Roy Montgomery

Alongside Sam Rosenthal (Black Tape For A Blue Girl) and Daniel Vahnke (Vampire Rodents), Roy Montgomery is one of the greatest musical minds of recent years. Having left behind that definitive monument to psychedelia known as “Well Oiled“, recorded with Bardo Pond in 1995 and released in 1997 under the Hash Jar Tempo name (a tribute to Manuel Göttsching's Ash Ra Tempel), Montgomery recorded two albums with Dissolve (“That That Is” and “Third Album From The Sun”) and two solo albums (“Scenes From The South Island” and “Temple IV”). Then he decided to go back to working on his own, as if driven by the need to put his life in order. Indeed, “And Now The Rain Sounds Like Life Is Falling Down Through It” is an eminently psychoanalytic work, tied to themes of the “underground”, of boredom and alienation. Montgomery clearly has the Kafka-Dostoevsky-Goncharov triad in mind, something especially evident in the lyric writing. Yet the music too ends up steeped in a suffering, anguished, often resigned atmosphere. The guitar's dark, stretched-out tone often glides through bleak yet fascinating scenarios, like a gothic take on ambient music, while at times it recalls certain textures of Dadamah, stripped, however, of their spatial breath.

Indeed, with this work Montgomery momentarily abandons the ascending flights and metaphysical raptures of Hash Jar Tempo to sublimate an emotional tension entirely resolved within a very confined space, attempting to exorcise the disjointed cries of the most nagging inner ghosts. His voice is both warm and cutting. It has a “prophetic” timbre, like Ian Curtis with a white beard. Rather than sing, he usually declaims, likely drawing on his experience in avant-garde theatre as well. The opening “No She Never Made It To Japan” is a very brief impressionist watercolor, painted in the muted colors of a solitary piano. The age-old circling of “In Our Time”, which unrolls a carpet of chords reverberating through empty space, is followed by “The Opportunity Passed Us By in Less Than a Minute”, another small soundscape sketched with soft, elegant touches.

The obsessive cyclicality of “Down From That Hill And Up To The Pond” is a very particular homage to Bardo Pond's spatial psychedelia. An arabesque of elusive yet layered guitars repeats a kind of ecstatic loop, over which minimal synth figures dance and twirl. The effect is deceptively static, much like the tumultuous monoliths of the Gibbons brothers. The title track is chamber music for rattles, unlike “Kafka Was Correct” (in short: life isn't worth living), which drags itself through a mystical delirium made of cutting guitars forced to repeat the same notes endlessly; of crackling voices and others stripped of even the slightest capacity to communicate; of synthetic, skeletal trickles, picked clean of any depth. In “Catherine At Aldeburgh”, by contrast, the guitar regains luminosity, even though the progression gives the impression of gradually losing itself in a dead end. It's likely that, in lingering over the same simple chords, Montgomery is seeking a hypnotic effect capable of resolving psychological fractures “from within”.

The trance effect is less oppressive in “Entertaining Mr Jones”: the cadenced litany of the first part gives way to a second half built entirely on the “implosive” accumulation of warped synth lines and shattered guitar chords. Montgomery is an exceptional composer; one of the few able to elegantly and creatively combine the intimate warmth of the best singer-songwriter tradition with the “human” intellectualism of true avant-garde. The timid sweetness of the piano returns in the mini-sonata “The Small Sleeper (For Jack)”, with the usual sinister background noises. A perversely psychedelic “fourth world music” (though a vaguely “exotic” strain of psychedelia) reigns unchallenged instead on “Algeria?”. For its part, “A Little Soundtrack (For Epic)”, introduced by the unsettling sound of guitar (filtered through a processor) and punctuated by a piano madly nailed to the same chords, brings the experience of “Well Oiled” back to an infernal clash between dissonant music and melodic digression.

The peak of this research, at once deeply personal and universal, undoubtedly comes in the more than eleven minutes of “Ill At Home”. The perspective is, precisely, that of someone confined to bed by illness (a “psychic” one, as in Goncharov's Oblomov) who tries, as best they can, to escape. The “dream-like” force of these premises is heightened throughout the track: as per space-rock convention, the guitar marks out spatio-temporal boundaries through mechanical repetition. But this is, in truth, an incredibly claustrophobic form of space-rock, as confirmed too by Montgomery's “silent” voice and by the synth's sinuous, enveloping trajectories. The piano is the only instrument that seems to lend the whole a melancholically “earthbound” touch. Everything else, in fact, strains minimalistically upward, in a liturgy of sidereal stillness, a celebration of the imaginative power of heart and mind. In a single track, the New Zealander manages to admirably condense the paroxysmal litanies of Dadamah, the otherworldly excursions of Hash Jar Tempo, and the noise-ambient music of Dissolve. The result is a masterpiece within the masterpiece, to which he entrusts the album's true conclusion, since “In Another Time” seems to “simply” pick up the theme of “In Our Time” again; though, reinvigorated as it is by a rejuvenating airiness, it reveals a small glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.

Once again, a man come from afar, and a record that isn't a dream, but has every appearance of being one.

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02/11/2006