Luna Honey’s raw atmospheres come to life in Bound, set for release on November 22

Transmission 113: Interview with Luna Honey

Luna Honey is an experimental dark rock trio formed in Washington, DC, in 2017. Comprising Maura Pond, Benjamin Schurr, and Levi Flack, the band incorporates unconventional instruments like organ pipes, vibraphones, and pitch-shifted kazoos to create raw, intense atmospheres. Their music often delves into themes of loss and transformation, carrying a powerful emotional weight. Their debut album, Peace Will Grind You Down (2018), established their evolving style, while their latest release, Bound (out November 22), continues their exploration of deep emotional terrain.

Featured image: Lindsay Hogan
Luna Honey‘s official site, Instagram and Facebook

Can you tell us about your earliest musical influences and how they led to the formation of Luna Honey?

For me personally, my earliest musical influences really came from singing in the church choir growing up. I had a hole I don’t think I realized was there for years, which is that feeling you get singing up in a choir loft in front of an organ being played at full volume and the floor and everything around you is just vibrating. That’s where I fell in love with not just music, but the feeling of music as something bigger than yourself. There’s something sacred in music, even some secular music. But my first favorite bands as a kid were Nirvana, B-52s, Nine Inch Nails, and Cat Power. You can probably hear bits of all that in Luna Honey if you are looking for it.

Levi and I met Ben at an Arto Lindsay show when Ben’s band at the time was opening for him at the Black Cat in DC, and we got to talking and decided to road trip to Philly together to see Nick Cave at the Electric Factory. That was a wild trip, we immediately hit it off and all ended up getting tattoos together. I came away knowing we were going to make music together in some form. So thank you Nick Cave, without that trip, there may have been no band. We’re also all big Swans fans, but in general we all like a wide range of music. We’re just as likely to go to a Missy Mazzoli opera or a performance of Quartet for the End of Time. And it’s not all dark stuff. We like fun sometimes.

How would you describe the atmosphere of the DC DIY scene in 2017, and how did it contribute to Luna Honey’s growth?

DC had an unusually supportive underground music scene. I’d spent a good chunk of my 20s going to house shows as an audience member and I have fond memories of all the long dead house spaces. Ben ran a spot called The Beehive and was very active when we all met. I’d say the community motto was really “do it together” rather than “do it yourself.” We were odd ducks. I don’t know that we musically meshed with anyone, but no one was requiring we mesh. It was a tight-knit community that was open-minded about genres and there was more overlap between a wider range of music just due to the size. I’m grateful for our early DC fans for being so warm and receptive.

How did your informal sessions in Levi Flack’s basement evolve into setting the goal of writing a full album?

It’s strange to look back on now since we’re on our sixth album, but before we started, writing and recording an album’s worth of material seemed like a herculean undertaking.

It’s worth mentioning that before playing music with Levi, I was basically a musical hermit who both compulsively wrote songs but also would also feel physically ill if anyone actually accidentally heard them or caught me working on them. I had a harddrive that died that probably had hundreds of rough demos that literally no one ever heard because I treated writing more like private journaling.

Levi had started playing bass as a way to help get through the grief of losing his mom in 2013. Levi is unusually supportive and encouraging, and at that point I wanted to get past this phobia I had about playing with other people. We had great musical chemistry together and that turned out to feel really easy, which was new for me at the time and it made me start to realize that the reward for pushing past the uncomfortable vulnerability of sharing your music with other people is that you get to work with them and make art together and grow.

We had different reasons, but we both arrived at a need to finish an album. Meeting Ben is what pulled all that together as he agreed to record us. At the recording of our first album, “Peace Will Grind You Down,” Ben was not officially in the band as there was no band, but he would agree to be in it by the time it was released. We learned a great deal from him in a short period and there is an undeniable magic between the three of us creatively. I am very grateful to the both of them for being so dedicated to the project and open to it as a vehicle for exploration.

Your music often treads the line between beauty and dissonance. How do you navigate that tightrope?

