Adagio Fishing by David Michael Moore

When we first discovered the music of Mississippi’s David Michael Moore in January 2021, he had several full-length albums available on streaming services under at least three different names — David Moore, David Michael Moore and Dayday Moemoe. There may be more we don’t know about, but we’re pretty sure we found them all. David kindly allowed us to remove these albums from the Web and select our favorite songs for a compilation called Flatboat River Witch: 1994-2015, intended to paint a powerful portrait of his complex musical mind over its two-hour and twenty-minute runtime. The compilation was praised by Uncut Magazine and Aquarium Drunkard alike. We admit that it only tells a sliver of David’s musical scope of vision. Today, the big reveal begins.

Over the next six months, we’ll be getting each of these albums back on to DSPs, complete with new artwork that nods to both David’s original covers — always done in collaboration with his dear friend, the mysterious Dr. Jim — and our own odd ULYSSA aesthetic. 

We begin the reissue series with 1994’s Adagio Fishing, a collection of four-track recordings that particularly highlight David’s inventiveness as a keyboard player and his interest in classical compostion. Gone for now is his rural, mystic lyricism. In fact, we surmise that at some point on Adagio Fishing, David Michael Moore discovers a new terrain somewhere between Jon Hassell’s Fourth World music (“a unified primitive/futuristic sound..”) and the Third Stream Jazz of Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain or Mary Lou Williams’s 1964 self-titled classic. Here, David Michael Moore invents Fourth Stream Jazz before your very ears. Massive Casio string swells and ultralight beams blasts from the digital heavens. Tape manipulations abound. The shrill two-syllable call of a Kildeer wound into a profound 7-minute Ravel ballet (of sorts). Tangos, stomps and sognandos — all generously and expertly boiled into a gurgling stew you have to slurp down two bowls of to even begin to understand. 

David wrote a bit about Adagio Fishing when he first uploaded it to streaming services in 2014 under his Dayday Moemoe moniker: 

"Adagio Fishing is a group of compositions done a while back (1994). Recorded into an old 4-track machine who has since passed, I’ve decided to pitch it out there anyway. I still like it. Tonewarts and all. Instruments use are of the period: a couple of digital keyboards; wooden drums; a shortwave radio. During that time, I was experimenting with superimposing various physical geometries found in Nature over different tone mandalas so to map out patterns for harmonic progressions and melody. Flowers; skulls; leaves; photo of a slithering snake through sand; a human hand; bird tracks in mud; anything that beckoned really. Why not an old shoe or a ladies bikini bottom?

Well, why not? Take a ride on this Mandala baby. Kind of a musical Glass Bead Game of sorts. I was reading books along the lines of Sensitive Chaos by Theodor Schwenk and The Power of Limits by Gyorgy Dozci, trying to conjure inspiration and direction from such writings. Cut me a slice of the Golden Section please. Correlating the vibe. A vibes indigo. F is red. C is Green. Harmonic crumbs through the dark forest. Anyway, a few of the compositions were involved in this kind of formula making. Turn it up. Tweak your system. Enjoy it if you can. My name is Dayday Moemoe and I approve this message."

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