MUSIC Moira Scar is from the Bay Area, but it would be better to put it this way: from a time and space at the edge of one of Jack Smith’s 15-hour performances in a crustacean imaginative nethersphere, the musical entity that is Moira Scar has arrived. The duo’s self-released vinyl debut Slink to Intensity is made up of seven songs. Some manifest in frenetic outer space garage sounds. Others conjure sprawling free-jazz fantasy lands just beyond the negative space of a film frame. Slink to Intensity also features three photos of the group’s LuLu Gamma Ray and Roxy Monoxide in nakedly wild attire. The spirit of Mary Daly would approve. I recently asked Moira Scar about itself.
SFBG Moira Scar moves, but not in a typical running or walking way. it meanders or sallies forth, wiggles like a wildebeest, dances or slinks to intensity. What kind of human or animal actions do you find inspiring, and what reactions do you want people to have to your music?
Roxy Monoxide To become your own mystical beast. Still influenced by the made-up animal friends of childhood, along with the ideal that we can somehow stand up with the wild animals of the world and learn to coexist as animals again. But then again, stuck between predator and prey, the tiger mouth chews on her own zebra hinds, kind of like ouroboros.
LuLu Gamma Ray Haunting tones of the waddell seals inspire, along with loud boomings of the Lyrebird, which has two sound sources and can produce a far greater variety of sounds than human beings. Animals and plants have wide ranges of emotions, vast intelligence, and can impart important information if only we’d listen.
SFBG Can you tell me a bit about the vintage-horror film analog sounds in "You Make Me Scream" and how you made them?
LLGR The eerie entrancing sounds are made with a CAT SRM2 70’s analog synth’s pulse width modulation. I play electronic music and musique concrete in the lineage of Delia Derbyshire, Ruth White, Sun Ra, and David Tudor, as well as other courageous musical astronauts.
SFBG What is Moira Scar’s favorite Nino Rota score? For me, you also bring to mind the organ sounds in the movie Carnival of Souls.
LLGR Nina Rota’s cut-up method in Juliette of the Spirits is influential, and also the camp and beauty of organists Korla Pandit and Anton LaVey. Many spirits passed and future possess the vessel’s Pelvis and Saphoid, and are warped and distorted through our lens to create the Muse-ick
SFBG What do you like about Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante?
RM The bittersweet realism with poetic montage, the slacker anarchy and feebleness of our lives expressed through human and cat coexistence aboard barge on 1930s Seine and Paris backdrops, with antagonistic relationships and the wise drunken fool; Moira Scar can’t help but being romantic in spite of our psycho-depressive tendencies, or maybe because of them.
SFBG What drug is most recommended for listening to Moira Scar?
RM Moira is the drug. We have been told that we are like watching Forbidden Zone on acid, and some fans enjoy their lubricants while dancing to Scar. But for us the muse possession is the best high.
SFBG What is Moira Scar’s vision of the future?
RM A show with Bambi Lake, M. Lamar, the Deepthroats, and Omnivourous Sinsillium; and us as vegan witches in a world of cannibal zombies.
LLGR To wake the audience from corporate hypnosis with insect and alien soundscapes. Realign nutrinos and journey through the wormhole with us!
RM and LLGR Transmogrify!
MOIRA SCAR
With Tongue and Teeth, Deep Teens
Aug. 26, 9 p.m., 21 and over
The Stud Bar
399 Ninth St., SF
Aug. 31, 10 p.m., all ages
SubMission
2183 Mission, SF