Michael Denny & Simon Sylvester - Imaginary Mountains (2020)

Michael Denny is a composer, Simon Sylvester is a writer, both are related to the land of Cumbria, and together they created an album with music stretching from ambient soundscapes to mild post-rock ornamented with poems read by Hilary Pezet. This is Imaginary Mountains.

The album makes a "soundtrack to a walk in the wilds of another Cumbria" that was created for Aerial Festival, a festival of sounds and words in the Lake District. Very folk culture vibes here. And so the presence of the land and its people with their folklore and history is extremely audible throughout the work. This is, first of all, due to the lyrics/poems with the themes of last year's tough experiences of pandemics and lockdowns situated in the first rows but also considering a lot of other burning matters. 

But there are also samples of nature sounds and people's lives incorporated into the music and being its vital parts. Some pieces are extremely touching, most notably Fools We Are with its existential theme and very post-rock-like composition and ecologically engaged Ever Smaller Circle. There's a lot of  difficult topics here but aren't they all parts of our life now? 

Imaginary Mountains costs 6 GBP.

Check: Fools We Are 

Country: UK

Genre: spoken word post-rock

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