Incredible Moses Leroy
Electric Pocket Radio (Ultimatum)
Musically, we inhabit the Age of the Record Collector Geek. You got your Beck, your PJ Harvey, your Air, your Buffalo Matto Funk Soul Chemical Brother, and a whole new wizard’s sphere of electronic wands and gadgets to commit those brilliant neural impulses to posterity. The thin line between organic analog utterance and blipping beatbox interface is blurred. The moral? Harnessing technology is a fine skill, but infusing it with life and soul is art. Remember The Matrix? Neo is “born” to the tune of exploding body gaskets, flushing embryonic pods, and looming computer squid-bugs — one man, naked in the universe of a control-happy technology. Today’s music matrix masters face the similar Zen quest of unplugging from all that’s been heard, seen, tasted, and felt to become truly plugged in. San Diego “pop-music archivist” (an academic-sounding phrase meaning “record collector”) Ron Fountenberry, aka Incredible Moses Leroy, takes the past and fucks with it. Even his name is an homage, taken to honor his great-grandfather, a Houston civil rights activist. Leroy, with the help of his able crew — producers/engineers Keith Cleversly (Flaming Lips, Spiritualized), Joey Waronker (Beck, Elliott Smith), and Wally Gagel (Folk Implosion, Eels) — is crafty: One minute he fakes out with literal takes on music past (the opening nuevo wave-o Gruppo Sportivo cover “Future Love” is gleefully dead on), then in a blink, he ouijas familiar apparitions of neurotic geniuses like Brian Wilson and Stephin Merritt, muscular one-chord wonders like Hüsker Dü, cyberhumanoids like Kraftwerk, and dandies like Martin Denny and Miles Davis, and makes it all his own damn own, managing somehow to save Zion from the robot octopii. Long live the nerds.
This article appears in June 8 • 2001.