''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 ...

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

Reception

Der Spiegel ''Der Spiegel'' (, lit. ''"The Mirror"'') is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. With a weekly circulation of 695,100 copies, it was the largest such publication in Europe in 2011. It was founded in 1947 by John Seymour Chaloner ...

'' 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 b ...

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 databas ...

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 timbre ...

s, lovely

counterpoint In music, counterpoint is the relationship between two or more musical lines (or voices) which are harmonically interdependent yet independent in rhythm and melodic contour. It has been most commonly identified in the European classical tradi ...

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 hou ...

, 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 so ...

, saxophone (alto, tenor, bass) *

Götz Alsmann Götz Alsmann (born 12 July 1957) is a German musician, singer and former television presenter. Biography Born in Münster, Alsmann studied German studies, music and communication studies at the University of Münster from 1977 to 1985. Fro ...

– 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