MOOLAH TEMPLE $tringband

------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------------------------------------- moolah temple live ep$
the devil has em on the run (tracks 1-5) & family skeleton turnt a'loose (tracks 6-11) are: (c) 2007 ANTI DRAM $HOP PARTY
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"Dust, the air of the room, one's clothes all become radio-active. The evil has reached an acute stage in our laboratory."
Following the trainwreck demise of Smoky Mtn. Drum'n Bass, MOOLAH TEMPLE $tringband began as a Western NC two-piece Temperance act dubbed, Anti Dram $hop Party. The show was billed as "A Secret History of the 20th Century," consisting of Even More (a/k/a Eden Moor), fiddle and Jon Yen (a/k/a Gem Yon, Johnny Favorite, Johnny Farragut, etc.), guitar. To accomodate historical jetlag, both split vocal duties. It dawned on them that they couldn't live up to such a lofty reputation with Johnny involved, though they sporadically record noise and do business under their former appellation. Messrs. More & Yen spend their days in Jackson County recording their homemade no-fi wares and like fire ants at a picnic, they play the occasional party, tavern, festival, or cafe gig.
Theirs is a music steeped in Absurdist, Dada, archaic fraternal and so-called occult pursuits, striking originals, Old Time, Country Blues, and the more maudlin of classic country and of the Public Domain. Moolah Temple $tringband's genre-defying take on Americana uproots alt-country's classic rock pretensions with found sound and willfully cliched beats. Rather than delving deeper into electronics as one would imagine from previous projects, Yen & More managed to make their goat drawn deathcart ricketier.
They released a self-produced cd entitled, BULLET ON THE WOOD$TOVE, as well as two live e.p.s, THE DEVIL HA$ EM ON THE RUN and FAMILY $KELETON TURNT A'LOO$E. Their first limited run full-length cassette and cdr, DOING DOUGHNUT$ AT THE GRAVEYARD, garnered derision from established artists/folk purists yet received praise from the kids and Mr. Marshall Ballew. They inadvertently start scenes, abandon them forthwith, and listen to them mountain echoes. On certain nights, they are the best esoteric Islamic-Judeo-Christian Old Timey Country & Western Fraternal Cruise Ship Dancehall band one is likely to ever see.
MOOLAH TEMPLE $tringband recently completed, MONEY ON THE FLOOR, a 16 track thing of beauty spanning the last two years of live and studio work. MOOLAH TEMPLE $tringband was pleased to include the REDHEADED STEPCHILD's excellent guitar work on MONEY ON THE FLOOR.
A new album is in the works tentatively titled, FOR A FEW DOLLAR$ MORE or $ANITARY FAIR. Upcoming projects might include editing the Scarlet Letter and sifting through the mounds of tapes, cds, minidiscs, floppys, and zips for future releases.
Eden and Johnny provided score and noise for the Terpsicorps ballet adaptation of the Scarlet Letter (thanks Heather!) in 2006 with Eden's daddy, David W. Moore. They performed in the 2007 encore performance as well.
JON YEN is a member of Robot Buckwheats and is THE ORIGINAL VACATION BIBLE SCHOOL, was thee Black Dragon, and is formerly of K-Bots and Grendel. EVEN MORE fronted Asheville's Rib Tips and has fiddled in Court Square, the Blazing Star String Band, and international cheese shops of renown. Yen and More are former members of Smoky Mtn. Drum'n Bass (Junior Samples Jr. and Son of 5 Dollar Man). When not recording or performing together, they practice stabbing each other in the back. One clown is merely a clown but two clowns make a circus.
Contact MOOLAH TEMPLE $tringband at [email protected]
"The American public never deserves to feel like our music makes you feel."
-Even More (paraphrasing the response of a well-known rock producer after auditioning the BULLET ON THE WOOD$TOVE cd ... it has become a badge of honor)
"Us live? We encourage couple skating during the more maudlin numbers. I suppose the experience is somewhat similar to Alien vs. Predator."
-Johnny Favorite
IN Review SMN
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Moolah Temple String Band
Bullet On The Woodstove
Imagine yourself sitting alone in a small hotel room in New York City or even Peoria, trying to figure out just what kind of music keeps drifting through the open transom across the hall — you’re sure there’s something you recognize, but you can’t quite put your finger on it. Is it the words? The melody? Just what the hell is this stuff anyway?
If you’re like most people, you crave familiarity in all aspects of your life — food, music, clothes, companions, and so on. But if you’re like me, you also crave surprises — curveballs that you never see coming, senses and perceptions that never occur to you in your wildest imaginings until they suddenly smack you upside the head
My favorite new surprise is a recording by Moolah Temple String Band called Bullet On The Woodstove. Some readers may remember Smoky Mountain Drum And Bass, an old-time/electronic hybrid from Jackson County a few years back. After their demise, alumni Jonathan Wertheim and Ian Moore formed Moolah Temple String Band. As Jon Yen and Even Moore, they have put together a sound unlike anything I’ve ever heard before, even though I’ve heard many of their songs throughout my life.
