Send "Mountains " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Tinymixtapes |
 Mountains first emerged as a collaboration between Brendon Anderegg and Koen Holtkamp, co-founders of the Brooklyn-based Apestaartje label. Originally, the duo approached Mountains as a means to articulate, within a live context, their blend of acoustic and electronic instrumentation into fully formed soundscapes. Soon, however, these methods began to translate into recorded material as well. Choral, Mountain’s third studio album and first for Thrill Jockey, was recorded largely in real-time and further exemplifies the band’s ability to produce dynamic layers of sound. While occasionally coming across as crisp and polished, the music maintains a more immediate quality, allowing expressive qualities to flourish. The end result is a consistently rewarding album, whose layered textures and pleasant atmospheres are complemented by moments of sheer blissfulness.Choral’s six tracks possess distinct qualities, each focusing on a separate array of instrumentation and structure. Despite these variations, the album avoids sounding fragmented, as each song effectively melds into a cohesive whole. Clocking in at nearly 13 minutes, the album begins with the sprawling title track. With its crisp drone and bubbling, playful synths, the song’s first half unfurls and rises with anticipation. Around the halfway point, the song begins to take hold as ethereal electronics, lush field recordings, and a slowly pulsating bass tone culminate and ascend before drifting off and leaving a solitary acoustic guitar in their wake. Now that the listener is sufficiently blissed-out, the album glides along seamlessly, traversing various moods and textures....full text |
| BBC |
| Revealing a finely attuned sense of proportion and balance, the six pieces which make up the album never fall short of their initial promise. There's also several surprisingly dramatic moments such as on the eight minute Telescope, in which cascading down-strummed acoustic guitar are gradually absorbed into the white-noise sheets of sound of an Arizona rain storm. The fact that they are willing to go beyond the usual suspects such as Eno-spawned noodlings, naive melodies frosted in reverb or the Kosmiche rent-a-mope settings that populate so much contemporary electronica, gives Choral a distinctive edge....full text |
| Consequenceofsound |
| The duo known as Mountains is not glitzy and glamorous. They do not create complex stage sets like Nine Inch Nails and they do not post animal rights activism essays in their CD booklets like Moby. They simply appear to exist. However, Choral, the third album by the renowned atmospheric audiophiles Brendon Anderegg and Koen Holtkamp brings new meaning to the word “dreamy.” After recently signing with their new label Thrill Jockey, the two, under the pseudonym Mountains, released the six song album for us joyous masses to interpret whatever way we choose - and that is truly the gist of a record like this. Beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder, and instrumental structures from any genre can be digested in a multitude of fashions. Whether you sit and stare at your ceiling and watch fan blades orbit around dead bulbs or if you just lay asleep with headphones on, you’re looking to feel the music. Some might use drugs to enhance these effects, but that is fodder for another trough altogether. On the titular opening track of Choral, the monotony of synth and strings aren’t too thrilling to the senses. In fact, they feel a bit stagnant and almost dull. Luckily, they also feel warm, as if there’s a warm digital blanket being pulled over you. To some it might be a mantra you hum to yourself in meditation. On other tracks like “Telescope”, you can really grasp the title of the song, picturing an array of colorful stars on an autumn evening, all over light guitar strumming and whispering atmospheres of sound accompaniment....full text |
Mountains lyrics
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