Moondog was one of the artists I only found out about after starting 1000 Songs.

Firstly, you can't go wrong with referencing the moon. Surely. It's like the cooler sun. While we are all projecting our happy vibes onto the sun, I swear it is instead looking at itself in the moon, thinking it's fronting Echo and the Bunnymen.

Anyway...

Moondog (born Louis Thomas Hardin) was a blind composer and musician who famously "lived" on the streets of New York dressed as a Viking! I think this is a bit of lore. But he wasn't just an eccentric street performer. He made brilliant, complex music, and not only that, he was the inventor of his own instruments, most notably a triangular percussion instrument called the "trimba."

Truly innovative, he was the inspiration for legendary minimalist artists such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich, who actually championed his work and viewed him as a peer.

I absolutely love the looping, repetitive phrases in his work, and the production quality is just unbelievable for the 1950s. It sounds so far ahead of its time.

For the archive, I have gone with "Theme", "Dog Trot", and "Oboe Round".

Oboe Round by Moondog