Adagio Fishing

For decades, David Michael Moore has been composing, songwriting, inventing his own instruments, and making albums that almost no one hears. He hails from the tiny riverside town of Rosedale, Mississippi, where he’s been playing since the 1970s and self-releasing his music under a variety of aliases since the ’90s. In 2021, the boutique label Ulyssa encountered his work and began a reissue campaign. You can imagine their excitement when they found it. Moore’s songs are sly and surreal documents of everyday profundity, with the mysteriously resonant imagery of mid-’60s Bob Dylan and the breezy equanimity of J.J. Cale. His instrumental compositions touch on blues, bebop, zydeco, ambient, and modernist classical music. And he plays them all on instruments like the homemade buzz box and the dog-bone xylophone. At 70-something years young, he’s a genuine American original, like a Mississippi Moondog.

The primarily instrumental Adagio Fishing, recorded in 1994, is the second in Ulyssa’s series of reissues, and the first re-release of material that Moore initially conceived 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 Fishing’s opening track, might give new listeners the wrong idea about what sort of artist he is. Five and a half minutes of luxuriant synthesized strings, with chord changes whose ambiguous yearning could soundtrack an alternate-universe Twin Peaks, it’s not entirely unlike the sort of dusty private-press new age that’s kept the lights on at various reissue labels over the last decade or so, albeit with an unusually rich harmonic palette for that style. Moore returns to this devotional mode a few times on Adagio Fishing, but on the whole the album is a lot stranger than its introduction suggests, and better for it.

“My Prosperity Package,” the second piece, opens with an audio play of sorts. We hear a charismatic radio preacher, evidently recorded and sampled from the Mississippi airwaves, and a helium-voiced regular Joe who seems to be listening to the sermon (presumably Moore himself with a pitch-shifting effect). The preacher promises deliverance from poverty and strife, and the listener starts murmuring his assent. But it’s hard to tell if he really means it: There’s something puckish and sarcastic in his squeaked uh huhs and alrights, like maybe he knows the guy on the radio is a fraud, and he’s mocking him by playing along. Before the sketch can reach a resolution, Moore interrupts it with a brief, elliptical piano solo, its chords first strutting low and bluesy and then becoming vaporous and impressionistic as they ascend. It’s difficult to know what to make of “My Prosperity Package,” but it has the feeling of a thematic signpost, in part because it contains some of Adagio Fishing’s only legible words. In both the music and the dialogue, it holds the celestial in tension with the earthbound, reaching for transcendence in one moment and laughing at the very idea in the next.

Adagio Fishing has the air of outsider art, not due to any naivety of technique—Moore has serious chops—but because of his apparent disregard for the way his music might be received by the market. Oddities like “My Prosperity Package” share space with comparatively straightforward fare like “Maria of Egg Sandwiches,” which could nearly pass for a Classical-era bagatelle if not for its down-home title and the chintzy bell-like keyboard patch Moore uses to play it. Along with his custom-built instruments and a few traditional ones, Adagio has lots of these then-contemporary, now-dated synth sounds, whose uncanny aspects Moore seemed to sense and savor even at the time. At the climax of “Maria of Egg Sandwiches,” he leans heavily on his keyboard’s pitch-bend wheel, turning notes into gooey squiggles. The gesture is both deliriously out of place in the elegant environs of this particular tune and perfectly in keeping with the wigged-out sensibility of the album at large.

Adagio Fishing’s stylistic jumble can make for a disorienting listening experience, but the force of Moore’s personality as a player and composer has a unifying effect: Whether grandly orchestrated or performed solo, forthright with its charms or evasive, each piece offers a sense of uproarious mischief tempered by reverence and curiosity. “Cracks in the Sidewalk,” with its jaunty gait and dissonances that suggest a Cubist painter’s take on the blues, evinces a deep affinity for Thelonious Monk, one of American music’s greatest tricksters. “Kildeer Sing (Where the White Meets the Muddy)” tethers symphonic grandeur—harp, strings, cascading percussion—to a nagging refrain played on a synth that recalls a dollar-store slide whistle. “What’s Going On (Okies on Ham),” the furthest-out track by a wide margin, brings back the radio samples and the high-pitched interlocutor, setting them among all manner of unidentifiable pings and squelches. This time, the squeaky guy acts as a stand-in for the listener, repeating the first three words of the title with increasingly frenzied incredulity—the only appropriate reaction.

Given the breadth of Flatboat River Witch, the compilation that introduced Moore to a slightly larger listening public, it seems that Adagio Fishing presents only a portion of his artistry. According to Ulyssa, there are plenty more albums in the vault. They aren’t available online, which means that this reissue campaign will be a fun one to follow for a certain sort of crate-digging music fan. Who knows: the next record could be a singer-songwriter album, or a set of jazzy solo piano improvisations, or an atonal dog-bone xylophone showcase, or an electronic sound collage. From what we know about Moore so far, we can safely assume two things: It may be confounding, but it won’t be boring.