On the road with Moriarty

Second album, The Missing Room

Paris 

26/04/2011 - 

More than three years after their first album Gee Whiz But This Is A Lonesome Town, Moriarty has returned with a second, self-produced opus, The Missing Room: an album forged on the road while they were touring, an electric-folk album, loaded with ghosts.

Around Earl Grey and other fragrant herbal teas, squashed into a Parisian bar, the Moriarty five, one sister and four chosen brothers as they like to remind you – Rosemary, Charles, Arthur, Thomas, Stephan and Vincent – play around in an undisciplined way, with humour and independence.

For their second album, The Missing Room, they have, for example, freed themselves from their record label, Naïve, so that they can fly on their own wings: manage their time, their image, gift themselves the luxury of a magnificent, silkscreened album cover… In the interview, the same: they do what they want! They  digress, philosophize, joke, take out socks from magicians’ pockets, guffaw… In three words: impossible to tame!

The road to the horizon

Their story, it has to be said, has predisposed them for adventure. The group got together in 1995, and chose a name inspired by the hero of the book On the Road by Jack Kerouac, Dean Moriarty, genius of excess. And following the trail, the latter was himself Professor Moriarty’s literary nephew, one of Conan Doyle’s characters, Sherlock Holmes’ sworn enemy, and evil genius. As for the name’s etymology, it comes from Western Ireland and means “man of the sea”. Finally, Moriarty is also a small town in New Mexico on Route 66; a pilot, Ernest; and an actress in little known films, Cathy…

Like a sign from fate, all these meanings invite the most extravagant journeys, on a road with a sole horizon. In the maze of their rehearsal area, the protagonists, with strong American genes and affinities, invent their own “Moriarty Land”, a small republic in perpetual motion, located – according to Stephan the double bass player – exactly between a number of border posts, at the end of a land without political membership, where a democracy reigns consisting of five heads, a government strong on endless discussion.

So, right from their first album, Gee Whiz But This Is A Lonesome Town, they drew the outlines of a fantasy Americana, woven with folk, harmonicas, dreams of bisons, of here and there, carried on Rosemary’s ethereal voice. So well, in fact, that this first album, this little square box at the root of all their succees, will transform their dream: the metaphorical road becomes real …

Songs raised on fresh air

A tour of 100 000 kilometres in three years, from a Woodstock-style festival in Japan of solitary restless wandering through the corridors of the Hyatt Hotel in Hong Kong, to the Church of Notre-Dame des Routiers to the Le Corbusier Chapel in Ronchamp, in the Haute-Saône, where the freezing cold enveloped the frosty stage in a halo… memories flow like recitations in haunted places.

The tribe has forged their new songs on this rollercoaster of life. For their second opus, The Missing Room, their tour preceded their album. Reasons: “When we write a song, it’s rarely set in stone. Every night it stays open to the public’s energy and our own emotions. We don’t want to raise our creations in a little In Vitro cage of a studio: they’re not battery chickens, but songs raised in fresh air, lubricated by beer, fed by life.”

As they go on their journey, so Moriarty electrocutes their songs, muscles them, amplifies them, as if it’s urgent. They sing about break ups, losses, searches, stretch in the twilight, play about the sun and moon, about death and resurrection, summon ghosts… With a sense of humour and taste nourished on the absurd, they create their film noir, a fatalism which always ends up with the hero being caught, even when he rebels against his fate.

One box less

As for the album’s title, The Missing Room, Moriarty could write a three-volume thesis on the subject. They thus refer to all the hotel rooms they’ve passed through while on tour and photographed by Stephan (but isn’t he missing one?); they also mention this “one box less” which defines them, the piece of the jigsaw puzzle which would complete their journey, or the secret room in a haunted house (which hides the ogre, the young girl, the fairy…).

Finally, the title also evokes the Japanese idea of Ma, which means an interval between two things: either the space between two walls, between two notes of music (musical silence), between two words (silence of thought). It connotes a negative interval, where anything can be created.

For a week during March at the Trianon in Paris where their concerts were sold out, Moriarty invested their energy in this missing piece of the puzzle. On stage in front of an audience they’d won over, they related their story: an obscure adventure told in a light where objects spoke, where mournful tales came to life… Moriarty definitely reveals the soul of their music: a country infused with spirits!

Moriarty The Missing Room (Air Rytmo/L’Autre Distribution) 2011
Currently touring in France.  

Anne-Laure  Lemancel