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Stars Are the Light, the luminous seventh album by the American psych explorers Moon Duo, marks a progression into significantly new territory. From a preoccupation with the transcendental and occult that informed Ripley Johnson and Sanae Yamada's guitar-driven psych rock, and reached it's apotheosis in the acclaimed Occult Architecture diptych, Stars Are the Light sees the band synthesize the abstract and metaphysical with the embodied and terrestrial. Says Yamada InchWe have changed, the nature of our collaboration has changed, the world has changed, and we wanted the new music to reflect that.Inch Branching out from Occult Architecture Vol. 2, the album has a sonic physicality that is at once propulsive and undulating; it puts dance at the heart of an expansive nexus that connects the body to the stars. These are songs about embodied human experience - love, change, misunderstanding, internal struggle, joy, misery, alienation, discord, harmony, celebration - rendered as a kind of dance of the self, both in relation to other selves and to the eternal dance of the cosmos. Taking disco as it's groove-oriented departure point, Stars Are the Light shimmers with elements of '70s funk and '90s rave. Johnson's signature guitar sound is at it's most languid and refined, while Yamada's synths and oneiric vocals are foregrounded to create a spacious percussiveness that invites the body to move with it's mesmeric rhythms. With Sonic Boom (Spacemen 3, Spectrum) at the mixing desk in Portugal's Serra de Sintra, (known to the Romans as InchThe Mountains of the MoonInch) the area's rich landscape and powerful lunar energies exerted a strong influence on the vibe and sonic texture of the album. On embracing disco as an inspiration, Yamada says, InchIt's something we hadn't referenced in our music before, but it's core concepts really align with what we were circling around as we m
