The Mountain Announces
Scatter, Blank Tapes, 2006
Glasgow-based avant-folk collective Scatter are aptly-named. The revolving cast of musicians has counted Nick McCarthy (of Franz Ferdinand) among its number, while their current line-up shares a cellist with Belle and Sebastian. Scatter’s impressive second album, The Mountain Announces, their first for the fledgling Blank Tapes label, suggests that a notion of dispersal remains central to their creative process. In an essay on the album Oliver Neilson, band leader of sorts, describes the moment of inspiration for the title track: ‘I’m riding a bike, just married, round my wife’s mountain village of Towa in Japan … and I notice everywhere around the mountain are these public-address speakers on telegraph poles, which at certain intervals broadcast a little melody through the piece and quiet’. In considering how it is that folk standards scatter and are received, the band attempts an exploration of where the origins of traditional songs lie.
The group’s approach to source material is neither reverent nor quite iconoclastic. Rather it is precociously curious; well-known standards are reinhabited, twisted into something a little eerie along the way. ‘She Moves Through The Fayre’, once covered by Simple Minds, is stripped, its skeletal form rewrapped in harmoniums and chimes, and stretched to well over the ten minute mark. Hanna Tuulikki’s vocal, wavering between a coo and a caterwaul, is the little girl lost in the bustling crowd. Scatter mine a common thread running between trad folk and contemporary drone/improvisation. Whilst a total of nine musicians are listed in the liner-notes, and three of the tracks stray past seven minutes, the album is remarkable for its restraint and economy. The opening track, ‘O Death’, builds a feral hymn from a single drone, skewed harmonies rising then subsiding as quickly as they began.
Over the course of The Mountain Announces’ seven tracks, a collage of traditions is assembled as two histories – one Celtic and the other an imagined Eastern Mediterranean – are placed side by side. As in the ramshackle rebetika (a form of Greek blues), ‘Dowie Dens of Yarrow’, dulcimer and bouzouki fight for their place aside the drunken hootenany. Celebration is always precarious though; the dances of Yarrow are forgotten as uneasy harmonies and skittering percussion lead in the funeral procession of ‘Blackout Years’. Tuulikki’s unfettered wail is a good foil for Neilson’s Leeds monotone: ‘Woke up from a coma / Drank a can of cola / Went back to the coma…’ The voice crackles with static, recorded over the telephone – literally ‘phoned-in’ – from the singer’s flat to his brother Alex’s upstairs. The old is filtered through the new but never completely or quite satisfactorily; remains of past voices are never fully exhumed. Instead, they overlap, sometimes collapsing under their own weight: ‘Telephone ringing in the rubble’, begins the Mark E Smith-shaped rant of ‘Kid Pharaoh’s Last Phonecall’. The Mountain Announces is a cacophony of voices that refuses to ever quite resolve. This partial reconciliation of the pastoral and the modern, of traditional song and improvisation, underpins the album.
Sam Thorne
