Anni Hogan — Mountain

In 2009 Cold Spring released a much expanded version of Annie Hogan’s Kickabye EP that was recorded in 1985 with fellow alumnis of the Some Bizarre school: Nick Cave, Marc Almond and Jim Thirlwell. The label have now followed this with Mountain, which features over an hour of new piano-based compositions from Hogan recorded this time with Gerry McNee (AKA Itchy Ear, frequent collaborator with Soho poet Jeremy Reed), and subsequently “re-imagined and remixed” with Robert Strachan, music lecturer at the University of Liverpool and member of The Hive Collective, a local promoter of electronic musics. The original piano recordings were influenced by the spiritual and surreal novel ‘Mount Analogue...’ by René Daumal (that also inspired Jodorowsky’s hallucinatory film ‘The Holy Mountain’), before the album evolved into more of a travelogue to the conquests of mountaineer Cathy O’Dowd whose photographs adorn the sleeve and footage provides the 30 minute film put together by fellow Hive Collectivist Bob Wass found on the reverse side of this dual disc.

For those familiar with Kickabye or Annie Hogan’s work as part of Marc & The Mambas, there is little here that bears much resemblance. Despite the main sound source being that of her piano, Mountain rarely exhibits her moody cabaret or goth pop of old, preferring to eschew song form for layered refrains heavily filtered and effected to paint bright icy thin atmospheres and dangerously dark and deep crevasses. Consequently, the overall effect is not dissimilar to some of Tim Hecker or Leyland Kirby’s experiments using reverb and delay to plump up otherwise sparse and brittle notes into tone clouds of varying density. However, for Mountain, the results are as uneven as the terrain it successfully evokes: whereas pieces like the opener ‘Strange Beauty’ and closer ‘Frozen Eulogy’ contrast chasms of billowing low tones with light echoing notes falling like snow from higher up the keyboard, other pieces like ‘Sunburst’ and ‘Endurance’ bear no obvious traces of Hogan’s original piano and sound like short excerpts from longer drifting electronic drone works.

Occasionally fuller sequences and finer subtleties of Hogan’s playing finds its way through the often murky mix for long enough to establish a strong foothold. This is mainly to be found at the centre of the album where tracks like ‘Pelydrau haul ar dir y Rynys…’ and ‘Mother Goddess’ allow her melodramatic piano passages to plough a sorrowful furrow, suitable for crooners like Cave and Almond, despite the arctic conditions imposed by reverb and delay. Elsewhere though, the effects feel heavy-handed, making gentle refrains pulse or diffuse perpetually so as to bury their charm despite their evocative tendencies.

Curiously, such distinctions are not as evident when accompanied by the film of an Everest attempt, the sounds seeming to slot naturally into place as they score its wondrous towering contours contrasted with the unenviable context of a life lived on base camp at the mercy of the elements. In view of this, it would be interesting to hear the original recordings to discover if the piano’s natural reverb could suggest by itself the delights and dangers of this most majestic landscape where Earth meets the heavens.