Underground music is rife with independent labels that flaunt the refined, idiosyncratic aesthetics of a single obsessive individual. Some examples include Siltbreeze, 12XU, Black Truffle, RVNG Intl., Drag City, and Buh. Another one-man operation that belongs in this exalted company is Holy Mountain Records. After opening strange portals in discerning minds over the last thirty years, Holy Mountain came to a tragic end in July with the passing of its owner, John Whitson. He succumbed to cancer at age fifty-five, leaving a formidable legacy of epicurean curation about which too few know.
Working out of a modest one-bedroom apartment on Portland's North Mississippi Avenue, Whitson was a serious record collector and former cog in the Revolver USA Distribution machine who couldn't resist the urge to foist his highly developed musical taste on the public. Granted, only a minuscule sliver of the population was picking up what Whitson had been laying down since 1995, but he wasn't in the game to make money. No, his ambitions were much nobler and more grandiose than that.
John was fomenting a secret cultural revolution that only a select few thousand folks worldwide would grok. But those superfans would worship Holy Mountain's releases with an outsized fervor, as if they were sacred, life-enhancing secrets to which only elite music aficionados were privy. It was the kind of label that gave you releases you had no idea you needed... until Whitson magnanimously brought them to your attention. He was a revelation machine.
Holy Mountain—whose website sadly has expired—was eclectic, enigmatic, and scornful of conventional music-biz wisdom (right down to its mystifying catalog numbers), reflecting its visionary founder's uncompromising ethos. That Whitson never had a dedicated PR team behind his efforts certainly diminished Holy Mountain's profile. He tended to view promotion as crass and corny. And while that stance is admirable, it hurt Holy Mountain in the social-media age, in which to gain traction, every culture-peddler has to be their own relentless hype person. Unfortunately, John was constitutionally ill-suited for that task. It was enough, Whitson reasoned, to put these treasures into the world; those who deserved to hear them would somehow find and love them. If not, oh well—your loss, suckers.
Some labels' catalogs have rigorously adhered to stylistic elements that enable consumers to instantly know what to expect from their output. Not Holy Mountain and its Intercoastal Artists and Tlön Uqbar subsidiaries. Whitson's tastes ran deep, wide, odd, and perverse. And his standards were damned high. Its roster included Six Organs Of Admittance, OM, James Ferraro, Wooden Shjips, and Lichens (Robert A.A. Lowe), all of whom HM fostered before they moved on to bigger labels and higher profiles. Whitson had room in his eccentric stable for brutal minimal techno, philosophical heavy metal, maximal shoegaze, subversive New Age, "organic free metal from Malaysia," and the experimental keyboard studies of an eleven-year-old prodigy. And that just scratches the surface. If there was an overarching aesthetic principle guiding Holy Mountain, it was "make it psychedelic—but not in a typical way."
Immersing yourself in John Whitson's important contributions to underground music is an enriching—and sometimes perplexing—experience. Below, find a sampling of the Holy Mountain catalog's peaks (in alphabetical order) from someone who's followed the label's unpredictable trajectory from beginning to end. Remember: Just because something isn't covered here doesn't mean it's not worth your time. Explore the entire HM discography!
Aufgehoben - Fragments Of The Marble Plan (2012)
The follow-up to 2008's Khora, Fragments Of The Marble Plan applies a slightly more electronic carapace to Aufgehoben's cataclysmic noise-rock foundation. The prevailing sound here evokes the Mego label before it added 'Editions' to its name and became enamored of American guitar mavericks, back when it purveyed cyclotronic electronic music that had the centrifugal force of an irrefutable PhD thesis. (Although Bill Orcutt would probably dig Fragments.)
Music this apocalyptic has few peers, but some touchstones might include the most radically 'out' and knotty moments of Norwegian post-jazz ensemble Supersilent, This Heat after realizing that Brise-Glace didn't pay them a penny in royalties, or Farmers Manual after extensive immersion in Mainliner's back catalog. Fragments Of The Marble Plan is a terrifying force of nature, a Rube Goldberg machine run amok, the sound of civilization atomizing into controlled chaos. It's so cold, it's hellish. Although Aufgehoben feel your need for catharsis, they convince you that being ready to jump out of your skin is the new normal. This music is war—with all of the fascinating horrors and grisly casualties inherent in that endeavor.
Fred Bigot - Mono/Stereo (2009)
Perhaps best known—if known at all—for his excellent, Suicide-like excursions as Electronicat, French producer Fred Bigot also created noisy minimal techno under his given name. Ranging from sinister, low-frequency throbs to punishing, Pan Sonic-like bangers to desolate, nerve-fraying ambient, the tracks collected on Mono/Stereo would sound right at home on Finland's Sähkö label. The positively ill distortion and foundation-quaking bass tones Bigot forges here were only released on CD by Holy Mountain. Pressing this music onto vinyl would prove very challenging, as the low-end timbres would likely make the stylus leap out of the grooves.
