Musique Machine / Multi-Genre Music Magazine

What differentiates one abstract work of sound composition from another today is largely a question of approach, what in some circles used to be called method or methodology. The term is painfully unsexy, so no reason to try to resuscitate it, just to note that for someone like Jo Montgomerie, I think it helpful to move away from the usual interpretative circles surrounding what many of us call “music”. Fragments of Something is quite a bit more, and by extension, also quite a bit less, than composed, prepared music, and this is very much willed on Montgomerie’s part. On a superficial, aesthetic level, the album, spread over four tracks (two of the short-form variety and two of the long), bears some family resemblance to drone, amorphous, atonal composition, with a decidedly sinister vibe. Montgomerie’s tact, however, is in making the source material gather like an impending tornado, accumulating slowly, until the sonic pressure makes its presence felt, a vice grip of textural violence

I highly doubt that many would openly choose to listen to such works if they knew what was in store – “not an invitation” is so cacophonous and relenting that it becomes a battle of wills between listener and work – but again, this fact runs the risk of missing the point with Montgomerie’s “method”, bent as it is on building a kind of sculptural artifact whose materiality first comes into being through the act of listening. Following the dissonance of “not an invitation” is the more chill atmosphere of “reflection/refraction”, which carves an ambient space for the jagged forms of what lies on either edge of its territory. And finally, we arrive at “conflict revolution”, a word play on the branch of practitioners who are trained to smooth out the edges of human conflict, largely in situations where the balance of power is skewed. The revolution is thus both the recursive structure of Montgomerie’s compositions and the desire, which follows many in the ambient camp, to rid themselves of the systemic allergy today to threatening behavior, language, whatever. If we have to choose sides, I am with Montogomerie, Tim Hecker, and countless others.