Recently, my wife and I visited an old castle ruin in a dense woodland near our home. This place has a somewhat eerie history, including a large subterranean hall believed to be the site of many dark rituals during its 750-year long history.
Whilst we wandered around the muddy ruins on a bright Scottish autumn afternoon, the sense of the past was somehow ever present. Passing through doorways, pondering the odd semi ruined spaces, walking down steps worn by centuries of human activity, the atmosphere is thick with something not quite tangible. Whilst I’m not suggesting anything supernatural, it’s easy to palpably ‘feel’ some sort of energy from centuries of mysterious human presence.
A similar sort of energy is interwoven through Breathing With Each Ear (Hour 3). An album that that Jayve Montgomery channels his own place in time. An exploration of his own creative freedoms, traced back through history, in particular – previous generations that came to America from Africa aboard slave ships. A truly hideous time in history, and a wound still both unhealed and visible to this day.
Breathing With Each Ear (Hour 3) is a vast hour of intensive, almost dream like conjuring that feels like a liminal fly-through these brutal journeys.
Strangely after this visit to this castle, Breathing With Each Ear (Hour 3) made even more sense.
Built around 3 lengthy tracks, all of which have been whittled down from hours of Montgomery playing his particular set up, Breathing With Each Ear (Hour 3) is a surprisingly beautiful meditation. He plays alto and soprano saxophones, bowed bells, kalimba and a mouthpiece pickup. Various processes generate drones, adapt sounds, and add random ambience. Quite how all this works perhaps is itself unimportant, but the end results are both soothingly familiar and engagingly alien.
Partially a ghostly monument, slowly over time, it emits a deeply psychedelic world that belies both its seemingly gloomy core as well as its apparent ambient surfaces.
In fact, several earlier listens had meant it was somehow difficult to retain much focus as the 18-minute opener Where There Is No Sun To Light The Way, easily spends almost three quarters of its length, somewhere near to stasis. The payoff though, is that, after an eternity in the void, unknown forms loom out the mist like buzzing, shimmering hallucinations. Nothing is in focus here, layers of activity gathered like silt and transmissions from the ether…
Wash Over We is a sparkling throb slowly and satisfactorily consumed by a vast smudged undercurrent. A full 15 minutes that simply trace the space between two points in time and space.
The album reaches its elongated peak of the final, almost 30-minute-long Sea Is A Sky When You Are Shelved Stowage. After a slow pan across the horizon, some 10 minutes in, a celestial doorway assembles in warped ripples. The effect is a haunted variant of Roland Kayn’s world building, where you sense everything as made of infinite layers. This is an embellished and magnified almost nothing, the spectre of a séance, and yet deeply affecting and stunningly beautiful.
Eventually the arc of the piece begins to flutter, like water filling and draining from your ears as it guides you into a stunned silence.
Like the strange atmosphere we felt in the castle ruins, Breathing With Each Ear (Hour 3) is the sense of the past overlapping into our present. It doesn’t quite make sense, its unimaginable, and impossible, but it’s also something undeniably human. A sense of empathy and connectivity through huge tracts of time.
Breathing With Each Ear (Hour 3) is out now, available digitally and on cassette on Monastral_
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