Montgomerie, Jo

Montgomerie, Jo

Ephemeral Rituals

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***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...

Montgomerie, Jo

From Industry Home

Helen Scarsdale Agency

An elegant decay amassed from the sounds of detritus. That may be an apt introduction to the work of Jo Montgomerie. Of course, The Helen Scarsdale Agency has a long standing infatuation with disintegrated sound in various forms. So, it makes perfect sense we should publish her work! That said, Montgomerie has a fascinating strategy to her long- form smears of blackened mascara ambient and smoldered noise. As a teenager she was a classically trained musician with an eye towards a career as a concert pianist; but a bad audition may have closed that door yet it opened another in her career in sound design, foley work, and post-production. It may be of note to some, that she was an uncredited soul responsible for thousands upon thousands of audio clips rendered for Boomkat during a lengthy tenure at that institution. These forms of production and editing necessitate a flawlessness which also hides the process entirely; and Montgomerie began to ruminate on that which was left on the cutting room floor (or the digital version of such a space). And thus, she took these unwanted sounds, telescoped them into sinewy drones, forced them to collapse in a crucible of noise, and even rarified their essence into fluid harmonic tones. The source material to much of her work is the urban landscape of her Manchester home, but she also will recontextualize traditional instruments and even the creaks, groans, and snaps of her own body. Amidst the thickets of details, obfuscating noise, and...