I am given to collaboration and find it the best way, for me, to really get to know another person. Talking is so often just talk, yet making a deliberate recording together -even if it is improvisational - requires action and focus. About six years ago, I became friends with Dave Newhouse, Jerry King, and Bill Jungwirth by way of social networking. Jerry and Bill had performed and recorded together in various Wisconsin bands for over a decade, and Jerry's recent Cloud Over Jupiter album was getting impressive indie reviews. Dave had formed and played with the acclaimed "Canterbury" progressive band The Muffins for decades and I was very fond of and familiar with their records.
At any rate, for different reasons, yet simultaneously, we four began to collaborate on some experimental rock music and discovered that we liked what we sounded like together. Early songs like 'BAM BAM' (mine) and 'New Moone' (Jerry's) made me think that perhaps we were onto something worth becoming and proposed that we commit to making a whole album of instrumentals together. We did. I'm glad we did. We called ourselves MOON MEN. What we've accomplished since has been such fun.
Over the next six months or so, we completed our
'Amazing Science Fiction Stories' album and put it out on professionally manufactured CD-r in a small run of 300 and included a full-color 5" sticker and bonus printed goodies. These sold out. We also launched the
MOON MEN Official Genuine Real Human-Interface Hub, a Facebook fan group that has bloomed into a fountain of silliness & aesthetic myth-making over the years,
"
MOON MEN is an experimental recording group consisting of DIY and Prog veterans, Bret Hart ('Admiral Eschaton Crater'), Jerry King ('Sgt Cthulhu Moone'), Dave Newhouse ('Major Dom Fook'), and William Jungwirth ('Billzilla'). This is a limited-editon run of 300 silver-backed compact discs in a special 6-panel cover. Using every available sound tool at their disposal, the complex arrangements & challenging structured improvisation of MOON MEN hearken back to classic shared band influences in many genres, and forward toward a new variety of popular music that hasn't been thought of yet." [from our first record release]
CD REVIEW: [Martin Noreau - Canada] "You know as a kid, Christmas Eve (or Christmas morning) you were looking so forward to that one gift that you wished would be under the tree and, once you opened it, it was even better than you could have imagined? Well, this is exactly the feeling I got from listening to The 'MOON MEN: Amazing Science Fiction Stories.' It's obvious that The 'Moon Men' have been tapping into our Earthly broadcasts since radio waves have sprung forth. If you like, 'KING CRIMSON','VDGG', 'PORTISHEAD', hell, even 'Robert Johnson'... (to name a few) then this album is for you! First off, the production values are strong...the sound quality is exceptional! Not to mention, the wonderful graphic look and ''feel'' of the album...all that was missing were some bubble gum cards! (Hahaha...) The musicianship is simply stunning! Breathtaking time signatures...''Cosmic'' sounds that enter in and out, sound-bites that bring you along to certain tracks...combined with a well-balanced haunting / forlorn ''stratosphere''...and you know what, it ALL works so brilliantly! Personally, I know I love an album when I start ''drumming'' with a pencil...and this album from start to finish...I was Robert Wyatt on the drums! Hahaha... If you like albums that bring you to other dimensions in sound; that bring you to a ''heavenly'' state, then I urge you to pick up this AMAZING album! You are in for one hell of a ''Cosmic trip!'' Even if the year is not over, this IS MY ALBUM of the year! BRAVO to THE 'MOON MEN!"
Our first record is available digitally on bandcamp:
https://bhhstuff.bandcamp.com/album/moon-men-amazing-science-fiction-stories-2017-digital
---------------------------------
By the time the first rush of album sales had passed, aided enormously by a special pre-sale we initiated online, effectively earning back most of the cost of manufacture before its release - a method we continued to use through our '3.5...The EP' project - new sourcetracks were already being circulated among the band and our home studios were buzzing. We were surprised and excited by how well our first record had done and charged forward to maintain momentum. A second full-length MOON MEN record happened with haste.
