Soft Moon - Vasquez's soft machine

The search for the dark and “soft” side of the moon.

Paraphrasing a work by William S. Burroughs, here we are on a perverse surface, capable of absorbing nightmares and paranoia: monochromatic by nature, it reflects acid visions and real illusions, with constantly evolving symbolism.

As in Méliès' film, in which a huge rocket shell is fired into the enigmatic face of the satellite, so Luis Vasquez's project seeks to reach a mental horizon between cinematic fiction and the deepest psychedelia. Along the way, it absorbs and incorporates elements from the German kraut tradition of Neu! and Kraftwerk, as well as from English industrial and French coldwave. A fragmented stream of consciousness, in which frames and geometries pile up magnetically along a space highway with psychedelic contours.

Born as Luis Vasquez's solo project, Soft Moon has managed to carve out a place within a new imaginative and stylistic context, one in which the lo-fi culture of Blank Dogs, the shitgaze scene in general, and the new new-wave revival had once again shaken up the American underground, opening the door to wide-ranging crossovers and detours into the sickest experimentation, tied to salvaged, vintage analogue gear.


The first two singles released ahead of the self-titled 2009 debut, “Parallels” and “Breathe The Fire”, perfectly capture this attitude poised between an obsessive, almost manic vision of sound and a noisy psychedelia, born out of a humus of feedback and controlled noise.

A radioactive terrain where celluloid ghosts and hypnotic vibrations meet on an endless circular path, heading toward saturation, toward an undefined horizon.


“Breathe The Fire” is a body held up by surgical darkwave grafts, as indebted to the Joy Division of “Atmosphere” and “Transmission” as it is able to seal an endless, subtle dreamlike magic within metallic whispers. A different story applies to “Parallels”, built on hebephrenic, noisy dynamics: a feverish spiral of distorted voices propped up by a binary bassline, heading toward a null gravitational center. 


These first two singles (released on vinyl through Captured Tracks, the label run by Mike Sniper/Blank Dogs) are two excellent miniatures of what we later find on Vasquez's debut, where these symptoms develop into a complex mental network.



Soft Moon is an introverted, enigmatic record. The cover, with its clearly minimal aesthetic influenced by German Bauhaus, shows an elegance that comes through best in its attention to detail and conceptual rigor. An imaginative world that can be summed up in geometric symbols and their spatial relationships, in which our own capacity for analysis and interpretation plays a crucial role.


The tracks that embody this space-time are both the instrumental emblem (vocals play an almost minimal role) and the very nemesis of this vision. While excellent examples of minimal rhythms such as "Tiny Spiders", "Dead Love" and the already mentioned "Parallels" play a crucial role in the album's mood, carving out tight, dark crevices poised between Sisters Of Mercy and early New Order, they also betray shades leaning more toward the borderlands of shoegaze and the post-industrial world.

Indeed, we can't hide the epileptic, clamorous nature of "Sewer Sickness" or "Into The Depths", escapes through catacomb-like ruins and metallic din, seemingly endless loops inside feedback fed by analog synths and drum machines. "Circles", another single pulled from the LP, is likewise an example of this multifaceted spirit: a deformed, illogical post-punk, propped up by cheap, broken electronics, yet capable of building a deeply sensory experience. 


The "Ghost Rider" of Suicide can be felt hovering around the record, alongside the noble ghosts of The Normal and kraut-rock lineages, able to wedge their Motorik DNA and weave cosmic webs into the composition's most hidden crevices.

Shortly after the album's release and the subsequent tour that saw the project successfully cross Europe and our own peninsula (alongside Vasquez: Justin Anastasi on bass and Damon Way on synths), a new EP of unreleased material was put out: Total Decay.


Marked by a compositional streak still in line with the debut LP, it manages to offer new angles of songwriting, shifting the sound toward a tribal percussiveness that, on tracks like "Alive" and "Visions", enriches the darkwave substrate or replaces it altogether, cultivating a lysergic noise-wave form.

At the same time, the title track reveals a liason noire with the dark, low-tech world of Blank Dogs, already glimpsed in "Circles" on the first album, while "Repetition" is perhaps the most abstract episode, slower to sink in, in its pout porri of feedback and drum machine.

Never tired of writing and seeking new sparks for his creative vein, the Cuban-born artist arrived in June 2012 with an extraordinary collaboration with John Foxx, which gave birth to the track Evidence (released by CT on 7").

A collaboration born not only out of mutual appreciation but – as Vasquez explains in a brief interview with Artrocker – out of the central role that "Metamatic" and Foxx's use of the Arp Odyssey played in Soft Moon's artistic growth.

The result could only be excellent: Evidence represents an ambiguous alchemical marriage in which the spirit of the former Ultravox frontman clearly dominates, bringing back to light the electronic, synthetic horizons dear to "This City" and "Burning Car", while at the same time flying above them, blending with Vasquez's hypnotic, metallic rhythms.

The second LP, Zeros, arrived at the end of 2012.

Luis Vasquez's new frontal assault is structurally built in the same way as the debut.

