If you’re looking for an artist somewhere between tUnE-yArDs and Anna Calvi, a woman who goes by the name Arthur Moon might just be your best bet. Hers is a kind of experi-avant-pop that you can deep dive into via her debut EP Our Head, premiering below. Sometimes the songs revel in a delicious discordancy (“Room”), sometimes they recall and dark-hearted Fiona Apple (“Wind Up”—the only track from the EP that’s already out in the ether).
But what of this girl who fancies taking a boy’s name? Lora-Faye Ashuvud is Arthur Moon, a Swede raised in Brooklyn, who studied contemporary art at Smith College in Northampton before heading back to NYC to make sweet, sweet music.
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Weird fact: Ashuvud suffers from a rare kind of migraine which causes aphasia. During these migraines, Ashuvud is lucid but unable to speak properly: “I’m having a migraine” might come out “Pony, Christmas tree, elbow!”
This experience in turn influenced her mode of music making: “I realized it was a version of what I’d always been looking for from music—that feeling of being turned on your head, not knowing up from down, wrong note from right note, one from two. Of being outside, disoriented, queered.”
Ashuvud had this to say about her debut EP: “It’s interesting to me how we often seek out our own disorientation—the odd human impulse that makes us revel in not knowing up from down on a rollercoaster, that causes us to seek again and again the turmoil of falling in love, that thrills us in our loss of control when we take drugs, alcohol. Some of the tracks on the EP experiment with how music can joyfully upend a listener when expectations about song-form or time are inverted (see ‘Boxing’ and ‘Bold Affair’), while others look at the way disorientation inflects our relationships (see ‘Room’) and political systems (‘Wind-Up’).”
