High-energy rock duo Moxi & Loon in Redmond on Thursday

Published 3:35 pm Wednesday, February 1, 2023

There’s serendipity, and then there’s the way San Diego rock duo Moxi & Loon — aka Nick Fulsher and Jake Jarz — found each other back in the fall of 2019.

Fulsher loaded up his van and left his hometown of Milwaukee, headed for Southern California with a dream of playing music for a living.

And Jarz loaded up his van and left his home in the Chicago area, headed for Southern California with a dream of playing music for a living.

“We both had the same goal in mind, but we didn’t know each other,” Jarz said. “We met at an open mic in San Diego. Nick saw me perform and he walked up to me after the show and said, ‘Let’s tour the f—kin’ world’ and we just hit it off from there.”

The two men quickly realized they shared similar interests and musical influences, but not before they actually signed up to play together later that night at the same open mic.

“I could already hear what kind of drums needed to go with Jake’s sound,” Fulsher said. “We were both like, ‘What is going on here?’ We had great chemistry right off the bat. In fact, that night, people were like, ‘How long have you guys been a band for?’ and we were like ‘We just met 20 minutes ago.’”

From there, Fulsher and Jarz started playing shows wherever they could — on street corners, at the beach, out of the back of their van — and they started working on songs together, bringing together the former’s interest in psychedelic desert-rock (think Queens of the Stone Age) and the latter’s bluesy garage-punk (think White Stripes). The result: A heavy and propulsive blues-pop-punk whirlwind that lands somewhere in the same weirdo universe as the wild-eyed freakouts of cult-fave California artists like The Oh Sees and Ty Segall.

The duo is now living out their dreams, touring the West Coast with stops scheduled at Redmond’s High Desert Music Hall on Thursday and Bend’s Silver Moon Brewing Friday. The tour is in support of their fine new album, “Pedal,” which they recorded straight to tape with producer Jordan Andreen, best known for his work with heavy psych bands Earthless and JOY.

Working in an old-school analog style helped to bring out the primal qualities of Moxi & Loon’s stripped-down, turbo-charged rock ‘n’ roll, Fulsher said.

“We usually say we play like cavemen,” he said, “so to record like cavemen just felt right.”

What: Moxi & Loon, with Hopeless Jack, The Psychedeltics and Blackflowers Blacksun

Details:

• 8 p.m. Thursday, $10, High Desert Music Hall, 818 SW Forest Ave., Redmond, highdesertmusichall.com.

• 8 p.m. Friday, $15, Silver Moon Brewing, 24 NW Greenwood Ave., Bend, silvermoonbrewing.com.