Mountains

“Spending time with something tends to give it more definition,” Koen Holtkamp of Mountains told The Quietus, explaining why he and partner Brendon Anderegg make such gradual, layered music. The pieces on Choral, their third album and first for Chicago label Thrill Jockey, take a while to develop, yet they never feel static or complacent. There’s always a sense of forward motion in the duo’s beds of acoustic instrumentation, electronic synthesis and sampled field recordings. Such technique makes their name both obvious and subtle—they certainly make mountains of sound, but they don’t start at the top, instead building their sonic pyramids from the ground up, stratum by stratum.

Holtkamp and Anderegg became friends in middle school, and both later attended the Art Institute of Chicago. Moving to Brooklyn in the early 2000’s, they started Mountains with the intention of it being primarily a live project. But in 2005 they decided to release a self-titled debut LP on their own label, Apestaartje, which the Dutch use both to mean “little monkeys tail” and as a nickname for the @ symbol. (Holtkamp was born in the Netherlands). They followed that up with Sewn in 2007, then moved to Thrill Jockey for Choral, perhaps their best release so far.

Recorded in 2008 at their makeshift home studio Brooklyn, Choral was performed mostly in real-time. As with a lot of improvised music, you can hear some of the decisions happen as they were made. But because everything occurs so patiently and deliberately, there is a slow-motion effect to Choral’s dense pieces, as if the duo has zoomed in as far as possible, stretching each sound out so you can see and hear textures and details that might otherwise fly by. Think of the way microscopic imagery can make specks of dust look like wide vistas—Mountains turn the simplest sounds into massive, endless peaks. —Marc Masters