Music, popular or otherwise, has always carried the myths and legends of rare and rebellious genius - those figures who see and hear what others do not, following the call to whatever end. Among the most compelling is that of Mark Hollis, a mind of pure vision and ambition, who began his career in popular music, before chasing the sounds toward remarkable and unplumbed depths, producing some of the most beautiful recordings of the late 20th century. Now, we’re thrilled to shine the light on a beautiful reissue of his final offering before retiring from music, his lone, self titled solo LP, from 1998. It’s a glorious immersion in sound, almost unlike anything else.

Mark Hollis first rocketed to fame as the front man of Talk Talk, a band who began successfully charting nearly as quickly as they emerged during the early 1980s, following with a series of synth-pop hits. Fascinatingly, by the middle of the decade, something in Hollis’ consciousness and perception of music had begun to change. The band’s third album with EMI, The Colour Of Spring, while charting well, stretched into entirely unexpected realms, becoming strikingly ambitious and making nods toward experimental music, without fully exiting a firm footing in pop. Within it lies the groundwork - the good as much as the bad, for its two successors, the legendary albums, Spirit Of Eden and Laughing Stock, considered by many to rest among the greatest albums to have ever emerged within the context of pop music, the root of the band and Hollis’ enduring legend. Creatively ambitious and visionary, particularly Laughing Stock, issued in 1991 and largely created by Hollis and a series of studio musicians, can be seen as an entirely singular rethinking of experimental music, followed quickly by the band’s dissolution.

Originally intended to be credited to Talk Talk under the title, Mountains of The Moon, Hollis’ self-titled solo debut, released by Polydor in 1998, encounters this visionary artist returning from silence to the remarkable realm where he left off at the completion of Laughing Stock, forging forward with a genre defiant expanse of sound, pulling freely from 20th-century classical and experimental musics, jazz, ambient, and folk. Sparse and minimal, filled with space, penetrated by slowly deconstructing and reforming melodies, and the pure, fragile power of Hollis’ unmistakable voice, the album rings through the years with timeless power.