Deep relaxation pop | The Beauty of Denial by Roy Montgomery

Nice music for a well-groomed fog. Photo: unsplash/Shapelined You can't really refuse to pursue a career anymore. The band Pin Group from Christchurch released their first single, "Ambivalence", in 1981, which was also the first single to be released on the style-defining New Zealand Flying Nun label. A pleasantly vague and reverberated piece of post-punk, but the band wasn't that happy with it and behaved ambivalently. She refused photos and tried to prevent copies from reaching the press. On the cover of the second single, Pin Group apologized for the inadequacies of their music, guitarist Roy Montgomery left for England for an educational trip before the record was released, and only released his first solo album almost fifteen years later.

But there are also types of lack of ambition that promote freedom. If you don't want to achieve anything commercially, you don't have to worry about how to get there. This is not necessarily good for art, but it is also often good. You can then do whatever you want.

Back in New Zealand, Montgomery played briefly in the bands Shallows and Dadamah. On the latter, the guitars were dronier and more overdriven, but the Dadamah album “This Is Not a Dream” remained within the coordinates that the Velvet Underground had set, with stoic drums and faded vocals. The first solo albums only came out in 1995, the second, "Temple IV", told of the death of his wife Jo three years earlier without singing and is one of the most beautiful things that has been recorded in the often shallow field of instrumental post-rock ambient with just one guitar and a four-track recorder.

The album of the week. Further texts at dasnd.de/ Plattenbau

Since the mid-nineties, Roy Montgomery has been producing introspective music that only follows his own standards, largely unnoticed by other musicians, with his guitar and a few filters, distortions, his pleasantly sonorous voice and, again and again, other musicians. No matter whether repetitive and minimalist or in distorted mode: his playing always radiates great peace and contemplation. Deceleration music for the overwhelmed subject.

His current album is called “Nebular” and he recorded it with the London singer Martha Skye Murphy. The title is right: music like warm fog. The guitar is still the main instrument, but unlike on most other albums, it often no longer sounds like a string instrument, but like something that sends flat signals to the earth from some parallel universe. As distant as it seems, you can still hear the legacy of the Velvet Underground, the post-punk of the eighties and the general aesthetic of music recorded in garages and bedrooms.

On »Nebular« you will find five deeply introverted and yet maximally present pieces, as with all music in which Montgomery has his deeply relaxed fingers in play. The largely wordless, disembodied vocals of Martha Skye Murphy, which, although more expressive, are reminiscent of the voice of Liz Harris (with whose project Grouper Roy Montgomery made a very, very nice record in 2007), move from the background forward and back again, adding to the ethereal character. Everything then comes together in the quarter-hour-long “The Play of Light and Dark”: a piece that slowly rises, moves up and down, layering more and more foggy surfaces made of guitars and voices, without coming to a conclusion, and slipping away in a fade-out.

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