''Elpmas'' is an album by the American composer and musician

Moondog Louis Thomas Hardin (May 26, 1916 – September 8, 1999), known professionally as Moondog, was an American composer, musician, performer, music theoretician, poet and inventor of musical instruments. Largely self-taught as a composer, his p ...

, released in 1992 via Kopf.

Background and recording

''Elpmas'' was recorded at Academy of St. Martin's in the Streets, a studio in Germany owned by

Andi Toma Mouse on Mars is a German electronic music duo formed in 1993 by Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma. Their music is a blend of electronic genres including IDM, dub, krautrock, breakbeat and ambient, featuring heavy use of organic analog synth and c ...

. The album's title is the word "sample" read backwards; it was the first time Moondog used sampling in his music.

Reception

'' Der Spiegel'' wrote that the music on ''Elpmas'' lies between

folk music Folk music is a music genre that includes traditional folk music and the contemporary genre that evolved from the former during the 20th-century folk revival. Some types of folk music may be called world music. Traditional folk music has ...

and

minimal music Minimal music (also called minimalism)"Minimalism in music has been defined as an aesthetic, a style, and a technique, each of which has been a suitable description of the term at certain points in the development of minimal music. However, two o ...

and called it pleasant. "Blue" Gene Tyranny of

AllMusic AllMusic (previously known as All-Music Guide and AMG) is an American online music database. It catalogs more than three million album entries and 30 million tracks, as well as information on musicians and bands. Initiated in 1991, the dat ...

described it as a "wonderful CD built from environmental sounds, gently rocking

marimba The marimba () is a musical instrument in the percussion family that consists of wooden bars that are struck by mallets. Below each bar is a resonator pipe that amplifies particular harmonics of its sound. Compared to the xylophone, the timbr ...

s, lovely counterpoint for

winds Wind is the natural movement of air or other gases relative to a planet's surface. Winds occur on a range of scales, from thunderstorm flows lasting tens of minutes, to local breezes generated by heating of land surfaces and lasting a few h ...

, foot-taping rhythms, and sweetly sung wisdom from a chorus". Moondog's biographer Robert Scotto called it "the strangest of his German productions and in many ways the most like his earliest New York albums". He wrote that it primarily appealed to those who appreciated Moondog's eclectic side and propensity to move his music into new phases and that it confused those who expected a unified expression. He called it "a little too much over the edge perhaps".

Track listing

Personnel

* Henry Schuman – oboe * Peter Wendland –

violone The term violone (; literally "large viol" in Italian, " -one" being the augmentative suffix) can refer to several distinct large, bowed musical instruments which belong to either the viol or violin family. The violone is sometimes a fretted i ...

viol The viol (), viola da gamba (), or informally gamba, is any one of a family of bowed, fretted, and stringed instruments with hollow wooden bodies and pegboxes where the tension on the strings can be increased or decreased to adjust the pitc ...

* Johannes Leis –

piccolo The piccolo ( ; Italian for 'small') is a half-size flute and a member of the woodwind family of musical instruments. Sometimes referred to as a "baby flute" the modern piccolo has similar fingerings as the standard transverse flute, but the s ...

, saxophone (alto, tenor, bass) * Götz Alsmann – banjo * Andi Toma – vocals, whistling * Akbar Huck – vocals * Max Alsmann – vocals * Nobuko Sugai – recitation * Moondog – keyboards, percussion

References

Citations

Sources

* * * {{Authority control 1992 albums Moondog albums