Sea Moya

Sea Moya are a three-piece from Germany. They call themselves a “beat trio”, a playful reference to the original era of jangle-pop, when, really, they’re miles from that, orbiting around some deeply spacious grooves that touch on afrobeat and krautrock, with production techniques that will be familiar to fans of blippy electronica, etiolated chillwave and sampladelic hip-hop: Avalanches have been namechecked in early reports, as have Flying Lotus and J Dilla. If there’s anything remotely 60s about them, it’s not the 1964-5, suited-and-booted, uptight stuff, but the far-out, 1967, psych end of things.

They haven’t been together for long, but the music they’ve created so far is accomplished and ambitious, showcasing their twin urges to experiment and entertain. They’re a self-contained unit, writing and producing, mixing and mastering their own material, and each of the five songs on their debut EP, Twins, suggests a wealth of possibilities.

Lead track Do Things has the rolling, polyrhythmic percussiveness and oceanic expansiveness of Can, with a funk bassline, arpeggiated synths and treated vocals that are barely above a murmur, even though they include demands to “do it!”. Second single Slow Down is soulful electro-pop, languorous yet gently propulsive, with a finger-clicking pulse and more entreaties, this time to “hold me tight”, “slow things down” and “feel it!” It’s a bit Jungle (the enigmatic Londoners, not the genre), with a powerful sense of place: “We had wide and open field pictures in our heads, like when you stand in Nepal in the Himalayas and look at huge snowy mountains with nice valleys in between and everything is just slow,” explain the band.

Twins has a subtle metallic clang, some bleeps, an idiosyncratic synth-bassline and a whispery vocal – you could dance to it, but you might feel self-conscious. Dinosaur Room is slow, shimmery, with a sudden key change that catches you off guard, which happens a lot listening to Sea Moya. It’s lovely, albeit rather hard to categorise. It’s sort of jazz-fusion, with elements of ambient and that Boards of Canada nostalgia-for-childhood thing going on, with the giggling kids in a playground middle-eight. Golden moves at a similarly languid pace, a sad love song featuring an Autotuned Elias Foerster gloomily intoning “I just want you” like a depressed robot. “Try making sense of Sea Moya,” urged one reviewer, almost defying you not to be befuddled, pleasantly so, by their stoned, immaculate, astral funkadelia. - The Guardian, Paul Lester

Try making sense of Sea Moya. Hailing from Germany, this self-professed “beat trio” touch on musical staples - the psych wave of Tame Impala, the electronic roots of Kraftwerk, a sample-happy Avalanches approach - without treading on anyone’s toes. But it’s not like they’re being considerate.

On ‘Do Things’, anything goes. Whether it’s straight-up funk baselines or spiralling synth parts, this mostly instrumental blast of weird is most comparable to Battles, when they melted hooks on a course of destruction. - DIY Mag