The future wasn’t supposed to sound this way. In 2017, folk music can feel borderline ubiquitous—from the hokey balladeering of Mumford & Sons and the Lumineers to the latest lovingly restored private press side on Drag City or Tompkins Square, it tends to offers a space to retreat from the modern world. Besides a few exceptions—rare maverick figures like Grouper or Richard Dawson—it is notable how little contemporary folk sets out to interrogate its own structures. To that short list, you can add ANAMAI. Their second album What Mountain takes folk music as a starting point, but walks an unfamiliar path, warping the genre’s familiar signifiers and shattering its bucolic reverie with a dose of future shock.
ANAMAI began as the solo project of Anna Mayberry, a Toronto-based experimental dancer and co-vocalist of noise rockers HSY. But the project found a new direction when Mayberry shared her early songs with David Psutka, aka Egyptrixx, and soon the pair had joined forces as a duo. On paper at least, the two share little musical common ground. Mayberry grew up in a close-knit folk community, where she learned traditional songs from her elders and practiced singing in close harmony. Psutka, meanwhile, has taken an unconventional path through electronic music. While his Egyptrixx project rose to attention through a string of releases on the UK label Night Slugs around the turn of the decade, he briefly slotted into a post-grime club movement before switching lanes for 2015’s Transfer of Energy (Feelings of Power), a record with harsh, metallic textures influenced by industrial noise acts like Ramleh and Anenzephalia.
Aspects of all of this are present in What Mountain. Mastered by seasoned metal engineer James Plotkin, it feels like the product of a strange, sometimes unprecedented collision. Moments recall the enigmatic chamber folk of groups like Espers, other times the avant-garde computer music released on labels like Editions Mego, but the lines it draws are porous; often it sounds like both at once. Alone, Mayberry might pass as a conventional folk singer. She has a pretty but strangely blank voice that purrs, and curls like burning newsprint. But backed by Psutka’s rhythmic synth throbs, her vocal augmented by digital effects, her songs expand into another realm, sprouting with cryptic possibilities and hidden metaphors.
“Some State” and “Crossing” offer a sort of New Aesthetic take on folk music, Laurel Canyon by way of Silicon Valley. On the latter, intricate fingerpicked guitar drifts through deep lagoons of reverb, and Mayberry sings about a journey across a lake that plays strange tricks with spatial and temporal dimensions. Elsewhere, a restrained heaviness enters the frame. “Hailstorm” multitracks Mayberry’s vocal over chinking, Slint-like melodic motifs and watery ripples, while “Brother Green, Sister Blue” and “Sun Saw” deploy sludgy, Sunn O)))-like guitar drones with clinical surety.
The mountain of the title feels significant. Mayberry returns over and over to images of nature, but they feel like metaphor, a looming symbol of something—sometimes to represent emotional devastation or mental blockage, other times to suggest new avenues of exploration. The cavernous, reverb-laden opener “The Choss” is titled after a climbing term for loose or unstable rock, implying territory untrod. (In a neat moment of disorientation, after two minutes of desolate ambience, Mayberry suddenly drops into the track; we hear the clatter of equipment and a few muttered words, like she’s taking a seat at an open mic.) On perhaps the album’s most arresting track, “Air to Blood,” she speaks of climbing the mountain as guitars snag and groan like thunder at the horizon. “Discarding your touch,” she sings, “It’s something I’ve done/I’m breathing all wrong…”
While formally exciting, What Mountain doesn’t fully deliver on its promise. Its blankness of affect can come over a little stifling; there is evidently a lot bound up in these songs, but sometimes you hope for something more concrete in the way of climactic revelation or emotional resolution. Still, if the pair’s ambition was to jolt folk music, then this stark, challenging record is a step in the right direction, rich with possibilities.
