SPACEMOTH - Inward Eye

Cosmic lo-fi adventures for the second release from Spacemoth, the retro-future project of talented Californian producer Maryam Qudus. Preceded by a wonderfully quirky live session on KEXP (a radio station that deserves a knighthood for its editorial and stylistic choices), “Inward Eye” is a moon-lamp of psychedelic dream-pop, a detour into an indie-chic world rendered in desaturated technicolor. The robotics of Devo meet the avant-nostalgia of Stereolab, producing ten video messages burned onto VHS and beamed into orbit. It's an eclectic, richly detailed style that skillfully exploits the evocative power of its electronics: now busy weaving pulsing, dilated carpets of sound, now running wild in hypertrophic beats and loops, it carries Qudus's kaleidoscopic voice through vivid, melancholy settings where nostalgia and wonder mix and bend space-time.

“Do We Exist?” is the lead single and the manifesto of the whole project: a straight-ahead rhythm, bone-dry bass and drums straight out of new wave d'antan, steeped in a profusion of vintage synthesizers and astral harmonies, jolted here and there by acidic guitar bursts. Bodies, machines, projectors and projections merge in the digital-existential lyrics, building a dreamlike, disorienting poetics.
Between robotic journeys à la Kraftwerk (“Internet Fantasy” and “North Star”), outtakes worthy of the best Ladytron (“Paper Cup” or “The Universe Next Door”) and a few of the most lysergic Can moments (“A Photograph Replaced My Mind”), the album keeps up a light, enjoyable pace; synth and drum-machine loops launch the listener onto a starry autobahn, and everything coalesces like an alien galaxy glimpsed through a porthole (though whoever's watching has clearly had a healthy dose of peyote).

After the excellent debut “No Past No Future” (2022, Wax Nine Records), Maryam Qudus delivers a superb follow-up, with a style and polish capable of transcending time; the fusion of a million ideas, influences, memories, echoes, smoke and laser beams creates a fascinating black hole that stretches every experience, projecting us among the great-grandchildren of the year 3000 only to make us nostalgic for that lovely indie-pop of days gone by, all love and alienation.

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11/07/2026