Ambient classic

Little Dreaming Boy by Thirteen Moons

Most old bands have a cult following somewhere nowadays, a badly coded Belgian or Singaporean website or some odd article here or there in an online fanzine. But not Thirteen Moons. They are just forgotten.

 Thirteen Moons formed sometime in the mid 1980s and released their debut album in 1986 called “Little Dreaming Boy” – arguably one of the most remarkable albums in Swedish music history. It is the result of a vision that is long forgotten by all everyone involved.

The band consisted of Göran Klintberg on vocals, Anders Holm on guitar and Mats Gunnarsson on saxophone. Gunnarsson is deceased, Holm has locked himself up in a one-room apartment for the last three decades and Klintberg now works with wine imports. He quit singing a long time ago. Most of them emerged from the Stockholm punk scene and wanted to try something new. Also, the 80s were the times of pretention, poetry and seriousness.

To make their forgotten vision a reality, the trio called in favours from people they knew. Håkan Almqvist, since then a producer of cheesy Swedish dance music, had just graduated from Berklee College of Music and wrote arrangements for strings and choir. They recorded most of the album at night in otherwise unused studios.