Jo Montgomerie

Jo Montgomerie doesn't want to pull back the veil too much on her source materials, but she's becoming more declarative and emphatic in how she works with her crucible of tempered noise. The opening clatter to Ephemeral Rituals sounds to these ears like the repetitive strike of a typewriter; though she asserts, without showing her hand, that is not the case. Out of this, a hallowed, radiant black glow emerges, nearly engulfing the acoustic clack with a sublime grandeur. Based in Manchester, Montgomerie has steadily built a body of work of abstracted, decentralized sounds into emotionally rich, metaphorically potent compositions. It's never enough for her to merely articulate those phenomenological interregnums of time, space, memory, and decay. Instead, she focuses on the yearnings, the hauntings, and the compulsions which form the daily rhythms and rituals of everyday life and re-imagines them as transcendental electronic hymns.

 

On Ephemeral Rituals, Montgomerie is deft in her industrial-strength drones, her ghost dubs of sound research, and the luminous, chromatic auras that appear as if latent images from decayed film. "I Can Feel You Breathing" has all of the Kirlian qualities of late period :zoviet*france:, percolating with an electrical fluidity, where the ominous "You Better Run" aligns with the cinematic suspension of early Demdike Stare. On the albums closing numbers, Montgomerie's hypnotic passages run adjacent the aerosolized, non-techno facets to Porter Ricks. It all makes for a splendid album, furthered by her photography of in camera overlays of urban decay, vernal pools, and asphalt sprouting with inflorescence.