Guest List: The Inspirations Of MMOSS

MMOSS (pronounced "moss") is a five-piece psychedelic-pop group from the unlikely environs of Dover, New Hampshire. Led by guitarist and electronics mastermind Doug Tuttle and flautist/organist Rachel Neveu, the group spent five years perfecting their debut album 'i' (out now on LP and cassette from Burger Records), striking an impressive balance between lysergic trippiness and solid pop hooks.

In a Critical Mob exclusive, Rachel details the genesis of the album and shares some of the band's favorite musical inspirations. In honor of the album's lower-case title, we decided to reprint her notes just as they came to us, sans capital letters.

'i' is the product of trying to do one thing for five years. the band started when in 2006 doug found out i played flute and we found out we wanted to make music together. the band then consisted of flute, guitar, a piece of sheet metal, a vox jaguar organ with quadraphonic sound, a fretless bass and an obsession of capturing the right sounds. we had two guitar players for a while and a revolving door for a rhythm section. we were unable to focus on recording a cohesive record because we were too busy fretting over the smallest thing, like the 16th flute track didn't fit right or something.

we moved to new hampshire in late 2007 without the rest of the band and waited for it to fizzle out. it fizzled and soon we met a record store employee with similar tastes in tunes who just happened to play bass and his best friend who didn't play drums, yet. we played together for awhile in this incarnation and it stuck, by 2009 we were working on 'i'.

we recorded the record in our practice space on a cassette 8 track recorder with various homemade signal processing gear that doug made (doug is mid-fi electronics) and three microphones. we have a strong love for the eerie mellotron sound and we don't have one or feel it's emulators do much justice, so we would spend hours notating and recording chordal flute, cello and voice parts. doug would sit on our leslie cab holding the speed switch he made in his hands, changing it while the three of us stood around one microphone 'ahhhing' into it. we just wanted to hear how much we could manipulate the sounds we were creating with the minimal amount of primitive gear we had.

once all the proper songs were recorded we started going through all the more 'far-out' recordings we've made and wove them around the songs, creating an album, with a side a and a side b, instead of a list of songs. we included backwards subliminal messages, far-away sounds, a whole recorder set from bass to sopranino and weirdo gizmos that doug masterminded. when we finished it my then 16 year old cousin suggested we send it to burger records and we did and they put out our tape and record.

here are some things that mean a lot to us.