My belov'd Freaky Trigger editor will smile a bit at this, no doubt, in that Mr. Montgomery was a coworker of his for a while, except he didn't really know him or meet him while he was around. Go figure. (Roy worked in a different shop, is why - Pedantic Ed.)
New Zealand has more wonderfully intriguing musicians off somewhere in the netherworld doing worthy things than I can count, really. Quite why I don't know, but let's just call it what happens when Scotland goes to the other end of the world and hunkers down. Montgomery's own career has danced constantly on the fringe of fringes, first with the Pin Group doing obscuro-cool postpunk, then Dadamah's heavy-duty abstractions, nowadays his solo work as well as being part of Dissolve. He has a great non-singing singing voice, but often he simply concentrates on the instrumental side of things, as with this disc here.
It isn't his most personal statement, actually -- Temple IV, dedicated in part to the woman he lived with for years who died of cancer, is so pure and anguished at points that you can't believe instrumental electric guitar could carry it all alone, and yet it does. But Scenes is the one I first stumbled across by sheer chance, a 99 cent used bin buy identified by my old roommate Jake who insisted I buy it right then and there, and a good thing he did too.
Recorded straight into four-track but as big as all outdoors, this disc. The South Island itself is the less populated and somewhat more 'wild' of the two major New Zealand islands, and while it's the song titles helping set the mood more concretely -- "Rainshadow near Christchurch," "Winding it out in the High Country," "The Road to Diamond Harbour" -- everything still, as with just about anything taken out of the immediate context still worth its salt, flowers and shades beautifully, heartbreakingly on its own. Melancholia, if melancholia it is, was never so perfectly unencumbered by distracting language and encapsulated in the flow. When you feel the low tones and distant echoing squalls at one point and realize the song is called "Twilight Conversation," everything makes a perfect sort of sense.
Sometimes things are quietly amusing and nice, like the lazy semi-blues stroll of "The Barracuda Sequence." But you think of "Escape Velocity" and the way the guitars sound like they're heading high, off, to a open formless heaven of space, and it's more than nice. It's heart-gripping.