Roy Montgomery
Temple IV

…and then, suddenly, she arrives. Death.

Continuing my excursus into the solo work of the psychedelic guitarist from New Zealand, I stumble upon his second work: “Temple IV”. An instrumental album formally inspired by his journey to Tikal, a city nestled in the heart of the rainforest in Guatemala, where Roy had the opportunity to drink from the fountain of the Mayan civilization while contemplating the famous “Temple IV” (or “Temple of the Two-Headed Serpent”), I realize that fundamentally, upon listening to it and reading the notes in the booklet, things are not exactly as they seem.

In the pieces of his first solo work, “Scenes From the South Island”, nature and the surrounding external space were the subject; in this album, they become the object complement where all of Montgomery's emotions and feelings, deeply disturbed by the death of the woman he loved, pour into.

Roy's psychedelic syntax thus, instead of producing a strongly impressionistic and pantheistic album like his first, this time created an expressionist and existentialist work: a true journey of self-analysis in search of a new psycho-physical balance, going through all the various emotional steps that separated him from overcoming/accepting his grief.

“She Waits on Temple IV” is a long and soft epitaph that, with the lightness and delicacy of its intertwining guitar jingles, Roy seems to have written not on a tombstone, but rather on a cloud or sand by the sea; an evanescent Mandala filled with sweet memories composed in the funeral chamber of his partner.

But memories can hurt: the intense distortions that come upon the funeral organ parade of “Departing the Body”, are Montgomery's excruciating pain fully enveloped by the sense of irretrievable loss. This piece, one of the most emotionally charged he has ever written, is followed by the classy arpeggio of “The Soul Quietens”: a continuous, relentless escape, a feline escape, graceful, delicate, no matter, as long as one escapes. The gaze, the thought, the sensations, cannot focus on the ruins of the Mayan city, on the lush flora, on anything! The thought of Her is there waiting, one must move to not remember, but in the end, exhausted, suddenly one stops.

Immobile, it appears to Roy that things are slowly melting away as if they were snow in the sun: “The Passage of Forms” is a dark spell of “Black Magic”, where the undulating guitar soaked in delay seems like the soul perceiving the dissolution of the surrounding world that has no meaning without Her. Counterpart to this piece, (preceded by the rocky “Jaguar Meets Snake”, a piece with an almost epic gait where we “see” the enormous efforts of a man trying to restore balance to his spirit and psyche) is “Above the Canopy”: this time the guitar delay, thanks to the “White Magic” produced by the benevolent snakehead of the temple, brings about the blossoming of everything around and the soft electronic drone that occasionally emerges seems to be Montgomery's soul soaring upwards in a new perception of himself and things.

The album closes with the brief arpeggio tinged with serene melancholy of “Jaguar Unseen” and perhaps its brevity is no coincidence: it is probably just a fleeting finding of balance and, to truly overcome and accept his grief, composing “Temple IV” was not enough for Roy, but he had to go through all these steps over and over again.

Dostoevsky wrote “The Gambler” primarily to rid himself of his morbid obsession with gambling, and ultimately, by describing all the moods of a gambling addict, he undertook a journey similar to Montgomery. It’s likely that for him, too, finishing the book was not enough, but one must not be discouraged. As the protagonist says at the end of the novel: “…Tomorrow, tomorrow all this will be over!”.