I was still recording my material in my outdoor, open-door, open-air shed-studio... so the sounds of cicadas, critters and cars occasionally factor into the mix. As a band, we were becoming more aware of one another's musical personalities and quirks, and it shows in how much more tight and cohesive the songs - many of which cut from almost exactly the same cloth as our first album - had grown. This was our engineer/mixer Chad Wardwell's second time around with us and the mastering job is cleaner, tidier, and more singular. Rather than a group of guys making remote recordings together, a
band-ness was there. A quality of not sounding like anything but itself. We got the new audio mixed and mastered, got the covers and interior images ready, and put out '
UNCOMFORTABLE SPACE PROBE.
Friends and fans liked it, but the response was more tepid than with our first record. 'Sophomore Slump'? In hindsight, I moved too quickly with 'Uncomfortable Space Probe'. At that time, all four of us were knee-deep in other recording projects & doing session work, Jerry/Bill with 'Cloud Over Jupiter' music, Dave/I with 'Diratz', Dave with his 'Manna-Mirage' series, helping on other people's projects, and so on. As for me, my attention was too subdivided. I now believe that the two last tracks,
both collages, should have been left off the record and set-aside for some future use or as online bonus tracks ... my bad. An impulsive inclusion. Also, this was the one CD of ours that I - ineffectively - used an online platform to try and sell our physical copies. Bandcamp was taking a big bite out of online sales (hurt also by increasing USPS shipping rates), and I was again feeling like selling things was not my strong suit. MM2 did not turn a good profit b/c of the percentage taken by the platform and my own ineptitude with numbers. We broke even, barely. But it is still, warts and all, a hard hitting collection of strong instrumentals. A great record, badly marketed.
Our 2nd record is available digitally on bandcamp:
https://bhhstuff.bandcamp.com/album/moon-men-ii-uncomfortable-space-probe-digital
---------------------------------
Our third album
'3' took longer to finish, survived some band-agita, but went in several new directions that gave it a fresh sound, look, and feel from the first two releases. It was not a silly looking album, with UFOs shooting weapons at skeletons on the cover & the band riding over a bone-strewn field inside. [The cover image comes from a photo by Fernando Sanabria taken in Herculaneum - where Pompeii hot-ashed people to death.] Mixing/mastering duties had changed to Ian Beabout/Shed Sounds (WV), and with this change to the team, the sound of Moon Men as a band evolved. Our third album combines the richness of Ian's fine-tuned orchestral ear and the clarity that grows among people who make music together over time. The songs are humorless, mostly, and have more of a film-soundtrack quality, less of a garage spacerock band quality. It's a stone-solid psychedelic album, firmly standing in the middle of 2019 America and wondering 'WTF?' aloud with our instruments. Even before COVID-19, we were frayed and making music that sounded like how the world was making us feel. We didn't discuss this, but I hear it.
