The first three times I listened to it, this album behaved much like a multi-faceted dream where, upon waking, I couldn't come up with a single, concrete story point. Its motley assortment of sounds felt incongruous, its memory consistently fleeting. My wife related my description to a book called "When Rabbit Howls" about a woman who had over 90 personalities. The woman's initial personality had been asleep since the age of two, while a myriad of personae and characters lived on, weaving their own unique tales, unaware of each other's existence. Yes, I thought! That is much like On Soft Mountains We Work Magic. I thought I'd had it pinned...
But then I played therapist.
The album revealed two immediate personalities: The first, Christophe Bailleau, a French multimedia artist who also plays in a free rock-tronic group called Arden. He seems to provide the watercolors that dapple, wisp, scintillate and tone the album. Our other personality is American country-tronic (yes!) guitar player Neal Williams of Possible Selves, who, while casting his own electronic glows and sparks, also provides a folkish lyrical element to this interesting dream. And so we sway, back and forth, from narcoleptic swaths of dream-tronics to strummed guitar and pastoral lyrics.
The two players join their armada of electronic textures with Neal's innocent folk philosophy, and upon close listen, there is much to love. A very Tim Hecker-inspired sheet of sound will swim and come to a boil only to be stopped in its tracks by Williams' very intimate and almost shaky voice. His singing reminds me of Bill Callahan of Smog, and for purists this voice might make or break this record, but I must insist that you go beyond its tickling imperfections and dive deeper for its earnest intent. "Future Plans" sounds like glitchy, laptop-music-maker Tuk provoking his equipment to self-destruct, only to be saved by another strummy, breezy jaunt led by our man on the microphone. Even some slide guitar and a beat rise up from the depths, and before you can leap aboard the groove, it disappears beneath Bailleau's glitch-o-phrenia, and is usurped by a crackly cascade of plucked classical guitars. It's all over the place. You know: just like any dream you've ever had.
The instrumentation is quite varied on On Soft Mountains We Work Magic, and with each listen, the multiple personalities start to gel and make more sense. When the banjo and chimes meet the bicycle-wheel-pluckery on "When Does It Start," I can feel myself being swept away, surrendering. Record crackle, a glissando of synth bubbles, a lonely accordion. All these characters come together in a forest clearing and surround a solitary figure - the one who was contriving this entire dream all along! I met him there in this clearing. He, a satyr, perhaps a cousin of Pan himself, was sitting on a stump as two mating flutes flitted by. In a perennial cycle, he waxes poetic for a minute or two (Williams' voice) before his eyes roll into the back of his head, immersing himself into his psychotically beautiful dream world, only to snap out of it again with more sing-song candor to share. This was his dream, and I was a character in it! Or at least that's how this album feels.
In the aforementioned book, it becomes clear that the therapist dictating the story of the multiple personalities is actually quite compassionate, and we wouldn't even know about this amazing story without the therapist's careful attention. Christophe Bailleau and Neal Williams have captured quite a beautiful dreamworld all its own. Each distinct personality has its chance to take center stage, and each new vignette is very different from the last. At times the album does feel like it jumps around too much, but listeners will become quite aware that they'll always end up on Neal Williams' summery island of strum. Sometimes I wanted Bailleau's soundscapes to go on forever, but collaborations like this warrant an expansion of thresholds from the listener. Let's afford this beautiful album a more careful diagnosis and let the music guide us. While at first a candidate for multiple personality disorder, On Soft Mountains We Work Magic will reward the careful listener with a world rich in sonic territory and is, at its heart, honest music.
-Nayt Keane