Blues Control - Blues Control (2007)
This New York duo's second album runs myriad avant-rock tropes through mutational and cosmic processes, so it streams out like non-obvious strains of twentieth-century minimalism, astral jazz, spiritual krautrock, Eno-esque art pop, and Nurse With Wound-like mind-fuckery. But, paradoxically, no blues detected.
Cloudland Canyon - Fin Eaves (2010)
On Fin Eaves, the German-American band Cloudland Canyon put shoegaze rock through the infinite-mirror-reflection treatment. Good luck deciphering any lyrics in the cosmic sonic soup, in which guitars, keyboards, and voices luxuriously blur and dissolve. No matter; the result is akin to Teenage Filmstars' hugely under-appreciated 1992 classic, Star, in which disorientation resounds so strongly, it results in an almost unbearable bliss. What a problem to have! "Hope Sounds Dry" might be the closest thing Holy Mountain ever issued that had hit potential.
Davis Redford Triad - Ewige Blumenkraft (1998)
Led by Portland guitarist Steven Wray Lobdell (who played with resurrected German legends Faust in the nineties), Davis Redford Triad created psych rock of remorseless power and blasted anomie. Their sophomore LP, Ewige Blumenkraft, stands as one of the greatest bad-trip records of all time, a portentously beautiful bummer that packs a mystical punch.
James Ferraro - Discovery (2009); Clear (2009)
These albums are inseparable in my mind because they inhabit the same kosmische New Age zone, which Ferraro would soon abandon for avant-garde Muzak™ and hypnagogic-pop realms that would launch his career to cover-of-The Wire status. But before he became underground music's most obliquely humorous cultural commentator, Ferraro dropped these twin towers of shimmering ekstasis and smeared majesty. These are exercises in glorious brain balm, with Clear the calm after Discovery's quiet storm. Play them at low volume right before drifting off to sleep.
Food Pyramid - Ecstasy & Refreshment (2013)
Ecstasy & Refreshment might be the biggest sleeper in Holy Mountain's catalog, rarely spoken about and seldom reviewed. Created by a Minneapolis, Minnesota collective, it's essentially an experimental electronic record that features elements of Chicago house, krautrock, dub, and electro-leaning IDM. The aptly titled "Dexedream" is perhaps the greatest Neu! homage ever, and that is a very important achievement. The discombobulating "Marsh Bar" is an ineffable creation, like something off of Haruomi Hosono's Cochin Moon, but upgraded to twenty-first-century specs. This album appears not to be streamable in its entirety in many places (YouTube has but two tracks, and Ecstasy & Refreshment is not even on Food Pyramid's Bandcamp), so track down the vinyl or CD, and spare no expense.
M. Geddes Gengras - Test Leads (2012)
Wonderful, long-form analog-synth excursions that bleep out of the Conrad Schnitzler/Harald Großkopf school of kosmische mesmerism. Gengras is a master of generating fascinating tones and drones, and he really brings it live, if you have the good fortune to catch one of his performances.
High Wolf - Atlas Nation (2011)
Mysterious French musician High Wolf (aka Maxime Primault, Kunlun, Black Zone Myth Chant, Annapurna Illusion, etc.) puts a hauntological spin on Jon Hassell's humid Fourth World atmospheres. Resonant hand-drum hypnosis commingles with distorted guitar radiation and aerated synthesizer drones, resulting in aural mirages that trigger inklings of infinity. High Wolf's music feels ritualistic and psychedelic in ways heretofore unknown to Western ears. It pairs well with the oneiric lysergics of Spencer Clark's Monopoly Child Star Searchers.
Lichens - The Psychic Nature Of Being (2005)
Before Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe (aka Lichens) became a renowned film composer (Candyman, Telemarketers) and a part-time member of OM, he trafficked in holy ambient music that seemed to emanate from mountaintops. Lowe's debut album as Lichens uses loops of his serene chants, spindly acoustic guitar plucks, and post-industrial drones to cultivate higher states of consciousness. These three long pieces are hymns for a post-religious world. Hallelujah!
OM - Conference Of The Birds (2006)
By the time of their second LP, Conference Of The Birds, OM had become masters of their own fearless domain: arcanely theosophical and verbose doom metal that located the golden mean between Earth 2's gravitas and ECM Records' austerity—with the bonus of King Tubby's acumen for low-end pressure and space. With bassist Al Cisneros reciting his polysyllabic lyrics as if in a trance, coming off like Ozzy after a decade of monastic study in a house of the holy, it lends the songs a scholarly yet stoned and sanctified air. "Flight Of The Eagle" epitomizes Cisneros' bulldozer bass and Chris Hakius' cymbal-happy, indomitable timekeeping. The piece makes you wonder—how can such a dense, gravid sound feel so liberating? That is the eternal mystery of OM. Future academics will be studying Al's mastodon-grunt bass tones like today's historians examine the pyramids. (There's a reason Rickenbacker made a signature bass for Cisneros.) "At Giza" finds OM at their most nimble, austere, and Pink Floydian, as they set the controls for the heart of the dark side of the moon. With its maniacal precision and predatory tension-building, "At Giza" could score the exploding-house scene in a remake of Zabriskie Point. It's rare for metal to make a listener feel cleansed and enlightened, but damn if OM haven't entered the rock pantheon doing just that, with an orotund sludge trudge that registers on the Richter scale.
