Mt. Mountain
Dust

THE REVIEW

I thought of one of the most famous speeches by Martin Luther King: 'I've Been to the Mountaintop'. It was July 3, 1968. He spoke at the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee in support of African American sanitation workers. The following day, while he was on the balcony outside his room at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, he was struck by a .30-06 caliber bullet fired from a Remington 760, fell violently backward onto the balcony, unconscious. He died an hour later at St. Joseph Hospital. He was thirty-nine years old.

I imagined all these events as if they were continuously repeating in slow motion before my eyes while the mountain turned to dust and crumbled in my hands. Like a ritual hallucination derived from listening to the music of the latest album by Mt. Mountain, a neo-psychedelic band from Perth, Australia, consisting of Stephen Bailey, Derrick Treatch, Brendan Shanley, Glenn Palmer, and Thomas Cahill.

The album is titled 'Dust' and was recorded at the Sleepwalkers Dread Studio in North Dandalup by Ron Pollard. Balancing between the psychedelia of Pontiak and the meditative ritual drone of Bardo Pond, 'Dust' (Cardinal Fuzz) is a work divided into four contemplative tracks, consisting mostly of long soundscapes and desert-like settings on a bed of drone compositions, occasionally interrupted by sandstorms filled with electric and acidic surges and invocations to the primal forces of the Australian outback.

A true journey that connects psychedelia with a certain religious mysticism and where the mountain becomes an ideal place to reach and possibly surpass to look beyond that ideal boundary evoked by Luther King and finally discover what we can call and define as the 'promised land'. A circular, evocative work where the traditionalism of percussion sound merges with neo-psychedelic constructions and the guitar style of John Fahey, and the present is lost in the sands of time beneath our feet.

'I don't know what will happen now; we've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter to me now, because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. God has allowed me to go up the mountain. And I've seen the promised land. I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. I'm only concerned about doing God's will. And I'm so happy tonight; I'm not fearing any man: mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.'