Bill Laswell, P.ST

Featuring: Henry Kaiser, Anna Clementi, Graham Haynes

Mount Analogue is a double‑album pilgrimage into René Daumal’s “symbolically authentic non‑Euclidean” world, conceived by Bill Laswell and P.ST as a musical counterpart to the writer’s cult novel. Daumal’s book, left incomplete at his death and breaking off mid‑sentence, follows a band of mountaineers seeking an invisible, unreachable peak on a hidden continent that can only be approached with obscure knowledge and altered perception. The record honours that premise by treating sound as a climbing route: a path that’s felt more than mapped, where every timbral shift or unexpected entrance is another ledge, another crevasse, another glimpse of an impossible summit.

The first disc is a fifty‑minute composition in six chapters – Introduction, Meeting, Supposition, Crossing, Arrival, and Conclusion – a through‑composed “musical poem” in which text, voice and ensemble move together like a rope team. Laswell’s bass provides the dark, molten ground, while P.ST’s electronics trace the mountain’s more abstract contours: weather systems of texture, glints of non‑Euclidean geometry in sound. Around them, an all‑star cast colours the climb. Henry Kaiser’s guitar cuts angles in the air, alternately lyrical and razor‑edged; Nils Petter Molvaer’s trumpet and Graham Haynes’ cornet send out flares of electric‑jazz luminosity; Peter Apfelbaum’s keyboards and Dorian Cheah’s violin sketch shifting horizons and fault lines. Hideo Yamaki’s percussion moves from ritual pulse to fractured avalanche, while Anna Clementi and Percy Howard give Daumal’s words a human axis, their voices carrying excerpts from the novel like fragments of a found expedition log, half‑incantation, half‑field report.

Recorded across Europe, North and South America and finally converging at Orange Music Studio in New York, the piece braids these geographically scattered sessions into a single, synesthetic tapestry: instruments and voices as colours, aromas, textures and moods, all orbiting the same conceptual summit. The chapters mirror key stages in Daumal’s narrative – the gathering of seekers, the formulation of hypotheses, the perilous crossing toward an unseen land, the strange calm of arrival – but, true to the book’s unfinished nature, the “Conclusion” offers no neat resolution. Instead, it feels like a ridge line: a vantage point that suggests further, unwritten paths beyond the recorded sound.

The second disc turns the mountain inside out. Here Henry Kaiser takes the novel – and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 film The Holy Mountain, itself inspired by Daumal – as a catalyst for five solo electric‑guitar improvisations. The opening piece, “Jodorowsky’s Peradam,” is a forty‑eight‑minute summit push of its own: a sprawling, exploratory solo that functions as a conceptual base layer, the route sketch from which the remaining four pieces fan out. Those later tracks operate in a “Rashomon‑esque” mode, revisiting the same symbolic massif from different angles, tones and densities, as if the ascent were being retold by multiple climbers, each with their own hallucinations and revelations. Kaiser’s guitar becomes narrator, guide and unreliable witness all at once, threading feedback, extended techniques and molten melody through the psychedelic labyrinth Jodorowsky built on Daumal’s foundation.

Taken together, the two discs of Mount Analogue form a diptych: ensemble and solo, text‑driven and wordless, cartographic and dream‑logic. Laswell, P.ST and their collaborators don’t attempt to “complete” Daumal’s unfinished story so much as inhabit its central proposition – that some peaks can only be approached through destabilised perception, through metaphors that admit their own incompleteness. In sound, that means living with unresolved cadences, narrative breaks, and the sense that the music is always pointing beyond itself, toward a further ascent the listener has to imagine. As a tribute, it is appropriately uncanny; as a listening experience, it’s a rare chance to hear a classic of mystical literature refracted through the full range of contemporary improvisation, electronics and visionary guitar.