Choral

The kind of ambient-drone music Mountains make suffers from the same kind of public-relations problem all post-minimalist art does: the old “my kid could do that” philistinism that equates artistic value with apparent aural/visual complexity. Mountains’ music has always had a surface simplicity, a cleanness of sound and form that made Mountains and Sewn so satisfying. Brendon Anderegg and Koen Holtkamp have always specialized in blending Stars of the Lid-style grandeur with more analog sounds, everything from the ever-present acoustic guitar to field recordings of water and birds, but those not moved by the graceful sweep of Mountains’ music might be tempted to label it too basic in composition—why, it’s just a bunch of drones layered over top one another, occasionally with an acoustic guitar plucking away!

Thrill Jockey claims that most of Choral, the third album from Brooklyn drone-duo Mountains, was recorded without overdubs, the group's guitars and organs and various other noisemakers looped and fractured mostly in real time. It's a semi-unique practice for quasi-experimental, long-form composition but ultimately one of those "it sounds like a turntable but it's really a guitar"-constructs that matters very little when a record is coming out of your speakers.