The aim is to create a cyclical continuum, in which the memory of history stirs up tension, fear, tragedy, restless rarefactions that merge into a sense of looming darkness rendered through martial percussion, leaden kosmische interludes, minimal-wave and clattering Motorik rhythms.

A space-time non-place that is born, once again, out of solitude. An intimate writing process that, however, loses the evolutionary progression shown up to the Total Decay EP, sketching out many small fragmented units, numerous self-contained art installations in which the song form is entirely lost.

The post-industrial pulse of "Machines", the cold, jarring darkwave of "Zeros" and "Insides", and the sick, binary, Carpenter-esque language of "Remembering The Future" fully embody this new vision.

The only exceptions seem to be "Die Life" – the first single taken from the album – and the following "Lost Years", where Vasquez's voice, pushed down in the mix to run parallel to synth and guitar, lends a sense of emotional claustrophobia, of vague spectral unease.

Compared to its self-titled predecessor, Zeros undoubtedly gains in sonic quality (Vasquez had Monte Vallier's studio behind him), in speed, and in sound design, carefully carved out with no trace of vintage flavor whatsoever — but it sadly loses the charm of those emotionally hollow cracks, caught up in an obsessive pursuit of a geometric perfection that here feels too artificial.

It must have been a particularly tough year and a half for Luis Vasquez, the mastermind behind The Soft Moon, spent in Venice, where he said he conceived and wrote Deeper (2015), a fierce, harsh and complex work. If at first the robotic blend of post-punk and kraut-rock was pleasant and well-judged, here instead we find a psychological monster capable of bringing avant-garde ideas to a wider audience, mixing — as the greats of the past knew how to do — heterogeneous elements usually kept in separate, non-communicating musical compartments.

We therefore get an alternation between experimental, synthetic tracks (perhaps the boldest new element of the whole album) and pieces closer to 4AD-style post-punk (like "Try" or the elegant wave of "Feel"), whose guitar swells do nothing to loosen the tension. The songwriting and its emotional shadings draw here on a palette of deep contrasts and tiny nuances that make the record solid, managing to balance the tone of each track in service of a single goal: laying bare the artist's soul, his hidden anxieties, his almost furious exaltation, even through screams that seem to come from something other than a human voice, propped up by rhythmic pillars.

Whether in the unusually prominent presence of tracks leaning towards alternative dance (the jagged "Wrong" above all) or in a vocal line closer to 80s pop, as in "Wasting", you can tell how the artist, through total command of his expressive means, has managed to fuse experimentation and popular music, old-school gothic and new turn-of-the-millennium articulations, multiplying the facets of his work.

Note the sorrowful piano notes accompanying the melancholic, Reznor-esque "Without", the deep quasi-African rhythms crowning "Deeper", ravaged by inner abysses, and "Being", which uses tape recordings to create an almost cinematic feel, offset by wild, unleashed screams that fade into noisy, never-ending feedback. Worth noting too is how Vasquez managed to move from minimal, often purely instrumental compositions into full-fledged songs, taking on the difficult challenge of measuring himself against a form with far more followers than the simple alternative circuit: here he succeeds, even while using a decidedly unfriendly range of sounds, orchestrated in a way that still manages to hook the listener.

The tracks are menacingly mechanical; the industrial streak doesn't lie so much in the electronic sound or the relentless rhythm, but in its obsessive, markedly disharmonious repetition, the result of which conveys deep unease, like the transformation of the scream in "Desertion" or the syncopated beat of "Black", which almost seems to scorch the ear.

Luis Vasquez's fourth album, Criminal, carries on the shift begun with the previous record with a work that pushes even harder on the accelerator of a personal, mutant form of post-punk and dark-shoegaze, hybridized with electro-industrial EBM percussion, not far from the most inspired and tormented Nine Inch Nails. The Oakland-based artist keeps digging deep into contemporary urban paranoia with a sound that's synthetic, schizoid and distorted, but this new chapter in The Soft Moon's saga is above all an autobiographical record, a reflection on guilt, pain and addiction.

In 2022, the fifth album Exister was released, a work that further merges Vasquez's post-punk background with the post-industrial tendencies he holds so dear (electronic experimentation at times becomes dominant). The record does pay a price in a certain underlying sprawl, but proves full of energy and illuminating ideas (the drama of "Become The Lies" above all), alternating violent electronic chaos with darker, more introspective passages.

After an exhausting world tour (Italy included), Luis Vasquez was about to resume his touring schedule in February 2024, bringing his music to countries he'd never played before (from Georgia to Kazakhstan). Dates that, sadly, remained only on paper, because Vasquez left us prematurely. 

News of his death by overdose reached us on January 19, 2024: the musician's body was found inside an apartment where a private party had apparently taken place. Beside him lay the bodies of techno producer Juan Mendez (Silent Servant) and his wife Simone. A tragedy within a tragedy, for a tormented figure who leaves a visceral void not only in the hearts of his fans but also among the new generation of post-punk artists who absorbed so much from him.

Contributions by Federico Gennari ("Deeper"), Marco De Baptistis ("Criminal") and Paolo Chemnitz ("Exister" and appendix)

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