Bleep

Quietly a post-rock innovator since his 1995 debut, there’s never an occasion when New Zealand composer Roy Montgomery can’t make his guitar sing impossible tones. Billed as the first instalment of a polyptych for the Grapefruit imprint, Island Of Lost Souls is perhaps the album he was always supposed to make; a sprawling work of deep psychedelia which recalls his artistic inspirations — Harold Budd, Popol Vuh — as well as those he himself inspired, such as Grouper and Julianna Barwick. His vast, side-long ode to krautrock and second-century mysticism ‘The Electric Children of Hildegard von Bingen (For Florian Fricke)’ alone seems like a perfect crystallisation of Montgomery’s on-going project.