The term “dance music” comes with all manner of sonic baggage and musical expectations. Usually, those expectations are of the loud, explosive, hyperactive, and beat-driven. But that also means that those expectations could be termed obvious, cliched, tired, and overdone. Moon and Aries certainly make dance music, but it is of a sort that is a million miles away from everything that I have just listed.
Theirs is a gentler form of EDM, a blending of understated clubland gloss and beat-structured ambient dance music. Music which feels perfectly at home in either the main room or the chill-out zone…and for that matter, as the soundtrack to getting ready for a night out as well as the more laidback vibe setter for the post-party wind-down.
Firenight deftly balances bubbling digital soundscapes with soulful vocals and shimmering grooves with silky atmospherics; it is both neatly unobtrusive yet able to generate enough effervescent atmospherics to fill the room.
Moon and Aries sit on the sharp end of a gorgeous sonic journey that swept through the clubland scene in the late eighties, which led to the Bristol-based trip-hop community of the nineties and then which carried on with its gentle momentum into the present day.
Arguably, that makes them the successors to bands such as Portishead, Faithless, and Massive Attack. Actually, there is no argument about it; that is exactly what they are, and they carry that mesmerising trippy-dancey-urban-ambient groovesome torch with the dedication, determination, creativity, and adventurism that such a role demands.
Discover more from Dancing About Architecture
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
