The second of my two Moondog albums thus far, which I ordered from Amazon towards the end of 2001, ten months after getting Sax Pax for a Sax.
Moondog's is a very appealing legend: the blind street musician, dressed eccentrically as a Viking; the musical savant rated as an innovator by Stravinsky and Steve Reich alike. It bears repeating, even if sometimes it sounds too 'good' to be true.
This music is from late in his life, and shows a knowing sophistication. In case you hadn't spotted it (I didn't for ages) Elpmas is Sample backwards. In the sleeve notes Moondog writes,
The sampler is ideal for my kind of music which is mostly contrapuntal, specifically canonic. With the sampler I can be sure that all the voices will be faithfully reproduced, as many times as I require, without the chance of a mistake… Almost all pieces (track 1 to 8) are triple canons, that are three canons in one or one in three.
The only let-down on the album is the closing 24-minute piece, which is one of those generative ambient pieces where you just set up the technology on 'repeat' and let it repeat itself, moving in and out of phase. Maybe that wasn't a cliché in 1991 when Elpmas came out, but it is now. And calling the piece Cosmic Meditation doesn't help. As a generative and meditative musical experience, I currently prefer Bloom by Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers.
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