Biography
Bay Area musician, producer, and engineer Maryam Qudus records as Spacemoth, a psychedelic pop project combining vintage synthesizers, tape manipulation, hypnotic rhythms, and low, understated vocals into richly layered, retro-futurist songs. A first-generation Afghan-American raised by working-class immigrant parents, Qudus began pursuing music early, trading chores for guitar lessons at 12 and working after-school jobs to pay for voice lessons as a teenager. She later established herself as a producer and engineer at Oakland’s Tiny Telephone Recording, working with artists including Toro y Moi, Spellling, Tune-Yards, Sad13, and Frankie and the Witch Fingers. Those studio experiences fed her own experiments with Yamaha CS-50 and Korg Polysix synthesizers, tape loops, backward guitars, drum machines, and other analog and digital equipment, resulting in a sound that drew comparisons to Broadcast and Stereolab.
Spacemoth’s debut album, No Past No Future, arrived in 2022, pairing cosmic avant-pop with songs about mortality, immigration, repetition, climate anxiety, and the difficulty of remaining present while time seems to slip away. Largely performed and produced by Qudus herself, the album moved between lush, watery synthesizer textures, post-punk propulsion, and dense psychedelic sound design. Following its release, Spacemoth toured with Tortoise, Spellling, Speedy Ortiz, and others, while Qudus continued her production work. Her collaboration with La Luz on the band’s 2024 album News of the Universe also led to several years playing with the group on tour. During long drives between shows, she began composing new Spacemoth material on a small synthesizer in the back of the van, developing looping bass lines, rhythms, and sequences while watching the landscape pass outside.
Those sketches became Inward Eye, a more rhythmically focused and expansive Spacemoth album built around the relationship between memory, imagination, and cyclical experience. Its songs were shaped partly by Qudus’ simultaneous project of digitizing her family’s home movies, which repeatedly confronted her with images of her younger self and underscored the continuity between the teenager making strange guitar loops in her bedroom and the professional musician still pursuing the same impulses decades later. Drawing on the interlocking grooves of Can, the layered arrangements of Tortoise and Stereolab, and the controlled electronic minimalism of Kraftwerk and Cluster, Inward Eye pushed Spacemoth toward tighter, more kinetic arrangements while retaining the project’s psychedelic atmosphere. Songs addressing digital distraction, love, nostalgia, and existential uncertainty circle around a recurring idea in Qudus’ work: that lives, memories, and musical patterns move in loops, continually disappearing from view while remaining present somewhere in the mind.
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