Henry Plotnick - Fields (2013)
Initial contact with Fields may lead one to believe it's the work of an A+ grad student at one of America's finest music colleges. Discovering that the album's creator was eleven at the time of recording will boggle the most jaded mind. The structural and dynamic sophistication at play in Fields—the way melodic beauty gyres within rigorous academic/minimalist strictures, the manner in which perilous, mordant atmospheres are conjured—are astounding for any musician, age be damned. Seemingly under the spell of Terry Riley's mesmerizing classic In C, Plotnick engineers ingenious strategies for mental liftoff. It's as if he's absorbed the principles and techniques of the twentieth-century American minimalist-composer pantheon and injected them with a zeal for greater instrumental complexity and melodic flamboyancy. The two longest tracks on Fields take the listener highest, suggesting that Plotnick is more of a marathon runner than a sprinter. Plotnick has gone on to become a top-flight jazz keyboardist who's played with Medeski Martin & Wood's Billy Martin. Bafflingly, his Bandcamp omits Fields.
Six Organs Of Admittance - Dark Noontide (2002)
On his early albums, including Dark Noontide, Six Organs Of Admittance (the solo project of Comets On Fire's Ben Chasny) conjured an arboreal folkadelic vibe that hit with wizardly profundity. With roots in John Fahey's fluent acoustic-guitar fingerpicking and Tyrannosaurus Rex's mystical-pastoral moods, this itinerant American guitarist cast an enchanting spell that made him an ideal touring partner back in the day with Japanese psych-folk gurus Ghost. A beautiful sadness wafts through every tune on Dark Noontide, buttressed at times by Chasny's Donovan-on-downers vocals, plus the occasional dissonant drone and rustic raga, to keep things from getting too ethereal.
Barry Walker Jr. - Shoulda Zenith (2020)
On Shoulda Zenith, Tennessee-bred, Portland-based pedal steel master Barry Walker Jr. subverted his instrument's tradition for lachrymose Rootzak™. Instead, he ventured to outward-bound strata more frequently traversed by Sonny Sharrock than Gram Parsons. Walker told me in 2020, "So often, the pedal steel is used as a textural flavor, but it really can breathe fire itself." Evidence for that claim abounds on Shoulda Zenith. Sprouting out of the strategies Walker used on his 2012 LP of Henry Flynt-/Paul Metzger-like fiddle aberrations, Banjo Knife, the music on Zenith explores similar extravagant tangents—but with pedal steel. With occasional help from bassist Scott Derr and drummer Dana Valatka, Walker synthesized his love for country, New Age, freeform freakouts, and ecstatic music on Zenith. You may hear traces of the laid-back sinuousness of Texas psych-rockers Cold Sun, Fushitsusha's craggy, acid-rock excoriations, and Doug Sahm's sprightly melodic sweetness. You may notice "Insect Interlude" adding new colors to Terry Riley's Rainbow In Curved Air and "Up The Fan, Into The Keyhole" taking Sharrock's Black Woman to Appalachia. "Shoulda Zenith" and "Trinity Payload" may have been the most psychedelic things my pandemic-besieged mind encountered in 2020. Hey, cosmic country got its own Inventions For Electric Guitar.
Wooden Shjips - Vol. 1 (2008)
This collection of early singles captures one of Holy Mountain's flagship bands at their psychedelic peak. Opening track "Shrinking Moon For You" represents Wooden Shjips' zenith, as they wreathe one of the most mantric bass lines with ever-thickening and intensifying clouds of guitar fuzz and skree. It rolls on for over eight minutes, but, honestly, eight hours of this would leave all of your chakras buffed for eternity. The rest of Vol. 1 ain't too shabby, either. "Death's Not Your Friend" psychedelicizes Modern Lovers' "She Cracked," "Space Clothes" is a bizarre, oblique Sun Ra homage (I think), "Dance, California" is a wobbly-legged reprise of "Shrinking Moon." Sure, Wooden Shjips' music vibrates firmly in the tradition of the Velvet Underground, 13th Floor Elevators, and Loop, but the group's monomaniacal intensity transforms their songs from tribute into transcendence.
Zomes - Zomes (2008)
Last but most, there's Zomes. If Whitson did nothing else besides release the debut album by ex-Lungfish guitarist Asa Osbourne, he'd be an indie-label hall of famer. As much as I love the other artists in this list, Zomes remains the most treasured. You know how sometimes you hear music that seems to have been created especially for your most private, hallowed moments? That's Zomes for me. The most basic way to describe Zomes is "outsider drone-centric drum-machine folk." While the melancholy melodic vibes have similarities with Boards Of Canada's, Zomes conjures a much more intense loneliness that somehow feels like consolation. At its best, Zomes is like some impossibly beautiful and solemn liturgical music for a religion too honorable for Earth. I am striving to live a good enough life to have "Cosmovital Force" played at my funeral. Thanks a million, John Whitson.
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