Moondog : More Moondog – HJRLP106

The majority of the compositions here are brief, often very intricate miniatures, which within the space of a mere minute or two instantly place you in Moondog’s singular sound world, structured with difficult time signatures and populated by sounds that are quite unlike anything you’d hear anywhere else. It’s hard to imagine how alien this music must have been back in the 1950s. When the longer-form pieces arrive they embellish upon this primal, outsider aesthetic with visceral, jazzy arrangements. ‘Up Broadway’ is an urgent and thorny construction combining the rhythmic complexity found elsewhere with aggressive horns, while ‘In A Doorway’ lets a little of the outside world into its recording, embracing the street sounds that so influenced Moondog’s early works and intermingling them with instrumentation.