Brendon Moeller

(This article’s English version was produced with AI-assisted translation)

Born in 1968, originally from Johannesburg but firmly based in New York since the early ‘90s, Brendon Moeller only began making music after moving to the US, driven by influences ranging from afrobeat and shoegaze to dub. Also known as Echologist and Beat Pharmacy, he’s spent decades shaping his sonic lexicon through the haze of Jamaican echoes, filtered into the interstellar pulse of techno and embracing minimalism in all its forms—from the bright, techno-optimistic sound of the early 2000s to the martial, granite rhythms of the Berghain and Tresor aesthetics. And yet, the polymorphous side of his taste had never quite emerged: compressed in the obsessive union between four-on-the-floor kicks and dub’s mantric drift, bound to an orthodoxy that plundered Basic Channel while stripping their message down to its barest, most skeletal form.

In recent years, though, something has shifted. A surprising U-turn after decades spent forging the same building blocks. Blue Moon marks a new trajectory: weaving dub techno’s sensibility into the rhythmic language of minimal drum and bass, carving out an atmospheric jungle sound that looks more to Looking Good Records than to the catalogs of cv313 and DeepChord. His 2024 release Further had already hinted at this transformation, but it’s Blue Moon that fully embodies it—an array of floating landscapes that rewrites the coordinates of Seba, Lotek, and PFM (not the Italian prog band, but Mike Bolton, a key figure in the drum and bass scene also known as Progressive Future Music). Here, dnb is deconstructed into gentle harmonies and details steeped in an aquatic, futurist imaginary (“Signals”), seemingly exploring a planet suspended in some far-off millennium (“Ruins”).

In just six tracks, Moeller manages to reinvent his journey, rediscovering the contemplative ecstasy of Aural Imbalance and Deep Space Organisms, filtered through jungle riddim’s broken geometries and IDM’s numerical abstraction. The ‘90s echo loudly here, but refracted through the sober, measured gaze of someone who truly lived that era. It’s a peaceful drift through still-unknown galaxies, with only one downside: it wraps up in just thirty-two minutes.

26/04/2025