevates the visual so far that you could even argue that the atmosphere he creates can in some ways carry the movie and that the images are accompanying the audio, not vice-versa. In the past, Steve has spoken about a desire to “terrify and inspire” his listener. There is a definite parallel between the overtly scary nature of his horror movie accompaniments with the more subtle, existential terror that is so deeply inherent to the scale and ideas of space, that lie within the work released under his own name. Though, he admits that his desire to terrify listeners has very much mellowed over the years, he certainly still wants to inspire them. He certainly accomplishes this. Steve is a model for what you can achieve through hard work and dedication to a craft without compromise. Lay back and dive into space with one of his expertly crafted albums.
Photographs kindly provided by Steve Moore. If you have any questions or would like to discuss this article or any other with us - don't hesitate to get in touch.