(2022) Roy Montgomery - Camera Melancholia
Review:
Roy Montgomery’s beautiful new album, Camera Melancholia was inspired by and dedicated to Kerry McCarthy, his partner of 20 years and mother of their two children, who died of cancer in 2021. He clarifies that the album is “not about my mourning, I’m trying to convey the essence of the person”. The Antarctic imagery on Camera Melancholia’s outer sleeve references McCarthy’s PhD on Antarctic photography. The inner sleeve features 10 poems by Montgomery; one, the elegiac ‘Your Albescence’, is sung by his regular collaborator Emma Johnston. The only vocal on the album, it evokes Montgomery’s loss (“I hear you in the hills softly calling”), but more so the quiet strength of his partner. “Kerry had a quietness, but also a self-contained confidence,” he says. “I was paying my respects to that.” Camera Melancholia’s first half channels the contemplative, introspective instrumentals he’s been exploring for the last quarter-century; the second half offers six organ elegies, each titled Aura of the Afterlife. A rich melancholy pervades, possessed of dark magic. The music came spontaneously. “I had to trust my intuition,” he says. “I wanted to record these ideas, and then call time on it. Not so I could say: ‘I’ve shut the door on that now, my grieving is done.’ It doesn’t work like that, not at all, especially not when you’ve got children. But I knew if I waited too long, it would have changed into something else.” The song titles – Playing with the Children, Some Footage of Dancing That No-One Else Saw – speak to the intimacy of this remarkable, subtly powerful work, and to Montgomery’s efforts to preserve something intangible but profoundly meaningful. “Kerry was a shy person. But that didn’t mean she didn’t feel things and couldn’t have frivolous moments,” he says. “I saw her in those moments that no one else saw. I saw her dance. It’s me saying, ‘I’ve seen that side of you, and you at least were comfortable with showing it to me.’” — theguardian
Track List:
01 - First Exposure
02 - A Series of Images From Your Youth
03 - On the Eve of Leaving Dunedin for Christchurch
04 - Courtship Caught Fleetingly
05 - Second Exposure
06 - The Very Picture of Dignity and Determination
07 - Some Footage of Dancing That No-One Else Saw
08 - Playing With the Children
09 - Your Albescence
10 - In Mutual Flux
11 - Aura of the Afterlife 1
12 - Aura of the Afterlife 2
13 - Aura of the Afterlife 3
14 - Aura of the Afterlife 4
15 - Aura of the Afterlife 5
16 - Aura of the Afterlife 6
Media Report:
Genre: ambient, post-rock
Country: Christchurch, New Zealand
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)
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