Arkive

We are excited to get Moonshake’s debut album Eva Luna back in print, and on October 6th, we will release a deluxe edition re-mastered from analogue 1⁄2” tape on double blue vinyl. Our reissue contains 19 tracks which equal the album’s original 10, The non-LP three-song single “Secondhand Clothes”, the two b-sides from the “Beautiful Pigeon” single and four tracks from a November 1992 John Peel session. The release also includes an 8-page full-colour booklet.

Following an initial 1991 EP on Creation Records Moonshake then signed to Beggars label too pure. Their debut album Eva Luna was released in 1992 by too pure everywhere except the US, where it was released by Matador/Atlantic.

Moonshake was formed in 1991 by David Callahan (vocals, guitars, samplers), formerly of The Wolfhounds, and New York musician Margaret Fiedler (vocals, guitars, samplers). Callahan and Fiedler recorded a demo for Creation Records, and were joined by John Frenett (bass) and Miguel Morland (“Mig”, drums) to record and release the First EP for Creation in 1991 . They took their name from a 1973 single by Can. Both Fiedler and Callahan wrote songs, and they would (generally) sing on the songs that they wrote. Their output of shared inspiration produced wildly different results - Can, PIL, Kraftwerk, MBV, Erik B & Rakim were a melting pot that made Moonshake somewhat uncategorizable, and as Margaret noted in an interview, “Moonshake was a collision - it was supposed to be a collision.”

Their debut album Eva Luna took its name from a novel by Chilean author Isabel Allende and the tracks on it are split evenly between the two songwriters. Callahan’s songs are somewhat angry, dissonant, post-punk affairs, while Fiedler’s are just as angular, but her quieter sometimes near whispered vocals compliment her writing partner’s equally. Producer/engineer Guy Fixsen, fresh from his work on My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, was instrumental in making the album cohesive.

This album has been critically revisited often since its original release, with Tiny Mix Tapes describing their sound as “an updated take on Can and Public Image Limited’s rhythmic propulsion with noisier guitar work and a predilection for sampling influenced by The Young Gods.” Last year, in a wonderfully long piece to celebrate the album’s 30th anniversary, Louder Than War wrote that they were blown away by the album’s “utterly spellbinding, dizzyingly genre-defying approach at articulating explicitly the sound of a city in the throes of urban psychosis and derangement...Eva Luna really is one hell of a ground-breaking record, and it stands resolutely alone among all of the albums released in 1992 as no other band has managed to create anything remotely similar before or since. It really is a unique album with few equals.”

In 1993, the original incarnation of the band split up, and Margaret Fiedler and John Frenett went on to form Laika with Guy Fixsen. Callahan and Morland continued on with guest musicians, with Callahan ultimately remaining the band’s sole original member. Moonshake ended in 1997 but their legacy is indisputable.