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"Words Of A Mountain" is an album that isn't afraid to sound synthetic and cheesy, yet also exquisitely delicately impressionist, and makes the artificiality of its sound the sincere stylistic hallmark that sets it apart from many other late '80s neoclassical ambient attempts. But it's not just this aesthetic, more akin to the earliest electronic music experiments and European library music than to its "genre siblings," that makes it so damn interesting because this work by the Parisian-born keyboardist/session man Wally Badarou is filled with mysterious, ethereal, mystical, icy, and why not quasi-ethnological atmospheres, at times.
Badarou, who has worked with many bands and artists - including Level 42, M (the ones of "Pop Music"), and Herbie Hancock (who knows a thing or two about keyboards, eh!)-, reveals here a compositional ability that goes far beyond the canons of properly said electronic music but approaches more closely, in its own way, the compositions of the virtuosos of the 18th and 19th centuries, at least in the approach to melodies and harmonies if not also in the final results of the music written on the score. If with his first very unknown solo work "Back To Scales To-Night" in 1980 Badarou had already demonstrated versatility and modernity, creating an electronic funk midway between the more disco Hancock and the super poppy Imagination, it would be his sharp turn towards instrumental music, first approaching more danceable models with "Echoes" and then soundtracks, that would highlight those potentials which in my opinion only consecrated themselves definitely here in 1989, at the end of his solo career, like the swan song of an almost entirely uphill journey (he reappears for a moment in 2001 and disappears again).
The "concept" behind the album is the representation in music of various mountainous settings scattered around the world, a sort of pretext to present a small musical Global Village, not unworthy of the canons of Fourth World Music but more exquisitely romantic and naive in content.
Natural noises and cold plucks intertwine to present the absolute secluded tranquility of the mountains, in harmonies full of desperate joy and calm tension. Like an expert trapeze artist, Badarou manages to avoid predictable melodic resolutions, unless absolutely necessary, and for this very reason, nothing in this surprising album sounds like déjà vu.
And inside the LP, there's really everything, starting from the powerful piano of "Leaving This Place" with slightly Jarrett-like tints of "Koln Concert"; continuing with the mild anguish of "Vesuvio Solo"; reaching the almost Caribbean Africanism of "The Feet Of Fouta", which from one moment to the next becomes immaterial and dreamy. There's "Ayers Rock Bubble Eyes" which starts entirely in tears and then reaches the epicness of Vangelis. If then, at the end, there's a short and sweet ballad like "Words Of Grace", whose title says it all, one cannot help but define "Words Of A Mountain" as a tender innocent ambient masterpiece. A childlike love letter to the planet Earth. A whisper forgotten by time. A moment of solitary pause.
All in all, a really great album.
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