Moon Duo will release their debut album, Mazes, on April 4 via Sacred Bones Recordings.

The, er, duo of Wooden Shijps guitarist Ripley Johnson and Sanae Yamada (pictured) have earned significant props for their EPs Killing Time (2009) and Escape (2010), honing a sleek, propulsive but very trippy take on space-rock that references Silver Apples, Suicide and Spacemen 3. Appropriately enough, Spacemen co-founder Pete ‘Sonic Boom’ Kember has remixed two of their tracks for a bonus CD accompanying the album release.

“We wanted to do something in a more ʻrock ‘n’ roll bandʼ style,” says Johnson of Mazes, “Something a bit fuller than our previous recordings.”

“We used more tracks on this record, in order to get a denser, layered sound to make this our ʻrock bandʼ record. I grew up a huge Stones fan, so I’ve always liked that dense sound, with multiple guitar tracks, percussion, piano, organ – anything you can squeeze into the mix.”

Mazes was recorded in San Francisco and mixed in Berlin. “The working title was Die Blumen [the flowers], so going into the mix sessions we kind of felt like it was becoming our ʻBerlin recordʼ, but in the end it retained the stamp of San Francisco and we liked Mazes better anyway.”

It ended up becoming a distinctly American record, then, Mazes is a definably American record, informed less by Johnson and Yamada’s short spell in Europe and more by their move from the Californian coast to the Colorado mountains.

“[Mazes is about] finding one’s place in the world,” concludes Johnson. “Moving forward, and the different paths one takes moving through life, trying to reach various goals, literally moving; love; pain; change. Or just getting by, and making sense of things.”

Tracklist:
1. Seer
2. Scars
3. Fallout
4. When You Cut
5. Run Around
6. In the Sun
7. Goners
8. Mazes

Bonus disc tracklist:
1. Scars (Sonic Boom Remix)
2. Seer (Psychic Ills Remix)
3. Run Around (Cave Mix Organ Desert Mix)
4. In The Sun (Purling Hiss Remix)