Mount Maxwell: Birds of Paradise LP

Mount Maxwell’s sixth album sees him cultivating a decidedly more organic and experimental approach to music making than that found on 2019’s 'Only Children' or 2021’s 'The People’s Forest.' Here the analog synth arpeggios and downtempo beats have been set aside in favor of a small ensemble of woodblocks, flutes and hand-held electronics, and the result lies somewhere between a 4th World tone poem and the Children’s Television Workshop.

There is a playful sense of tactility and malleability to this endeavour. The individual tracks, some not more than fragments, drift freely into one another with little regard for their respective run-times, and the longer one listens the more disorientated and lost the album seems to become. Wonderfully weird and beautiful from start to finish, Birds of Paradise is a deeply compelling addition to the ever-evolving Mount Maxwell discography.