Mount Analogue

Description

This musical journey pays homage to René Daumal and his enchanting world of mystery and magic. The album shares its title with Daumal’s novel, Le Mont Analogue: roman d'aventures symboliquement authentiques et non euclidiennes en alpinisme, published posthumously in 1952, 8 years after the author’s premature death. Le Mont Analogue is a classic allegorical adventure novel. The novel describes the expedition of a group of mountaineers who set out to conquer Mont Analogue, a gigantic mountain located on a surreal continent, invisible and inaccessible to the outside world, which can only be perceived with the aid of obscure knowledge. The central theme of mountaineering is extensively explored through a literary and philosophical prism. Daumal died before completing his novel, which gives the story a strange, one-sided quality, as it abruptly ends mid-sentence. The first disc features a 50-minute composition divided into 6 chapters: Introduction, Encounter, Supposition, Crossing, Arrival, and Conclusion. This album weaves a rich tapestry of diverse instruments, sounds, and voices that, together, tell the story of this work. The second disc presents five improvisations for solo electric guitar by Henry Kaiser. The first solo, Jodorowsky’s Peradam, is inspired by Alejandro Jodorowsky's 1973 film, The Holy Mountain, itself inspired by Daumal’s novel. Kaiser’s initial forty-eight-minute guitar solo serves as a fundamental guide for his subsequent four solo musical interpretations, in the manner of Rashomon, of Mont Analogue, as seen through the psychedelic labyrinth of Jodorowsky’s cinematic masterpiece. These discs feature musicians: Bill Laswell (bass), Henry Kaiser (guitar), Anna Clementi (vocals), Percy Howard (voice), Hideo Yamaki (percussion), Graham Haynes (cornet), Nils Petter Molvaer (trumpet), Toshinori Kondo (trumpet), and P.ST (concept, mix, electronics).