Members and collaborators
Peter Arthur Moon founded the band in 2017. Peter has a long history of recording in ambient electronica and post rock under names including The Ambience Factory, Remixed by Nature, Apocalypse Lemon and as a collaborator with Held by Trees. Described by one reviewer as “The Dr. Who of music”, he travels backwards and forwards in time, taking elements of past and imagined futures to create startlingly elemental film and music.
Collaborators
David Joseph Griffiths, a successful and prolific artist and performer with over 20 years of experience and the founder and writer in the band Held by Trees.
Sara Baggini, vocal artist who releases music under the name Augustine and who’s last album was in the Italian top 10, and has been described by reviewers as having the spirit of Kate Bush and Elizabeth Fraser.
Recent collaborator Martin Ditcham is a drummer, percussionist, and songwriter Martin Ditcham has been involved in world class recordings and performances for over three decades. Collaborations have included The Rolling Stones, Sade, Elton John, Tina Turner, Everything But The Girl, U2, Mary Black, Diana Ross, Brian May, and Chris Rea.
Style and influences
Described by reviewers as an original fusion of early Kate Bush, Talk Talk and Board of Canada, Unknown Replica fuses its past of electronic, ambient and ambisonic field recordings of nature in Cornwall and Italy, with the forthright vocal style of Kate Bush, while encompassing modern classical influences such as Nils Frahm. Unknown Replica explores meditative, reflective soundscapes and vocals inspired by the writers homes in Cornwall, England, Brazil and Italy.
Working in surround sound and virtual environments, Unknown Replica seeks to create a haven, a place for the lost souls to find solace and peace.
The project is influenced by a diverse range of artists including early Pink Floyd, Brian Eno, A Winged Victory for the Sullen, Kate Bush, Boards of Canada, Talk Talk, Rustin Man, Portishead. Miles Davis, John Cage and modern classical composers such as Henryk Górecki, Béla Bartók and Max Richter.
We have decided to release music only in the physical formats of Tape, CD, Vinyl and with video on DVD and VHS. We will be releasing our films on Vimeo. As streaming services and YouTube do not support artists, we can’t be found on them as this time.
The Carl Jung Connection
The name came from a former collaborator who is sadly no longer with us. It refers to the work of Carl Jung. The ironic nature of the entire basis of that persons life being a living shadow of projections and rage is not lost on the people who suffered it, but that’s the point of the delusion. In Jung’s own words:
“Projections change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face.”
Carl Jung
The first album is that journey, facing the unfathomable depths of your own existence. The album was created against a background of personal reflection and not a little sadness. Taking account of where I had been and where I needed to go. Of challenging what it is that makes us what we are.
Facing the ego. Jung held that is was not possible to overcome the problems that hold us all back from being the best possible version of who we could be, of self actualisation, without facing, admitting and vanquishing the shadow version of who we all are. Facing the darkness and, in that facing, it loses it’s power to control you.
“The effect of projection is to isolate the subject from his environment, since instead of a real relation to it there is now only an illusory one. Projections change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face. In the last analysis, therefore, they lead to an autoerotic or autistic condition in which one dreams a world whose reality remains forever unattainable”
You see this effect in projection in so many difficult people, many of them having attained a lot of power, driven by their own daemons to seek an unobtainable reality. It can be a powerful well of dark energy that drives people, but at it’s heart is cruelty, poor self perception and often narcissism, which is a cancer that rots the modern world from Boris Johnson to that ex partner you will probably regret ever meeting.
“The resultant sentiment d’incomplétude and the still worse feeling of sterility are in their turn explained by projection as the malevolence of the environment, and by means of this vicious circle the isolation is intensified. The more projections are thrust in between the subject and the environment, the harder it is for the ego to see through its illusions. A forty-five-year-old patient who had suffered from a compulsion neurosis since he was twenty and had become completely cut off from the world once said to me: “But I can never admit to myself that I’ve wasted the best twenty-five years of my life!”
The first single released, Aneomile, was that letting go, drifting into a state where you could face reality, by escaping your own, looking in on your life from the outside. It was written as a lullaby, on waking at 3am one morning, monsters under the bed, the monsters in your head, all conspiring to topple that sense of self. Although not part of the first album, parts of it live on, much like the writer himself.
“It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going.”
Or her of course. Jung was still a man of his time, but also out of time. Much of the philosophy of what he thought ends up in strange places, including AI and computer science. Much of what he said was also far ahead and sits outside gender identity in a way that nobody appreciated at the time, the discussion of the essence of masculinity and femininity outside of the physical gender was prophetic.
“Not consciously, of course for consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him.”
The track Pale is an allegory of being with a person who experiences exactly this. It was written around the core of a dead song, one that had, like some ancient failed star, gone supernova and all that remained was the original core, an ember of what was. This was sent to the other half of Unknown Replica in Italy, Augustine, aka Sara Baggini, the utter genius of vocal art, who turned my thoughts and a line of lyrics into something spectacular, the collapse of the dead star into a super massive black hole. There will be more on this track in another post soon… ∞