Moonlight Beach

Moonlight Beach is the place-record and touring-body record. After KŌAN expanded Scoobert into paradox, Japan, spatial audio, and international attention, this LP pulls the project back into a physical geography: Encinitas, ocean air, covers, collaborators, burritos, bonfires, and songs that sound built to be played outside instead of only inside headphones.

Finding $D is the lab notebook. Swami’s is the lore dump. Dragon Ball $d is the narrative hip-hopera. Masks and Monsters is the pandemic record. Little Hug is the small recovery object. Big Hug is the accessible thesis. KŌAN is the four-part paradox / international expansion. Moonlight Beach is the place-record, radio record, and live-body record.

Bandcamp Moonlight Beach dropped May 19, 2023 ($8 or more, 24-bit/88.2kHz). Ten tracks, about twenty-eight minutes, on Spotify and Apple Music, ℗ 2023 Beformer. Album art by Gentle Giant Illustrations; mastering by Riley Knapp.

The title is not abstract. Moonlight State Beach is an actual Encinitas beach: California State Parks lists it as operated by the City of Encinitas, with a snack shack, rentals, playground, and Junior Lifeguard programs. That local specificity matters because the album sounds like the Scoobert mythology finally landing in a named hometown public space. On Apple Music, Luke notes that Feels So Good was written thinking about best friends on Moonlight Beach, beer in hand: a platonic love song for the homies.

This is also where the release becomes more social and less solipsistic. Earlier records were heavily internal-world: cartoon lore, pandemic mind, koan structure, internet friends. Moonlight Beach has covers, guests, and a more legible “come hang out” surface. Walk Don’t Run, Dancing in the Moonlight (Beach), and Low Tide make the album partly a covers conversation; Bubby Lewis and Jamie Drake make it a collaborator record; Gonna Go to Japan keeps the KŌAN/Japan thread alive; and the final flipped-title möbius spuǝ ʇᴉ ʍoH ʇoN points forward into MÖB and the planned four-part cycle (MÖB → I → US → MÖBIUS). MÖB and I are finished; US is in progress.

Public radio logs show FIP plays for Walk Don’t Run (Ventures Cover) and Dancing in the Moonlight (Beach). FIP is Radio France’s nationwide eclectic station: curated, genre-spanning, built for discovery rather than chart repetition. On the Munich/Bavaria side, egoFM had already brought Scoobert into its world with a 2022 interview and a one-hour Privataudienz takeover: his track picks, his stories, funk and current favorites in rotation. egoFM broadcasts in Munich at 100.8 FM and across other Bavarian cities. Moonlight Beach is the era where that beach-pop language had visible French and German radio traction.

It also lines up with the live transition. In a 2021 VENTS interview, Scoobert said he had not yet played live as Scoobert Doobert and was still figuring out solo performance. By the egoFM interviews around 2021–2022, he was talking about turning the virtual, live-stacked Scoobert idea into a real-world thing and starting to play out. This is the period when the project becomes a live act, not only a studio persona.

The best single-context clue is Ocean View. EARMILK described it as a laidback, summer-tinged, self-produced track with live guitar, bass-driven grooves, and a calm ocean-facing quality. That previews the whole record’s posture: less “what is the self?” and more “go outside, look at the water, bring the groove with you.”

Big Hug made the project emotionally legible. KŌAN made it conceptually and internationally expansive. Moonlight Beach makes it local, bodily, and performable. The record says: this is not only a bedroom universe anymore. It has a beach, a snack shack, guests, covers, radio stations, and a crowd. What comes next is MÖB: the first Möbius turn.