An intimate piano song about self-love and the joyful displacement of a strange foreign city, ‘Hotel Room’ is the brand-new track by Jenny Moore, leader of London-based six-piece choral-punk ensemble Jenny Moore’s Mystic Business. It’s a taste of Jenny’s new EP of “stripped back, swirling, reverberant compositions” The Piano Tapes Vol. 1. Recorded at St Barnabas Church, Dalston it will be released on cassette and digital platforms on August 5th, 2022. It’s the follow up to JMMB’s debut EP release for Lost Map in October 2021, He Earns Enough, the lead single from which ‘I Am Afraid’ received extensive radio play across BBC Radio 6 Music, particularly from Steve Lamacq, who called it “a great record”, and selected the track as his Lamacq Livener for play on his show every day during week of release.

About ‘Hotel Room’ Jenny writes:

“A love song to myself and to the pleasurable dislocation that comes from getting into crispy hotel sheets in a city that’s not mine. This tune excavates an inner landscape that is always making up stories, seeing ghosts, building caves for myself to hide in. The body is weird, memory is inventive, and sometimes I crave a generic box room in an average sized European city to get lost in.”

About The Piano Tapes Vol.1, Jenny writes:

“The EP was recorded live in one day in a cavernous church in Dalston, summer 2021 with members of Jenny Moore’s Mystic Business and F*Choir. The songs are stripped back, swirling, reverberant compositions that feel a bit more private than my previous work – they’re songs written early in the morning when everyone is still asleep upstairs, or behind the closed door of the dining room, surrounded by my housemates, drying laundry while we couldn’t leave the house. I think of the songs like a reflective surface, shimmery and illusive, but alluring. In these songs, I’m talking mostly to myself, groping around for a way to sit with weird feelings, new crises, new configurations. The big chorus of voices are a kind of collective conscience, a tender but powerful gathering of chosen family and my own inner voices trying to figure out what the f*ck is going on.”

Hailing from the prairies of Canada, Jenny Moore grew up with a strange brew of American hardcore and gospel music before moving to London to study art. For the last 10 years, she’s straddled the DIY art and music scenes, staging live performances in fields, warehouse and museums alike, and playing in bands including dance-punks Charismatic Megafauna and pop-punk trio Bas Jan (whose albums Yes I Jan and Baby U Know were released on Lost Map in 2018 and 2022 respectively). Jenny runs the Hackney-based feminist F*Choir and was the first artist in residence at Borealis Festival for Experimental music in Bergen, Norway.

Her rabble-rousing six-piece ensemble Jenny Moore’s Mystic Business is a testament to the raw power and untamed joy of communal singing, and features members of Bas Jan, Trash Kit, F*Choir and Bamboo as well as solo singer-songwriter Rubie. They draw inspiration from artists such as Meredith Monk, Laurie Anderson, Joan La Barbara and Robert Ashley, as well as feminist poets like Sharon Olds and Lorrie Moore, and David Byrne’s musical use of language, breaking down words into rhythmic tools. Jenny Moore’s Mystic Business released their self-titled debut album in 2018 via Sheffield label The Audacious Art Experiment.

TRACKLISTING

Side A

1. Marshmallow Root (6mins 23secs)

2. Take It Down (5 mins 12secs)

Side B

1. Hotel Room (3mins 49secs)

2. Let Them Go (4mins 25secs)

3. Never Trust A Therapist (3mins 40secs)