Mountains

I saw Mountains last night at Le Poisson Rouge, they opened up the night as part of the Unsound Festival ahead of Tape, Radian and Tim Hecker. I must really like Mountains because I trudged downtown in a blizzard with a bad cold and split right after they finished, but it was worth it. Mountains is one of my favorite bands at the moment, what they're doing really speaks to me on a conceptual level and really just on a gut reaction level too. I think their music is an evolution of avant-garde experiments in the past, like Terry Riley's "In C" or Steven Reich's music. I would hesitate to call it minimalist music but there is a simplicity to Mountains, a meditative aspect that is like standing in one place while the elements swirl all around you. Both of the guys in Mountains (a duo based in Brooklyn) had guitars, laptops, a variety of effects and percussion. They started the set off both blowing into melodicas, the sound filtering through the laptops and they just add to it. I've listened to their new album "etchings" a lot but it's hard to say whether they were playing music off of that, the music is so transient and changing. In that way it's part of the American Primitive tradition, which is about, in part, never playing the same piece of music the same way twice. I saw Mountains for the first time about a year ago and there were about 15 people there. This was a part of a festival with some other well-known bands (at least in the ambient or abstract folks realm) playing, but I was still impressed that there were around 250 people hovering in front of these guys on a very cold and snowy winter night in NY. I bet at least half the audience or more were musicians, made me think about the quip about how the Velvet Underground never sold a lot of records but everyone who bought one started a band.