Bullet On The Woodstove is a wonderful collection of original songs and real old-time standards of a time gone by, revisited through different eyes in a different time and molded into a new musical form. Some old-timers will recognize titles like “The House Carpenter,” “Handsome Molly” and “Molderin Vine,” but it is highly unlikely they will recognize MTSB’s versions, with their trip-hop and dancehall beats and rhythms and from-another-dimension vocals. The album is a twisted joyride through the history of American music, taking cues from gospel, minstrel shows, tin pan alley, jazz, and (dare I say it) folk music.
A highlight is “Booze Yacht,” a ballad from Harker’s Island remembering a time when a foundering ship full of confiscated liquor had to jettison it’s cargo or sink — the fishermen came home with nets filled with bottles, and consequently no fishing occurred for the next two weeks — a true story, I’m told.
I realize this doesn’t really convey exactly what MTSB sounds like, and the most concise take from Jonathan was Dada Shriner Old Time, a description that poses more questions than it answers. A short list of influences would include: old Velvet Underground, Charlie Poole, Captain Beefheart, The Residents, Reverend J. M. Gates, Harry Partch, Prince, Stockhausen, Ennio Morricone, and Eugene Ionesco. Their absurdist channeling of the American songbag is situationist art at its most entertaining — and in concert, you never really know what’s coming up next. When was the last time you saw a show like that?
Upcoming appearances include a solo appearance with Jonathan as Black Dragon at Guadalupe in Sylva on July 16 and an Aug. 19 show at Broadways in Asheville,. Do yourself a favor and check out these guys — I guarantee you’ll be surprised and entertained.
— Marshall Ballew
SMN Arts+Events
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Blessed, demented genius
By Chris Cooper
The picture you see when you flip open the new Moolah Temple Stringband CD shows singer/guitarist/found-sound alchemist Jonathan Wertheim whacking some hapless little synthesizer to bits with a mallet. That’s almost all that needs to be said if you’re familiar with the kind of sonic de-(re?)construction he and Ian Moore have pursued since the days of Smoky Mountain Drum’n Bass, the project from which Moolah Temple was born.
I’ve heard their music described as something like “the sound of a television on the fritz in the next room of a creepy motel.” And yeah, it can sound like that. It can also sound like three separate songs drunkenly occurring at once, smacking into each other every so often. Or a nightmarish collage of disconcerting noises set to cheezoid beatbox rhythms- with vaguely Appalachian undercurrents.
You may think you’re hearing a crackling plastic wrapper and those little “hand farts” you make by clasping your palms tightly together just so during “Spiders Care, Babe,” followed by a spatula scraping a pan with eggs frying in it. You might think that Money On The Floor is the strangest and most wonderful thing to come out of this odd little town in nearly forever.
It seems that an early goal for Wertheim and Moore was simply to reinterpret old time music in thoroughly drastic and unbecoming ways, and sure enough they’ve done a lot of that. That both are “legit” musicians — make no assumption that these musical oddities aren’t driven by focused intent and skill — reminds us that mere technique will often take a backseat to imagination, twisted as it may sometimes be. The moments of normalcy, if you can describe them as so, reveal artists that are perfectly capable of doing it “right,” but that absolutely cannot keep their hands off the “freak” button.
“Dysentery Pesthouse” rolls in with a haunted jungle soundscape broiling under Moore’s lilting, sometimes lurching fiddle. After a few bars, the tremoloed guitar from a Morricone film shows up. For a band that described their earliest recordings as “no-fi,” there’s an awful lot happening here, and a remarkable use of placement in the stereo field. Sounds seem to appear from over your shoulder, from over in the corner and above your head.
The careful reassembly of what appears to be a pulpit dissertation on the inevitability of hard times in “Blues Tour” is momentarily interrupted by a snippet of from one of those greasy QVC salesmen expressing his excitement about their next “product.” Then it’s back to the sampled mantra “hard times... hard time blues...” which by now has grown in intensity and purpose. Maybe I’m taking this track a little too seriously, but damn — when an artist finds a way to say what they need to say in such a striking way, it’s hard to deny the urge to dissect it and see what makes it tick.
As if to remind you that they don’t always construct their music in the most non-traditional ways possible, “(I’m Not) Looking For The Devil Tonight” ties more found sound (this time a late nite Christian radio sermon) to a loopy acoustic blues that’s wonderfully played. “Trash Mtn.” wanders into remix territory, with the prerequisite echoed atmospherics and sparsely arranged but hypnotic rhythms. It goes out with a bang — rather, a thermonuclear explosion. “Falstaff AZ” stumbles along, rickety as can be for almost nine minutes, at times sounding as though it was filtered through a faulty phone connection from Venus. Then there’s that flatulent duck noise on beats one and three (mostly) that I won’t even try to explain.
The cliché of “mad scientists” is the easiest, but lamest way to sum up what Moolah Temple is about. Wertheim and Moore may be a little nuts, for sure, but it’s their skill for harnessing that lunacy and hammering it into a collection of aural experiences as striking as those on Money On The Floor that makes this so much fun (and scary, itchy, paranoia inducing, etc...) to hear. Impossible to categorize, pigeonhole or otherwise shove into a compartment and label in any way, Money On The Floor actually makes me want to return for a moment to the “star” rating system of CD quality, but that doesn’t quite fit. So let’s say these guys get five sun bleached cow skulls found in the red dust of some gravel road on the hottest day of your life. That means it’s great, by the way.