Customer Reviews

Scenes from the South Islands

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You really don't have to go to the island nation of New Zealand to understand it's beauty when you listen to Scenes From The South Island. Put the CD into your player and you are transformed there quicker than e-mail. Memorizing, haunting yes but mostly shows Roy Montgomery's genuis for creating beautiful works without using much fancy equipment. Not your run of the mill instrumental work. Too much creative guitar feedback to be "New Agey", not to mention depth of feeling puts it into it's own category. Your new "must have" CD!!

No one's going to hear typical instrumentation universally associated with traditionally arranged songs on "Scenes From The South Island" for two compelling reasons; the first with regard to lack of any instrument on this recording except for heavily processed guitar, and the second due to the fact that the tracks unwind with very little sense of defined linear progress, with the former definitely contributing to the latter.

Roy Montgomery is almost universally unknown outside of Europe and his native New Zealand, where he was a member of both Dissolve and Dadamah. His recognition factor within the American indie-music community is largely due to his participation with Bardo Pond in in their side project Hash Jar Tempo (which can be heard on "Well Oiled" and "Under Glass") and a string of solo releases, beginning with the 4-track recording "Scenes From The South Island". Somewhat of a heavily textural phrasing informs his technique, and it's processed through his effects rack. Reverb, chorus, echo , and delay are the pedals he tends to rely upon the most, creating a vibrant, fluid, overlayered tone, occasionally altered by E-bow. And he tends to focus more on developing subtle changes within repetitive chord patterns to provide both variation and a sense of dynamic tension rather than building from a moderate tempo toward the sort of sustained, explosive release favored by Bardo Pond and other masters of centering their textural playing around heavy drones that undergo extreme dynamic shifts in magnitude and amplitude.

South Island is the larger of the two island land masses that comprise New Zealand's territory. And what Montgomery accomplishes here using just a guitar, his effects rack, an E-bow, and a four track recorder is to aurally replicate, on an almost synaesthetic level, the physical remoteness, transcendent beauty, spiritual accessibility, and universal enchantment (in the truest sense of how that word is defined) of this mystical, haunting land where everything seems timeless, rooted in eternity, and filled with a yearning to either connect with (or return to) it. "South Island" is an evocative, haunting, impressionistic work whose recording limitations work as its most positive vehicle for translating this into the mind's eye of the listener's ear.