The world around us hangs in a state of constant simultaneous beauty and dissonance. I don’t know how much navigating we are really doing versus just drifting on the currents. We try to let a song be what it is going to be. I appreciate that none of us have the impulse to make changes to downplay unpleasant parts and make them more palatable. On the flip side, we’ve been trying to avoid the urge to mess songs up or try to make them intentionally uncomfortable just because they are coming out more gentle or understated. You can hear this on the second half of “Bound,” there are some quiet songs with simple production that we considered dressing up more, but they felt done as they were. Songs have threads to me, so do albums. You rummage around in your gut until you find the thread and then you just keep following it and try not to get in the way.

What role did your collaboration with Norman Westberg play in the creation of Aftermath? How did that partnership come about?

Aftermath was done remotely during COVID with Norman in New York and Ben and I in Richmond, VA. For Side A of Aftermath, we’d send files to Norman and he’d record his response to them and send it back. For Side B, the last piece, Norman sent a live performance he’d done over for us to work with, which was just an absolute dream because what he sent over was already so good on its own. We wanted to be careful not to add anything that would drown out his playing. That track is over 20 minutes long, which was daunting to tackle in terms of pacing for writing vocals because it’s not like you have measures to count where you are in that style of music. I like that kind of thing as a challenge and we’d already developed a similar creative workflow working on “Branches.” If you do a deep listen to longer ambient work, the music will generally tell you where something should change, and I used those moments to break the longer piece into more manageable lyrical segments, maybe three or four, I can’t remember, which we then recorded piece by piece. Ben and I added the additional synths and other instrumentation to emphasize those moments of change while trying to stay within the existing emotional landscape. Very fun challenge.

Meeting Norman and getting to be friends with him has been a highlight of this whole experience, I just think he’s as delightful a person as he is a talented musician. Ben has looked to him as a guitar role model for a very long time. Levi and I met him briefly in DC when he came through with DBUK in 2019 and that is how I first heard his solo work. After my mother died in 2020, I was having a hard time and listening to his albums on repeat. It was spooky because I started hearing vocal melodies to some of them and abstractly thinking how nice it would be to be able to work with him. He sent us an email a few days later saying it would be nice to play on a project. I hadn’t been sleeping at that time and I did actually think I was losing my mind for a moment because it felt like my inside thought had escaped out of my body somehow. It helped pull me out of a pretty dark place of grief, and I will never be able to express how grateful I am to him for that.

You’ve described your art as emerging from “the death of the ego.” How do you kill yours in the studio?

By remembering you are there because you are in service of something. Trusting your bandmates. Being open to killing parts maybe you or someone else has come up with something that you might really like but just aren’t serving the song. Also examining why you might initially not like something or are uncomfortable with it and whether it might be the right thing to do even if you don’t want to. Toxic internal thoughts that are actually just the ego like: “this might be too weird,” “I don’t know if people will like this,” or “This is probably bad.” We think of ego as the voice inside that tells us we are great, but it also steers us to avoid failure and humiliation. What, you think you’re a genius? That you are above being laughable? That people should like everything you do? Stop making it about you and your silly, passing feelings and just focus on the work, you know? I listened to those voices for far too long and lost a good decade of time I should have been doing this.

I’m still trying to get there. Diving into my worst fears and learning how to maintain that state seemed like a good theory for how to move past myself, but it is a process. I have horrible stage fright. But good nights on stage, the fear boils over and fizzles and pops until the room isn’t there anymore, and I am not there anymore, and I will find myself in a moment where I regain awareness and realize I have been singing. Every now and then, we’ll have a night where I’m not nervous beforehand, and those are usually not very good nights for me. Fear generates a tremendous amount of energy and you get to decide how to use it.

Ben and Levi are down to go wherever and take things as far as necessary, and all of us strive to make sure everyone else feels safe to bring in whatever they are hearing, even if we don’t end up using it. There’s no yelling allowed at practice. Practice is a sacred, intimate space. I don’t see how people are supposed to “get there” if you don’t trust and feel artistically safe with the people you are working with.

How does the tension between improvisation and structure play out in your creative process?

