To tell the story of Brooklyn duo Mountains, we must return to a time when Brendon Anderegg and Koen Holtkamp were just young’uns. The pair first met when they were both attending middle school in Connecticut, where they bonded (as kids will) over “skateboarding and stuff like that.” Though they remained friends throughout high school, it wasn’t until the late 1990s when they both found themselves studying at the Art Institute of Chicago – where Brendon went to study painting, Koen film and video – that their working relationship began to develop.
“When we were in high school, we didn’t live in the same town,” explains Brendon. “We didn’t see each other all the time, so we kind of hung out with different people and stuff. But when we went to the Art Institute we started having the same friends and going to shows together.”
Slowly, both Brendon and Koen began to gravitate away from their original areas of study towards the sound department. “It’s a very open school, so we didn’ technically have majors or anything like that,” says Koen. “So I ended up doing predominantly sound.”
“I painted a lot when I was growing up and I went to school as a painter and eventually gravitated more towards the sound department also,” Brendon adds.
Mountains was originally conceived as a vehicle for collaborative live performances while Brendon and Koen were still studying. The success of this endeavour eventually led to the duo’ eponymous debut album, which they released via their own label Apestaartje in 2005. Featuring just four tracks spread over the course of an hour, it was an exercise in subtlety and nuance. Mountains earned the pair many favourable comparisons to artists like Fennesz, for its blend of fluttering electronics, field recordings and acoustic instrumentation, as well as seeming to owe a debt to the John Fahey school of Appalachian folk.
The following year, Mountains released Sewn, which was written and recorded over an intense period of several weeks in 2006. Structurally, Sewn was quite a step away from its predecessor, featuring twice as many songs yet clocking in at a good 12 minutes shorter. “We wanted to try something different to what we did on the first record,” says Brendon, of the change. “The shorter tracks were more of a conscious decision.”
Brendon describes recording Sewn as “challenging” due to the concentrated nature of the sessions. So when it came to recording the follow-up, the pair took a much more relaxed approach. Choral, Mountains’ third album and first for Thrill Jockey (Apestaartje is on an extended and possibly permanent hiatus) was carefully crafted during the northern winter and spring of 2008, mostly within the comfort of Brendon’s loungeroom.
Unlike Sewn, Choral was recorded with no preconceptions in mind. As such, the final result sits somewhere between the long form explorations of the debut and the shorter, more focused pieces of Sewn.
“The approach with this one was a lot more open,” says Koen. “We let it develop more naturally, whereas like Brendon said, the second record was a conscious decision to try something different.”
A natural extension of Mountains’ birth as a live project is that Choral was recorded as much as possible without the use of overdubs. “It depends on the track,” says Brendon. “The title track for example, there’s a lot of stuff layered on the top of that. The backbone of it was something we did live, and then we just layered a lot of instrumentation to give it a fuller, thicker sound. But there are a lot of tracks on the album that are almost completely live. The only one that’s made through a studio process is the second track [‘Map Table’]. I recorded the guitar and then we added other stuff on top of it. But the rest of the record, we played everything together and then we’d do overdubs at the same time. We were trying to play it the whole time, rather than just doing one track and then another and then another.”
“It allows for more surprises to happen, because we’re reacting to each other in real time,” adds Koen.
“I feel like you wouldn’t get the interaction that’s very important to our music, given that it’s very detailed,” Brendon continues. “And also a lot of it is somewhat subtle, so it’s nice to be able to key in to these interactions between the sounds that I don’t think you’d really get as naturally if you were doing it one track at a time.”
Further to this, many of the pieces on Choral had evolved over a long period of time as part of the duo’ live sets. “They mutate a little over time,” says Koen. “We start with a structure, and we’ll play that. We have certain feelings about it afterwards, like, ‘What if we extended this part a little bit?’ or ‘What if we did this thing differently?’ and then over time as we play it in different spaces and environments it changes. Then we reach a point where it’s ‘finished’, and that’s when we record it. We rarely play pieces after we record them. We won’t play anything off Choral for the upcoming shows, it’s all going to be new material.”
“We’re really picky about the quality of the sound and the post-production side of it,” says Brendon. “With music like this I feel like it has to sound really nice and detailed, otherwise you don’ get the nuance. So once we’ve put all the time into making it sound good, and once we’ve listened to it so many times, it’s almost like it would be hard to go back and keep playing those tracks over and over again.”
