After our feature on Moondog, we were contacted by Kunsthalle Münster, a museum in this German city that is about to open a special multimedia presentation devoted to Moondog. Münster is the city in Germany where Moondog worked and lived the last part of his life.
The exhibition will be open to the public from February 11 to April 19, 2020, and is to cover both Moondog’s works and life.
Three artists and musicians, Thies Mynther, Veit Sprenger and Tobias Euler developed a “Moon Machine” that will land in the Kunsthalle, displaying unheard Moondog pieces and new compositions, as well as visualize sounds and ideas. Added are artifacts from the Moondog archive and friends of his, photographs, instruments as well as original sheet music in Braille.
There will also be a release of an EP with music specially prepared for this exhibition, followed by two special concerts.
As the museum’s press release notes, especially for this exhibition, composer Thies Mynther and theatre-maker Veit Sprenger in collaboration with the visual artist Tobias Euler have created an interventionist music machine.
“The Moon Machine is a mobile sound system — a bricolage consisting of pneumatic instruments and mechatronic sound automats, sun shades, bugles, and acoustic collision warning devices — being played by the two performers Mynther and Sprenger. The acoustic sculpture developed in cooperation with the Theater im Pumpenhaus was first put into operation by the artists at the international festival Flurstücke 019 in Münster in 2019.”
“In the course of the show, the Moon Machine evolves into an installation, throwing off tentacles and connecting with space at the Kunsthalle. Much like Moondog’s appearance, the music machine meets the viewer head-on. The individual instruments take center stage as objects and can be examined in detail. This brings both a sensuous and a visual aspect of making music into focus.”
“The ‘regular’ part of the exhibition will present “exhibits from the estate of Louis Thomas Hardin (aka. Moondog), deriving from his archive in Münster and now shown publicly in this form for the first time.”