Moon Men “3” Review
"Moon Men is the quartet of EC community member Bret Hart, Bill Jungwirth, Jerry King, and Dave Newhouse. I’ve been following Bret’s music for nearly 20 years and have written about him extensively. And Newhouse was a founding member of Washington, DC based prog-jazz-Canterbury legends The Muffins. I’ll confess that I only buy CDs anymore if they are by an artist I follow closely. Other than that, I’ll opt for digital if only CD is available. But Bret is not one to be hindered by the physical limitations of the format, which is no surprise because he came from the 1980's CASSETTE world!! I sprung for the special limited edition. Check this out… The CD is housed in a gatefold jacket, but also comes with a postcard signed by the band members, a poster, and a bonus 3” CDR with accompanying 14 page handmade, PERSONALIZED art booklet. Isn’t it lovely? View the video for a detailed look. This is the third Moon Men album and, like the others, it’s a crazy but totally seamless blend of avant-jazz-progressive rock… Prog-jazz with an adventurous experimental edge. I like how jazzy horns trip along on ‘Peas & Carrots & Grass’ to a steady jazz-rock rhythmic pulse. After a few minutes the guitar challenges them and the musicians bull and matador circle each other, slowly jamming and finding their way as noise and effects color the proceedings. I love the contrast between the chaotic jamming groove, sweetly swooning horns, and brief punked-out vocals on ‘Coeur de Boeuf’. Lusciously clunky! Other highlights include ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon Is Dark For A Reason’, which has a dreamy melodic vibe that recalls the Canterbury sound of 1980's Muffins. But it’s amped-up an experimental notch with scratching effects, clatter percussion and cascading electronics. Dig that lazy, lysergic jazz-blues on ‘Nurse Ratched’. Moon Men get nicely spacey on ‘The Mutt Stars And Cat Planets’, rocking HARD in alien prog-jazz land, but later make a gradual descent into a beautifully melodic Canterbury finale. Progheads with a taste for the creatively strange will dig this!" - Jerry Kranitz
Our 3rd record is available digitally on bandcamp:
https://bhhstuff.bandcamp.com/album/moon-men-3-digital-album-and-art
---------------------------------
A month or so after MM '3' was released, Jerry King shared a '50 CDs for $99' deal he saw online with us. "LET'S DO THIS!" We had a stray track that did not make it onto our first album "LURCHING HERMAN" that Ian was willing to remaster, I had two new songs ['Waltzing Into A Pickle' and 'When A Loved One Sails Away'] that were in various stages of accompaniment in the Moon Men pipeline, and a new cleaner mix of our epic 'Around the Solar System in a Tub', which had only been available online. In short order, these four tunes were finished and along with the great 'Moont Rushmore' cover art by Dennis James, sent off for manufacture. These sold out in three weeks.
Our EP is digitally available on bandcamp: https://bhhstuff.bandcamp.com/album/moon-men-35-the-ep-2019-digital
---------------------------------
Late 2019, just before COVID-19, the band began pitching sourcetracks around like we do and our fourth full-length album project began. The sourcetracks that eventually became
'Tales of the Space Pirates' circulated for months, some of them coming together very quickly, a few taking considerably longer than others to reach fruition and readiness for mixing and mastering. Billzilla contributed one, Dave & Jerry two each, and the rest are mine. I must confess that I created some extreme setbacks on a few tracks owing to my bad file management/titling skills ... ie; sending
different length sourcetracks to band members, not realizing it until, during rough-mixes, things didn't always line up. In one case, a mystery drum track found its way into the proceeding of a song, affecting the rhythm of some accompaniment, before being discovered and extracted from the mix. Stuff like that. Here's where I must give big kudos to Ian Beabout/Shed Sounds studio in WV, who has had the daunting task of parsing through piles of WAV files - about which we have different opinions - and forging mixes that satisfied the whole band. Many other engineers would throw up their hands and quit. This is Ian's gift ... sustained interest in and perseverance regarding music he believes in.
By mid-summer 2020, the ten new songs were mixed and mastered and ready for manufacture. I'd settled upon another vehicular cover theme - "old school naval" - and hunted up some 18-19th century photos of 'sea captains at the wheel' to manipulate and turn into the band members. These became the four images on the cover. During the final weeks of tweaking, the talented Eric Kearns, who does a lot of quality graphics design for mutual friends and musicians, came on board to create our on-CD and back-cover images, as well as to 'QC' our typesetting and the resolution of my front cover and interior graphics before printing.
'Tales of the Space Pirates', the fourth full-length Moon Men LP, was released during September 2020, is selling well, and only about 50 hard copies remain as of this date. Those who've been with us from the beginning say it's our strongest and most cohesive album yet.
Our 4th record is available digitally on bandcamp: https://davenewhouse.bandcamp.com/album/tales-of-the-space-pirates
----------------------------
What's next for MOON MEN? Who knows...? What's next for any of us during this strange time.
