Yes, that’s good. The difference between the two bands points to many of Ava Luna’s strengths, especially on its third album, “Infinite House”.

Here’s what you get more of with Ava Luna and less of with the other band: a devoted belief in dance rhythms, a casual interest in harmonic development, a self-contained and playful attitude, and the creation of a unified band sound in real time.

Most of Ava Luna’s members grew up in New York, rather than arriving after the colonization of Brooklyn, and you can hear their own connection to the new wave of early 80s funk, such as Konk and Liquid Liquid. and Dinosaur L and Tom Tom Club. The magic is in the open space: it’s the music that lets you in. When you enter, Carlos Hernandez’s singing can determine how long you stay. He spends a lot of time singing in falsetto, and he delivers soulful phrases-a series of seductive songs stretching between Al Green and Prince.

This band is friendly but strange. It has a practical sound, especially in the rhythm section: it creates notes with strong bass lines and exciting chord progressions that can open and linger, and yet the best songs here – “Tenderize,” “Roses and Cherries,” and especially “Billz,” which is a marvel of this band’s dynamics, its “Darling Nikki” – closed in three and a half minutes.

For his chance to continue, he chose “Victoria,” a good groove over which the band members fiddled aimlessly with the lead and distortion for seven and a half minutes. There is a certain deliberate perversity here and a certain trust in the flexibility, forgiveness, and loyalty of the audience. These are also New York things.

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The band’s sixth album, Moon 2, could be a sound map of the moon if there were a moon on Earth that was colder than the one we have now. The Brooklyn-based band delves into its namesake to provide a tour of the tumultuous, boisterous, noisy landscape of this planetary body. It’s teasing electro-funk that plays on a gravitational plane where everything has a different weight, sounds melt deeper and float more easily.

Moon 2 is almost an invitation. The band meets us at a distance, as if they were giving us a visa to study abroad. There are glimpses of joyful everyday errands in the sideways bounce of “Deli Run”. The pace is unexpected, sometimes feeling like you’re rushing down a difficult highway, like in “Walking With an Enemy,” where you hear alien purrs from imaginary fauna and an extraterrestrial stream of eerie whistles. You hear snippets of noisy parties from apartment windows, gossip on the sidewalks, car windows, the roar of your own engine, the screech of a terrible run-in. The title song crystallizes the stomach-churning emotional fracture that happens when you stumble upon a dangerous crush. The sluggish reggae bassline encourages you to swing your torso straight home, the Kraftwerk synth sympathizing with your alarm clock and panicked excuse: “Come back, I left the oven on.”

On Moon 2, eeriness reigns supreme. The mood swings, mercury rhythms, and optional melody don’t let you sit still for long. Even though they sneak in quickly, the sounds are full and realized; you have the feeling that you’re just moving through a world that exists without you. Conversations interrupt each other and fade in and out Doppler-style: Kaufman’s cavernous, clear voice runs over Douglas’s elastic velvet in harmony, and Hernandez revels in his deep, almost militaristic authority. Sometimes, as in “Centerline,” the band is clearly interested in position and perspective, and where everyone stands. One person is having a hard time coming back to reality (“After our luxurious vacation/Starting from the minibar/I can get you back, I mean it”), while the other is slowly thinking about the fact that it is impossible to know each other (“Defrost the iceberg, you will see/Your original reflection is looking at me”).

The test sample for this album was a warped tape of a 90s female band that sang neo-pagan ritual songs that Kaufman found at a rummage sale. This feeling of the band is infused into Moon 2. The band wrote and recorded the album during two cold-weather trips to Vermont and during a blizzard on the Massachusetts coast. They set up a studio in the basement and ventured down alone or in small groups to work on what people had left behind. It was written by picking up what others had put aside.

Ava Luna is seduced by group dynamics and interactive creativity as a theme: who goes to the grocery store, who sits, who quits, who pays up front, who promises. They have never shied away from combining independent sounds. In Moon 2, they captured this utopian kind of jostling, where two people bumping into each other makes a lot of noise, and around every corner there’s a productive coincidence. They mix like the best neighborhoods, in the busiest cities, in more exciting, alternative moons.

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When it comes to music, the prefix “indie” should mean that an artist or band collaborates with an independent label – a company that produces and promotes artists’ work, their audio or video recordings on various media, but does not belong to any of the music industry “giants”: Universal, Sony or Warner. It is believed that artists signed to independent labels have more creative freedom and the ability to create what they want, not what will sell better. Also, for obvious reasons, artists who work independently without having contracts with labels have the right to be called independent. But now the concept of “indie” is so distorted that it doesn’t always work that way. And this is a problem.

Okay, let’s just try to come to terms with the fact that musicians on major labels can sometimes be identified as “indie.” Obviously, it’s not because of their collaboration with an independent company. What are the other reasons? Most often, it happens because of the inability or inability to find a genre category for what you hear. This can be forgiven to any ordinary listener who is not supposed to know genres well, but it cannot be forgiven to respected music publications whose journalists write their reviews of certain albums, because in this case it is nothing more than elementary professional incompetence. Here are some reasons why “not indie” can be identified as “indie”:

• It feels like music “made with your own hands,” on your own, without the involvement of a large number of producers or songwriters. Or it doesn’t feel like it, but it actually is. Indeed, independent musicians usually write both lyrics and music themselves, handle their own record production and other technical issues, or involve one specialist in this process rather than a whole team. But this is how Tame Impala, for example, works: Kevin Parker writes his own songs, produces them himself, does mastering and develops the artistic concept. Does this approach give him the right to call himself an “independent musician”, i.e. “indie”? No, because his albums are released under the Interscope label. Does the fact that he releases his music on this label, and not on some conventional Marathon Artists, make it bad, or does it devalue his work? Not at all;
• The use of the so-called “lo-fi aesthetics”, which gives the impression that the songs were recorded not in a modern recording studio with expensive equipment, but, relatively speaking, in the musician’s own living room on a smartphone, and then mixed and mastered in the same living room on his own laptop. Sometimes this can be true, but more often than not, it’s not, if we’re talking about musicians like the ones mentioned above;
• The emphasis is on authenticity and sincerity, on the atmosphere, not on virtuosity or skill. This is a very conditional and relative category, because skilled performers with a wide vocal range are not always insincere, and outstanding and virtuoso musicians who approach the process of creating music in an extremely creative way are not always insincere. And those who play and sing so-so but think they are good at it are not always sincere. Most often, what is considered sincere in music (and not only in music) is something that has a personal story behind it, and a certain meaning.

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