Eliot Mo – ‘La Morosophie’ (2024)
‘La Morosophie’ is the newest album by Eliot Mo, heavily influenced and inspired by 60s and 70s progressive rock bands.
Eliot Mo is a 29-year-old guy living in a small village in Switzerland called Froideville. Near Lausanne, beside Lake Geneva, he and some friends have a place where they can all make music together, where they have been jamming improvised weekly sessions for almost ten years now. He is primarily a guitarist (acoustic, electric, bass…) playing since he was 14, and with a ton of YouTube tutorials, has taught himself keyboard and drums, and also the art of recording and mixing. ‘La Morosophie’ is his first album. It’s purely homemade, composed, recorded, and mixed entirely in his apartment. He plays every instrument you’ll hear and sings in a mix of English and French. He wrote all of these tracks a long time ago but only decided to record them properly around 2021-2022. He tells me that he struggled a lot with the mixing and restarted a couple of times. When he was finally happy with it, he tried to find a label for a couple of months but without results… After that, he decided to go independent, and by the time it took to order and produce the records, 2024 was already upon us, so here we are right now, and I sit with a copy of his album, impressed by the brilliant artwork by Nicolas Degaudenzi and intrigued to lay this slab of vinyl on my record player.
‘Souplex’ begins and I enter the album like the start of a dream, all echoey and lysergic as jangly guitars and a swirling vocal tell me about what’s “downstairs in the darkest shadows”, and I’m intrigued. There’s a short mid-sixties west coast guitar solo not too dissimilar to a sharp stab of Quicksilver Messenger Service, then I’m back into the vocal, before I somehow arrive at a jazz-induced smoking lounge inside an after-hours club, before swirling back to the beginning at the end of the beginning and I like what I hear.
‘Mandros Agora’ kicks off with jungle noises singing from the trees. The music starts up and sits me somewhere between Syd Barrett and Ty Segall, sounding somewhat off-kilter and purposefully disjointed, before taking a krautrock twist which leads me down a long winding path of nice piano and synth work towards track 3 with a brief Barrett/Segall revisit on the way back out.
‘Satané Hippy Joel’ begins with a resemblance to Gong. A garbled vocal and some confused whistling, tell me the story of Hippy Joel, who twists and turns around my mind like some drug-crazed woodland hobo. The guitars pick away above my head somewhere up on the ceiling, all the while being driven along really nicely by some solid drum work.
‘C’est Ça’ has a soul-drenched smooth start giving a noticeable juxtaposition from the last track’s ending, before a killer fuzz guitar draws me into the hypnotic hushed vocal line repeating “C’est Ça” which translates to “That’s it”.
Some gorgeous acoustic guitar and synth and plenty more fuzz guitar, mix in with the trance-like repetition of the vocal line. There is a slight Beatles twist and then we are back to that acoustic beauty, before closing out the first side of the record with a chunk more fuzz and keys tearing up an ending to drive me from my sofa to flip the record over.
Side 2 starts with ‘Hu Ha Babey’, a synth-heavy squelchy groove over a dreamy high vocal line declaring the singer’s love to who I can only imagine is the girl of his dreams. Accompanied with some great percussion additions and yet again some great electric guitar work, as it progresses to become a dream-like, ethereal wandering into the abyss.
On ‘Yebab Ah Uh’, that squelchy groove persists and I can hear those krautrock influences drifting back in on this instrumental track which I can’t quite explain but absolutely adore.
‘De A è E’ starts with a midnight 70s soulful beginning blending into a bit of Zappa-like Doo Wop vocal work and then it’s just driven along with that soulful city sound of cruising past neon-lit strip joints real late at night with a car full of friends, fully loaded on cocaine, knowing it’s gonna be a long weekend.
‘Pau-El Jam’ kicks off with some great Can (the band)-like drums as some wonderful synth sounds push me towards the inevitable end of the album, I’m reminded how much individual instrumentation of real high quality I’ve just heard through the entirety of this album as each one seems to take you on a different trip, igniting your senses towards a star-filled night sky.
‘Fin Heureuse’ closes out the album with an outer space-like fanfare which is again quite Zappa-like, bidding me farewell as I settle back down to earth and Eliot Mo waves goodbye after a really well-put-together, exciting, and impressive debut album.
Hats off to you, sir…
Ross Beattie (The Night Tripper)
Eliot Mo – ‘La Morosophie’ (2024)
