Atonement – When Mountains Speak (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

Often, the writing arm of the music reviewer is guided by the information provided by the artist, band or PR company. Usually, the sonic subject matter arrives with press releases, photographs, existing quotes, and all manner of, what the industry pretentiously calls, “assets.” But it is laying everything out on a plate like that, which means that most reviews will come to the same conclusions, likely the ones the sender have indicated that you should reach.

I prefer to go in blind, just be faced with the music unaided, unprompted, and, let’s face it, unprepared. Isn’t that the only way to generate an honest, individual response? And that is the only way to face the sort of music that Steven Clarkson‘s When Mountains Speak makes. All you have to rely on is what releases you might have heard before and where this new one now takes you.

But even with such materials to rely on, it would probably be hard to find references in the music, something certainly true of this latest release, Atonement. There are undoubtedly things that the band is trying to say, thoughts and feelings they are aiming to provoke in the listener. Still, they are so abstracted, so far away from conventional structures that all you can do with these truly unique instrumental creations is let them wash over you and see how you feel about things. Isn’t that how you should approach all art?

“The Light Inside,” which leads us in, has the familiar use of tabla beats, but the guitar work is unlike much you will have heard before, even on earlier WMS songs. It wanders between the swampy and squalling and the searing and spacy, and tethered by these raga beats and other Indianocentric surrealist sounds, it explores the space, the potential, what lies beyond. Like much of the music in Steven’s back catalog, it explores what lies on the far side of conventional song and stops just short of actual noise. This is music as art! music as experiment. Music as an academic process.

“Bellingham” is a reductionist take on that sound, spacious and gloopy (that’s a word, right?), full of seemingly random musical motifs – honking harmonicas, shrieking, squeaking sax sonics, off-kilter beats, feeling like an exploded and extrapolated diagram of song construction, everything pulled apart, adjacent rather than woven together.

The title track takes us into more ambient realms, with music as a dark, cinematic, fractured score, drifting and dreamlike, even if that dream feels fitful and fraught. Yet, “State of Soul” is a song that comes close to having a recognizable groove, a mandolin madrigal over a clinical dancefloor beat. We end with the same blends of mystique and almost-melodies that brought us in, “Guide My Path” feeling like the fractured nature of life that the traveler is asking for help resolving.

As always, the music of When Mountains Speak is what you make of it. It always has a spiritual and cosmic quality, a blend of philosophy and psychedelia. As the track titles suggest, much of the music’s intent is to open the mind, see the bigger picture, and leave the mundane and worldly behind.

This is not music that gives answers; it is music that puts you into unnatural surroundings so you can think about things in different ways. As I mentioned on the way in, this is not an exercise in being drawn to a single, definitive conclusion; this is music that throws you in at the deep end and asks you to learn to swim. And you do. You must. Pretty rapidly. My first encounters with When Mountains Speak, all those years ago, were daunting, bewildering, and unnerving. But after a while, you begin to understand the point of it all. The music might wield a dozen questions, but if you align your mind with it, let it work its magic, it will prompt a hundred answers.

Once you realize that the boundaries of music do not lay where you thought they did, you can begin to question and explore the perceived demarcations of everything else around you.