Montgomerie, Jo

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 thrumming din, the original sounds are dissolved with new layers and accretions become audible. They still address a heavy melancholy augmented through a dilated sense of time. From Industry Home becomes a tantalizing, uncanny album of the once familiar, adjacent to those Heemann / Chalk productions as Mirror and the environmental abstractions of Jana Winderen.