This is a great question. I have to give a shout out to Ben here because from his years of recording people, he’s really good at sensing when there’s a moment about to happen. There are many Luna Honey songs that wouldn’t have been born if he hadn’t had the good sense to start recording as I’m noodling on something or we are all riffing off each other during practice. Speaking broadly when we are recording, I lean towards improvisation, Ben slightly towards structure, Levi probably somewhere in the middle. I want to have a repetitive, pre-established very simple moody loop to lock into, but I prefer to go relatively blind before we hit record.

“Vacuum Cleaner” is an example of this. That wasn’t originally going to be on this album as it was not a song we’d been playing live, but I wanted to be able to work out the vocals in a space I could be really loud and wanted to take advantage of Dan’s large warehouse studio while we were there. I listened to the instrumental track of the feedback and the beat on repeat, then wrote the lyrics and read them to the music to myself several times to test out the cadence and the rough timing to make sure it’s the right amount of words for how long it needed to be. I had a pretty good idea of what style of singing I could hear. But I went in having no idea about the melody. What you hear on the record is the first take. I love being able to capture that when it works, whether for vocals or synth or any instrument.

“Vacuum Cleaner” on “Bound” grapples with technology, gender, and progress. How do these themes intertwine in the track?

I get nervous writing lyrics about gender issues because there is a tendency in the listener to simplify songs into being about just that, and I find the man vs. woman narrative to be dull and reductive. Especially since the overturning of Roe v Wade, I’ve been walking around with a kind of anger I don’t know how to put into words. But that’s just one thing. Suicide in the US has gone up 40% since 2000, but meanwhile we are supposed to have made all this social progress during that time.

While that is happening, we are surrounded by the promise of technology’s ability to make our lives better. I ended up down a rabbit hole looking at vintage advertisements for vacuum cleaners. They are exactly what you would think- all promises to liberate women from the drudgery of housework by making it easier to do that housework. The vacuum cleaner simultaneously made women’s lives easier and also did nothing to challenge that housework was women’s work. This is an important feminist observation, but in the song, I am trying to bring the broader absurd undercurrent there closer to the surface.

The problem is not the metaphorical vacuum cleaner, I do love my vacuum cleaner. The issue is what it allows us to avoid confronting by making the pain points less noticeable. How many ads have you been getting for products or services that are aimed at helping you feel more in control of your unmanageable life? Each of us on our own is struggling to find individual solutions to cope with these broader, dehumanizing trends. But maybe it isn’t your fault your life feels unmanageable, maybe something bigger needs to change here and it isn’t just that you aren’t doing enough self-care or being “productive” enough?

How does “Bound” differ from your previous works like “Parables” or “Ballast”?

“Bound” is our first album we recorded at least partially in a studio and not in our home studios, and we wanted to be really intentional this time. Up until “Bound,” what you hear on the recordings is the process of us writing the songs, then we’d take the recorded tracks and figure out what we could play live for shows. The problem with this is then after you’ve played the songs over and over in front of people, they do take on a different energy and we’ll wistfully look back at the album and wish we’d captured that. This time, we did wait until we’d played at least some of the songs at shows, then went into the studio with the intent to capture that feeling. Dan Angel’s warehouse space we recorded in had all these mics set up all over the building, and for one thing, we set up our PA and blasted our electronic beats out at full volume so we could re-record them and mix in what they sound like in a real space. Plus Dan is an incredible drummer and added drums to most of the tracks, so overall the big parts of the album just feel bigger, the hits hit harder, and there’s some dirt and rawness in there we were reaching for previously but weren’t able to fully realize with the resources we had available.

With “Bound” nearing release, have you already started conceptualizing your next musical venture?

I would describe it as we are trying very hard right now to stay present in the moment and not start conceptualizing our next release, and perhaps failing at it because we can’t help ourselves. To me, we have been moving too slowly, but I look at what we’ve actually done and objectively I know averaging about an album a year isn’t necessarily considered slow.

I’m happier with how some of the songs turned out as a result of waiting longer to record them, but I will say it makes the process feel a bit more like work and you don’t get that same high from being in a collective flow state chasing down new ideas together. We’ll go back to our old workflow for at least this next one. All of us are itching to lock ourselves away and just lose our minds for a week and record whatever comes out of it. It does feel like something big is percolating. 

Photos courtesy of Luna Honey

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others