Rothko’s new EP Bury My Heart In The Mountains is an epic ambient tour de force that is as invigorating as it is Zen. It was written as a physical cassette release for the American Jukebox Heart label, website and podcast (being released soon) but has just been made available to streaming platforms (you can listen to it in all its serene glory at the bottom of this review).
Artists – musical or otherwise – can find it hard to exercise restraint – there’s always another guitar part, more keyboards, or another effect to add. A painter friend of mine once thanked me for buying a painting from his studio as he lived in fear that the next brush stroke would be the one that ruined it. Rothko do not have this problem as they are past masters at the glorious tension between not enough and too much.
This new EP balances the ambient scales to perfection. There is something both monumental and poetic when you not only call your EP Bury My Heart In The Mountains but also name each track for a Swiss mountain. On these new tracks Rothko bring us blasts of icy air and breath-taking views on tracks like ‘Monte San Giorgio’, but also interpret their heft and the subtle movement of shifting rock into the lower register rumbles on ’Säntis’ as well as crystal clear water running from glaciers on ‘Monte San Salvatore’.
Rothko create beauty in solitude, the kind we crave i.e. the contented feeling of being alone rather that the pain of loneliness. They transform the bass that sits at the core of their music from a humble provider of root notes to something that uses multiple parts to add harmony and effects which bring wonder and an otherworldly quality which is further enhanced with empathic sound washes and wonderfully placed frosty piano . This is music that could easily accompany drone of shots of the deserted buildings of Pripyat near Chernobyl or abandoned shopping malls, and when Roy Batty was “watching stars fight on the shoulder of Orion“ he could have been listening to the music of Rothko.
Bury My Heart In The Mountains is available through all good streaming services and previous Rothko releases are available through their Bandcamp page.
Full EP:
For the mountain lovers among you here are links to Wikipedia pages about each:
Monte San Giorgio / Lyskamm / Monte San Salvatore / Säntis / Monte Tamaro / Monte Brè
Review by Paul F Cook
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