Moon Hooch!

All of this is intentional

Welcome to our Musical Zodiac, in which we arbitrarily match instruments to personality types and use that as an excuse to discuss our favorite musickers. Aquarius runs from 20 January to 18 February, and the sign is supposed to be “known for being compassionate, independent, and rebellious” - which says “saxophone” to me!

You may have to look beyond the performance to find “compassionate” here, but let’s start with a band that had “independent and rebellious” in abundance:

MOON HOOCH!

I was in marching band for eleven of my formative years, and I had heard saxophones make all of these noises before. However, when my Cactus High bandmates made these sounds, they would stop and blush, adjust something on the instrument, and apologize.

But Moon Hooch is doing all of this on purpose.

They call their music "cave music," taking the best elements of electronica — the brutal stops, starts and shifts — and performing those unnaturally precise hairpin turns organically by blowing on horns and banging on drums.

Bob Boilen, NPR Music editor

The band released their debut album in 2013 after earning a name for themselves by busking in the New York subways - and getting banned by the NYPD because too many people were dancing near the edges of the train platforms.

The Compassion

I wasn’t trying to be dismissive about the “compassionate” quality of these saxophone players. But these guys bring something you don’t hear when you listen to a Moon Hooch recording:

A smaller carbon footprint.

It would be hard to know this from their purely instrumental music, but the guys behind Moon Hooch have a philosophy of sustainability, and they are dedicated to making the world a better place through their actions and choices as they bring us their music.

Their compassion comes from a sincere effort to learn to relate to each other - and their story makes the music that comes out of their relationship even more compelling.

In 2015, we were invited to speak and perform at the TEDx Conference in Atlanta. We spoke about how learning to understand psychology and our human realities helped us to cope with our own dissonance and express our emotions through our music.

So, come for the sick beats - stay for the self-awareness and compassion.