| Artist: Mountains Album: Centralia Label: Thrill Jockey |  
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It will be interesting to see which group claims Centralia (66'30") as their own. Who from the neo-spacemusic, post-rock, ambient-prog, or grunge-minimalism, camps will cite this work as the next step in the evolution of their respective genre? Koen Holtkamp and Brendon Anderegg release music under the name Mountains. The guitar based innovations of Centralia are equally open to generous meditative reflection as well as the questioning that arises from the unfamiliar. On a few tracks the duo plays acoustic guitar deeply picking above an organ chord and buzzing, hissing space effects. Further in the music sounds like it is based on something guitar-icon Richard Pinhas or his group Heldon would have made to pay tribute to the tape loop soundscapes of Robert Fripp (all those old influences may not have made it into this album, but they have made it into the musicians). Elsewhere on Centralia gradual but eventually overpowering buildups add a nervous undercurrent - a youthful gesture of meaning and threat. Holtkamp and Anderegg intend their music to be more than expressive arrangements of sound and form - and they are powerfully effective on those terms alone. Mountains continues to find new wonder in realizing musical ideas which demand specific spatial organization. They do not create their musical fantasies in order for us to escape reality, they create them in order for us to stay.
- Chuck van Zyl/STAR'S END 5 June 2013 | |
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