Gimmie Mountain Language is a collection of improvisations and songs inspired by the ways music and landscape speak to one another. The way that music from the west of Ireland is born of the craggy and mystic landscape. This character is mirrored in the ways in which artificial echo can describe the American southwest in country music and western films. Music has been used to describe landscapes both real and imagined since we all walked (hunched?) into the caves thousands of years ago to hum and drum to newly created cave paintings.

Most of these tracks were conceived as demos for a larger performance work scheduled to be staged in late 2020. Instead, I’m pleased to share them with you here, amidst our collective crisis. Now that I spend my days of self-isolation looking out at the mountains from our front porch, I am more fully realizing that we are surrounded by landscapes. Equally, I’m reminded by the human geographer Yi-Fu Tuan that our interior landscape also offers refuge: ”we speak of resting in each other’s strength or dwelling in each other’s gaze.” I’m finding a lot of peace looking out into the San Gabriels on our unusually clear days here, and I hope you, too, are finding some peace from your real and imagined vistas.

April 2020, Los Angeles