For decades, David Michael Moore has been composing, writing songs, inventing his own instruments and making albums that almost no one listens to. He hails from the small riverside town of Rosedale, Mississippi, where he has been performing since the 1970s and has been self-releasing his music under various aliases since the 90s. In 2021, the boutique Ulyssa came across his work and launched a reissue campaign. You can imagine their excitement when they found it. Moore's songs are sly and surreal documents of the everyday, with the mysteriously sonorous imagery of mid-'60s Bob Dylan and the serene calm of JJ Cale. His instrumental compositions touch on blues, bebop, zydeco, ambient and modernist classical music. And he plays it all on instruments like the homemade buzz box and dog bone xylophone. At age 70, he's a true American original, like a Mississippi moondog.
The primarily organic Adagio Fishingrecorded in 1994, is the second in a series of Ulyssa reissues and the first reissue of material that Moore originally intended as an album, following last year's excellent Flatboat River Witch, a compilation of highlights from across his catalog. “Birth of Love (A Major Adagio)” Adagio FishingHis opening track, may give new listeners the wrong idea of the artist's genre. Five and a half minutes of rich string composition, with chord changes whose ambiguous longing could record an alternate universe Twin Peaks, it's not entirely unlike the kind of dusty private new age that's been keeping the lights on on various reissue labels for the last decade or so, albeit with an unusually rich harmonic palette for that style. Moore returns to this devotional mode a few times Adagio Fishing, but overall the album is a lot weirder than its intro suggests, and all the better for it.
“My Prosperity Package”, the second track, opens with a kind of audio playback. We hear a charismatic radio preacher, apparently recorded and sampled from the airwaves of Mississippi, and a sunny regular Joe who appears to be listening to the sermon (apparently Moore himself with a pitch shift effect). The preacher promises deliverance from poverty and strife, and the listener begins to murmur his assent. But it's hard to tell if he really means it: There's something risqué and sarcastic about his screeching uhhhhs and wells, like he knows the guy on the radio is a fraud, and he's making fun of him by playing with him. Before the skit settles into resolution, Moore interrupts it with a short, elliptical piano solo, its chords at first low-pitched and bluesy, then steamy and impressionistic as they rise. It's hard to know what to make of “My Prosperity Package,” but it feels like a thematic guide, in part because it contains some of Adagio Fishingthey are only legible words. In both music and dialogue, he holds the heavenly in tension with the earthly, reaching transcendence one moment and laughing at the very idea the next.
