Roy Montgomery
The Allegory Of Hearing

Roy Montgomery is a prominent figure in the psychedelic, ambient, and space rock of the 1990s, one of the most interesting revelations from New Zealand in the realm of music straddling the popular and avant-garde, along with the Dead C.

Unjustly remained niche even today when his career can be considered concluded, as he has hung up his guitar in favor of an academic career, he left posterity a prolific series of works of consistently high quality, never descending into empty mannerism: from the eighties beginnings with the dark-punk of the Pin Group, to the excellent "This is Not a Dream in Dadamah," to the two albums as Dissolve in partnership with Chris Heaphy, to those with Bardo Pond in the Hash Jar Tempo project, up to six solo albums and a couple of collections, one gathering his most songwriter-like creations, the other - Inroads - recently released, retracing his instrumental evolution through various b-sides and unreleased tracks.
The roots of his style, oriented toward minimal trance, often devoid of rhythmic base, can be traced—though uniquely reshaped—in both John Fahey's guitar work and Indian ragas, as well as Manuel Gottsching's daring kraut; reminiscent of Terry Riley's kaleidoscope and Spacemen 3's saturated obsessiveness.

"The Allegory of Hearing," released in 2000, represents one of his cornerstones, alongside "And Now the Rain Sounds Like Life Is Falling Down Through It," from 1998, and "Scenes From the South Island," from 1995. It can be said that with this work he reached the peak of awareness of his own means, attempting to fuse the celestial and ambient experiments of Scenes with the almost psychotic, unconscious, underground psychedelia of "And Now The Rain...," his most known record.
Roy attempts a sort of synesthetic instrumental journey, seeking to create real landscapes by molding evocative music that can merge mental and real horizons. The album is aimed at evoking the distant, desolate, and rugged lands of the southern islands of New Zealand, where even endangered bird species struggle to find refuge from civilization.

The journey begins with "Ex Cathedra," a slow guitar arpeggio reverberated by dark drones and with a homogeneous flow of farfisa in the background, making the track very ambient: a kind of general glimpse, from above, of what the album's panorama will be. "Rock, Sea, Muse, Seek" unleashes a wave of adrenaline, where the same riff, overdubbed multiple times, overlaps with a series of sirens. The atmosphere is hectic, shrill, deafening. Roy manages to outline something very similar to a lysergic journey within a storm.
"As the Dali Lama Was Remarking I Believe" offers a dark rumble in which a long chanting, oriental-flavored solo theme interjects, revolving around a couple of reiterated chords that have been its foundation from the start, with minimal variations. It's evident here, as in many of his pieces, the fusion of static, repetitive elements with dynamic, none of them overshadowing the others: the horizontal sense of the material, immanent chant perfectly integrates with the vertical sense of the transcendent, ecstatic, contemplative impression. They give meaning to each other, creating a rhythm through their intersection in the absence of drums.
"Sounding The Abyss" delves into marine, sandy, and calcareous depths with a long, muted, slow, thunderous, tactile guitar incursion. Between Roy's fingers, the strings vividly project their movements onto the rock of sound, as if bringing a sea monster to life.

"I Hear You Mocking," the fifth track on the album (missing by mistake in the original tracklist), resurfaces to trace a clumpy, arid path where the farfisa liberates in a harsh solo while the vehement chords of multiple guitars serve as a harmonic counterpoint.
The series of these brief landscape sketches continues with "Where the Beltower Once Stood," a more airy, sidereal piece. The rumble in the background allows the tones to be more open, the echo and reverb of the guitar drawing a moment of ecstatic contemplation, which halfway through allows other suspended and more monumental visions to emerge. "From The Promontory" permits itself to reprise the theme of the first track by adding an electric trail reminiscent of Brian Eno's inventions.

With "Resolution Island Suite" we reach the climax of the album: 17 whirlwind minutes of scorching magma, divided into seven movements, where Fahey-like acoustic arpeggios, made dirty and then electric, encircled by farfisa flows and as many guitar inventions as possible succeed each other; all creating a shoegaze carpet, a timeless mantra from which fanciful deviations pop up; Roy manages to maintain a perfect balance between acid jams of the '70s and minimalism, avoiding falling into outdated baroque styles but preserving the imaginative richness of psychedelia, indeed updating it for the third millennium.
After this journey to the center of the earth, dawn rises again on the hills with "At The Intersection of Herzog & Wenders," reminding us of how Montgomery's music, related both to that of Florian Fricke and Ry Cooder, is ideal for accompanying the mood of these directors: the melodic-harmonic leitmotif returns between material and ethereal moments, between rural, granitic, and ascending, pastoral spaces. The circle closes with "Above All, Compassion," another reprise, more pensive and gentle, of the opening theme.

With relatively simple means, Roy Montgomery managed to develop and touch both the concreteness of natural territories in music—it should not be forgotten how sound is an essential characteristic of the movement of bodies in contact with the environment—and the abstractness of invisible, pantheistic, universal tensions, the music of the spheres. He conveyed a spiritual charge to all that sublime and mysterious spectrum of inorganic existences, not subservient to human needs, with a personal calligraphism that unites fantasy and precision, becoming and origin of the world, spirit, and matter.