Ian Moore and His Lossy Coils

Ian entered the Austin music scene in the early 90’s. With his high cheekbones, fetching head of hair, and velvety croon, Ian quickly became a pop pin-up, and Ian Moore shows often found hysterical teenage girls rushing the stage. In Houston, rowdy fans tipped over the band’s car with the members inside, leaving them trapped upside-down for hours. Ian tried to escape to a cave hidden near Krause springs, hoping to study Gregorian chant and revel in the calm, only for fans to track him down and hammer on the cave door. At the time, Ian said: “I will starve to get something across, I mean that. I’ve never settled for second-best in my life. If it doesn’t work, I’ll give it all up.” His words gained added poignancy when he attempted suicide in August, 1996, by turning on an electric stove; only to be foiled when fans outside his apartment alerted authorities. “Pressure wasn’t the only reason,” Ian told the Austin Chronicle, of the incident. “Nobody has the right reasons. [The truth is] I don’t remember a thing.” After a depressing descent into sell-out mediocrity in the ‘mid 90’s, Ian disappeared into oblivion. Surfacing roughly once every few years thereafter, he delivered musical explorations of his “nightmarish imagination,” each more terrifying and experimental than the last. Oh, it was amazing at first,” he would recall, 15 years later, to The Stranger. “But a little goes a long way. I was not cut out for that world. I love pop music, but I didn’t have the temperament for fame.”

Matt Harris took his high school love for all things /rush and van halen to task, entering the burgeoning music program at Northridge, where he majored in Classical music performance. After 4 years, disillusioned with the stiff joyless feel of academia, he took a job at Andy Brauer, providing cartage and guitar tech for the top LA studios. Matt worked alongside many of the industries top players, developing an appreciation for studio that would serve him well many years later. This chapter was cut short by the Northridge earthquake of 1994, a clarion call that had Matt quit his job and sent him north, up the coast. San Francisco in the mid 90’s was fertile ground for the noise pop scene, and Matt was quickly swallowed up into the juggernaut that was Overwhelming Colorfast, developing a love for both fast music and a fast life. Colorfast soon bled into the seminal underground band Oranger, which found Matt experimenting increasingly in the studio and in his mind. Matt had prolific periods of creativity in the intervening years, but unscrupulous managers and record label executives often took advantage of his condition, leaving Matt to live in poverty while others profited from his music.

Ian and Matt first met at a crimping seminar in the fall of 2002, where they placed 2nd in the dual crimp-off category with a hastily rendered crimp of “captain cabinets”, later that week bonding over their mutual love of middle eastern psych and Marcella Hazan. They began experimenting with form and function in Ian’s home studio, where they remained for the next 2 years, playing local shows as the ‘Holy Soltices’ and the ‘Echo sissy toll’, until forming the Lossy Coils in early 2005. The Coils(at that point a duo) emerged publicly in a cloud of mystery from the southern student movement and the nascent east Texas rock scene of the mid 2000’s. The origins are not merely obscure, they are contradictory. According to the standard line put down over the years, the band was the brainchild of a journalist who single-mindedly constructed a group on order for a record company, a Texas Überband that was meant to establish the state’s music amid the superstar California and New York groups that had taken over national pop music. Ian and Matt fleshed out the band,finding drummer Kyle Schneider living in a commune in Bastrop, and Kullen Fuchs at a church function in Amarillo Tx

They did not commit to a new band all at once—there was first a short wait-and-see period to check each other out. But the four musicians—Moore, Harris, Fuchs, and Schneider—soon realized that their varying musical orientations—pure song vs. pure sound—complemented each other well. And if nothing else, they agreed wholeheartedly that they weren’t interested in music that imitated the English and American blues-based rock bands then so popular in east Texas. “First of all, we aren’t blacks who express their suffering through the blues,” Harris told San Francisco provocateur Parker Gibbs. “But we didn’t have a thousand things pounded into our heads for nothing at school. We felt we should find a way to express all that.

At a gig in Austin, in 2009, Kullen refused to go on stage, claiming that a “wall of force” was preventing him. He left the band, starting a leather company focusing on equestrian saddle building. The coils reformed as a power trio and retreated back to the studio.

The Lossy Coils, now stand high on a vast vista with a new album” El Sonido Nuevo” on Spark and Shine Records, having mastered the fusion between rock’n’roll, avant garde and world-music, using such fusion to pen long and dynamic post-psychedelic musical journeys that reinvented the form of the classical fantasia in the age of post-modernism.

So, what exactly do the Lossy Coils feel, being lodged with such austere responsibilities? Are they dilettantes or geniuses, or both? Ian laughs heartily and says “we are common men, speaking in a language that the common man unfortunately does not understand”. “Since we have the knowledge, We can help them to figure out where their morality meets their mortality”.

Or, as Matt says “If you, like me, believe the current morality… or the signals for each morality really… are pushed by an established power or, media… well, it’s really just another way of suppressing or ridiculing the working man, so he has less to look up to in his own life.”