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TwinSisterMoon, "The Hollow Mountain"
This brilliant and mind-bending solo opus by Natural Snow Buildings' Mehdi Ameziane was originally issued as an LP by Dull Knife in 2009 and sold out within hours. Fortunately, it has now been reissued and remastered and augmented with a massive amount of bonus material for those of us that weren’t fast or well-informed enough to catch it the first time around.
 
There are a lot of unusual things about Natural Snow Buildings, but the most notable (to me anyway) is how utterly detached they seem to be from the mundane and often petty world that the rest of us are stuck living in (both musically and otherwise).Instead, Solange Gularte and Mehdi Ameziane seem to inhabit a darkly magical and Edward Gorey-esque shadow reality. Also, they seem guileless and genuine in a way that is wholly foreign to modern human nature.Those are admittedly odd statements to make about a band, but Solange and Mehdi's recorded output provides excellent corroborating evidence.The duo are prolific, but each new album is released without fanfare, as though they had simply accumulated enough otherwordly material for yet another dispatch from their insular, self-contained universe.More significantly, though the duo tend to put a great deal of effort into beautiful art and packaging, they release everything in such limited quantities that it seems that they have a total indifference to any of the external rewards that might be reaped from producing great work.Or they’ll release a double-album as a free download (through some third party, of course).The simple act of creation seems to be the entire point and whether the rest of the world notices or gets a chance to hear it is largely irrelevant.
Another odd thing is that Mehdi’s vocals are quite feminine- in fact, critics often mistake him for a woman.More specifically, he sounds like a profoundly sad and somewhat ghostly Vashti Bunyan.The actual music, on the other hand, sounds exactly like the sort of album Shirley Collins might have made (but regrettably didn’t) after teaming up with the Current 93 milieu. Some songs, like the simple and sparse acoustic ballad "Bride of the Spirits," sound a lot like traditional Celtic folk (until the "Come to me, my only child- I’ll just eat your flesh" line, anyway).More often, however, the songs seem to come from a much more exotic time and place, such as the pagan drone of "Druids."While this mystique and timelessness is certainly deliberate and well-earned, some of the credit must be given to Mehdi’s exclusive use of instruments that cannot be associated with a fixed point in time, such as flutes, tampura, shruti boxes, and tambourines.
Despite the clear allusions to psych folk, traditional music, and modern drone/noise strewn all over the album, The Hollow Mountain still sounds like something entirely fresh and unique.Ameziane weaves all of his influences together in an unpredictable, ingeniously arranged, and complicated way, but makes it all sound like a seamlessly and organically unfolding dream.This is the kind of music that unicorns would make (if they had good taste): melancholy quasi-medieval ballads warp into field recordings of babbling brooks, clanging cathedral bells, or a chorus of happily chirping birds just as easily as they turn into evil-sounding drones or heavenly psychedelic fugues.The tone is similarly mercurial, as Mehdi’s sweetly melodic songs have a tendency to become menacing, ritualistic, or pastorally beautiful with little warning.It never seems jarring or clumsy either, although Ameziane's vocals can sometimes be oppressively sad when I am in the wrong mood.
I have not heard the original LP version of this album, so I cannot say how much effect Ben Nash’s remastering efforts have had on it.It’s a pretty lo-fi album, but not in a bad way- more in an immediate and raw way, but with a thin patina of hiss and distortion that suggests that it may have been recorded with just a microphone and an 8-track.Amusingly, the "bonus track" included here is almost 45 minutes long, making it essentially a "bonus album."Disorientingly, it is just as good as the main album and could have easily been released separately, but I’m sure Mehdi forgot about it as soon as it was done and moved onto something else.Regardless, more TwinSisterMoon is always a good idea, as Mehdi's artistry is best appreciated as complete immersion.
I haven’t tracked down enough of the voluminous Isengrind/Twinsistermoon/Natural Snow Buildings ouevre to effectively contextualize The Hollow Mountain within a hierarchy of essentialness (they’ve been working in extreme obscurity for 13 years now), but I can conclusively state that it is a beautiful and stunning album and that it is actually still available (a very rare occurrence indeed).Also, despite the fact that it has been retooled slightly for mass consumption, it still retains some of the duo’s characteristically ambitious packaging: the disc is (egolessly) enclosed in a booklet of Solange’s creepily surreal woodcut-inspired art.
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