Prior to coming together as Mountains, both Brendon and Koen were well established as solo artists, with Brendon performing under his surname and Koen as Aero. These days, however, such pursuits take a backseat to Mountains. Koen did manage to record Field Rituals (released under his own name last October by UK label Type), and Brendon composed the music for Meg McLagan and Daria Sommers’ film Lioness, but that looks to be the only solo output from either of them for quite some time to come.
“I’ve been working on stuff here and there, but really I feel like Mountains is more of an extension of what I was doing before than what I would be doing on my own,” says Brendon. “I had a band for a while [Charter Oak] which was more singer-songwriter stuff and put out a limited EP, but other than that I haven’t put out anything on my own in a while.”
“I try to go back and forth,” Koen says. “A lot of [Field Rituals] was done when Brendon went back to school for a little while and moved to Arizona. I wanted to continue doing work and performing, and that record kind of came out of that. I do plan on doing more solo stuff in the future, but the focus shifts from one to the other. Mountains is the focus right now.”
Part of the reason for this shifting focus is the mutual desire not to allow their solo work to filter too much into Mountains, and to maintain at least some nominal form of separation between the two.
“I think they definitely influence each other, but I feel like they’re too close to do at the same time,” says Koen.
“I feel like that too,” adds Brendon. “You just get into a mindset working on certain things and doing things a certain way when we’re practicing a lot and it’s best to just use that material for us, for Mountains.”
“Also, when I work on solo stuff that’s more like the ambient, melodic experimental stuff, a lot of the time it sounds to me like it’s one half of Mountains without the rest of the tracks on it,” he laughs.
All of the music Brendon and Koen have recorded together as Mountains dates from the period after they both moved to Brooklyn. But you won’t hear any influence of the city in Choral or either of its predecessors – in fact, the gentle, pastoral tones of Mountains seem to be the very antithesis of the bustle of New York.
While Brendon agrees that their music is not at all urban, he denies that this is in any way reactionary. “I feel like our music forms more internally than externally in terms of what’s going on around us,†he says. “I’m sure there is some influence, but we’ve been trying to evolve our own music in a direction that we want to go. Where we are I don’t think is a major factor in what we make.”
Brendon and Koen both speak very highly of their current living situation. Besides the convenience of being no more than two blocks from one another, the pair have found innumerable advantages to being immersed in an environment as creatively fertile as New York City. Koen does, however, reject the notion that Mountains are part of any particular scene.
“We have a lot of friends who play in bands and are involved in music projects, but it’s not necessarily one kind of music,” he says. “It’s not like all the people I know play stuff similar to what we do; I’ve got friends who do more singer-songwriter stuff, friends who do more experimental improv things. In Chicago it felt like there was more of a specific scene. I don’t get that feeling here. In terms of activity, one of the great things about New York and a good reason to be here is that there’s always something to see, there’s always something going on. I think that’s pretty inspiring. Whether it’s art shows or music stuff, or just exploring the city. It never gets boring.”
“I agree,” adds Brendon. “I lived in Portland, Oregon for a year and a half after I moved from Chicago, just because I didn’ want to be in a big city for a bit. But I felt like the music scene there was so small that every time you went to a show it was the same people there. It seemed a little bit too small, especially for the kind of stuff I was doing, so I felt like I had to move. Koen had just moved here, so it felt like I should move here. Also, my family was in Connecticut, which is like 50 miles away from New York City. So it made sense to move here. Since I’ve been here I feel like generally speaking the people are really open to different kinds of music, and are generally positive and open to different musical ideas. It varies enough that there’ always someone who’s interested in someone’ work.”
However, time spent away from their regular environment does have its place in Mountains’ creative process. Sewn, for example, features field recordings captured by the duo during a hiking trip in upstate New York. “That’s something we really enjoyed doing, just capturing different elements of an environment,” says Koen of the experience.
And absence, as they say, makes the heart grow fonder. “It makes you appreciate being here more when you have the chance to escape,” offers Koen. “I don’t know if escape’ the right word, but just to get away. Then coming back being in this environment is more tolerable. But I think in the long run, I don’ want to grow old in the city. I would like in the next few years to move upstate somewhere that’s a little quieter.”
Brendon, however, isn’ so sure. “I went to Arizona for nine months and I didn’t know anyone,” he says. “I met some people there, but none of my friends were there and I didn’t know people that well, and I just studied the whole time. But it was really hard, because I didn’ have time to come back here at all, so I had to stay there the entire time. I missed it a lot, just knowing that everyone was here doing what they were doing, and I just felt completely isolated. So it really made me appreciate being here, even though I complain about the amount of people and how hectic it is. It’s hard to be away from it for too long.”
Mountains’ new album Choral is available from Thrill Jockey
