If you know this one, you already know. If you don’t, take a breath before you get introduced. Then take another. And another. Be aware of those breaths.

The meditative nature of the sounds is writ large across Montibus Communitas‘ The Pilgrim to the Absolute, the 2014 second-ish-and-what-do-numbers-matter-when-we-have-the-cosmos-as-our-playground full-length from the Lima, Peru, exploratory collective. It’s a record of multiple paths. You can be the pilgrim, decked out in travel gear, walking stick and headphones, making your way every step through the six-song/43-minute progression, from “The Pilgrim Under Stars” at the outset to “The Pilgrim to the Absolute” itself at the finish, the ‘Absolute’ itself providing both the pilgrim’s destination and the next path you can take. You can be the absolute. You can leave the details to the details, revel in the nighttime crickets and moving percussion of “The Pilgrim at the Shrine,” violin and drums reverbed out in distant what-did-I-take-and-how-much fashion as the music begins to shift about three minutes in, and spread mind-presence like pouring water in the memories of “The Pilgrim to the Source of Love and Life” and the droning resolution in “The Pilgrim and the Light Masters” and the concluding title-track. Closed eyes, you don’t have to see your steps because you know it doesn’t matter, if you slip you’ll just fly.

Or I guess you can be you, and that’s also fine.

There aren’t lyrics — so don’t expect any — but to call The Pilgrim to the Absolute anything but narrative does it an injustice. The titles, with “…Under Stars,” “…to the Woods,” “…at the Shrine,” and so on providing clear stages of the pilgrim’s journey toward what seems to be some kind of resonant oneness. And whether you listen like you’re the one doing the going or like you’re the destination, or even like you’re one of the light masters in “The Pilgrim to the Light Masters,” what ultimately matters is your willingness to give The Pilgrim to the Absolute the attention it deserves. It is not always easy. Somewhat ironically, this is not driving music. It’s very definitely an on-foot pilgrimage, sonically speaking.

But it’s also a ceremony in itself, and you can hear that in the experimentalism, the realization of “The Pilgrim to the Source of Love and Life” and the ethereality that ties the entire album together, one piece into the next. There’s gorgeous melodic shimmer, but it’s always in interaction with sounds from the natural world, and of all the dream-acid music one might encounter using birdsong to its atmospheric advantage, I’ve never heard a group do it with the same kind of character as Montibus Communitas do here, or come out with the same kind of moment-capture in the end result.

The three longer-form chapters, or stages, or levels, or whatever you might want to call them, help give The Pilgrim to the Absolute its shape. And they’re arranged shortest-to-longest in themselves. That’s the aforementioned opener, “The Pilgrim Under Stars” (8:22), the vinyl side-A closer “The Pilgrim at the Shrine” (10:14), and the side B finale “The Pilgrim to the Absolute” (13:46). They are the stops along the way, though it’s noteworthy that the last of them is “…to the Absolute” rather than “at” it, which would seem to imply another journey being undertaken.

To that end, there’s a fair amount about Montibus Communitas and The Pilgrim to the Absolute that’s still not really out there to know. For example, why they never made a follow-up to this record. And also who they were. I know there was some common membership between Montibus Communitas and the multi-national collective We Here Now, who put their The Chikipunk Years (discussed here) album in 2019 through Elektrohasch, but that’s about as much as I have to go on. The Pilgrim to the Absolute didn’t come out of nowhere, of course — it was issued through Beyond Beyond is Beyond after being self-released by the band — and it’s certainly not a thing I “discovered” in some kind of aesthetic colonialist fashion. All of the work the band did (that I know of) was between 2011 and 2014 — kind of hard to know where studio releases end and live ones begin, but again, whatever — and so far as I know, The Pilgrim to the Absolute is the last of it.

You can insert your own story here about the band having transcended to the plane of existence portrayed in their music if you want — say what you (I) will about echo and reverb and dreams and alternate dimensions, there’s a constant human presence in these songs — but one way or another, they’re not the first or last to make their way into something really special sound-wise and then not be heard from again in the same form. Sometimes that makes a record like this more special for the time it captures in the first place.

As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.

—

The day isn’t really over, huh? Maryland Doom Fest is set to announce its lineup at 8PM, and I’ve still got to get that post ready as well as some other stuff that I hope to have up before this. We’ll see if that happens.

I was away for part of this week, Tuesday into yesterday evening, house/dog-sitting for The Patient Mrs.’ mother and sister in Connecticut. I probably wouldn’t have gone to Clutch at Starland Ballroom anyway, what with the amount of people who’d be there, but it was convenient to have another valid excuse to give myself, if parenting an unvaccinated kid wasn’t enough of one. Someday they’ll have a shot for the under-five set. I hope he’s not seven by the time they get there.

But who cares, right? I hear omicron isn’t that bad, and so what if it’s like half a mil cases per day. Haven’t you ever heard of a bad cold season? Mask this, big government!

Quite an age we live in.

On that note, Happy New Year 2022. The Patient Mrs. and I discussed last night how we would ring it in and it was mutually decided we’d watch Star Trek on the couch and then go to bed, probably before 9PM. With the bulk of the day ahead of me, I’ll say I’m looking very much forward to it.

Whatever you’re up to, be safe and have fun. On Monday the poll results will go up. Tuesday I think is a premiere? I gotta look. I’m going to try to review the new Earthless though after that, or whenever the next open day is. I’ll check the notes and get back to you, or, more likely, not get back to you and just post what I can when I can, because these days that’s about as much time as I have. To wit, I’m writing this now on my phone while The Pecan paints rocks from a craft kit he just got. Week later he’s still getting Xmas payout. Pretty impressive.

In any case, don’t forget to hydrate and watch your head. I’ll be back with more on Monday and so on into the great unknown of January.

Thanks again for reading. Please buy a t-shirt and/or some sweatpants so I can invariably spend the money on whoever is closing out next week’s Bandcamp. Ha.

FRM.

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Tags: Beyond Beyond is Beyond Records, Lima, Montibus Communitas, Montibus Communitas The Pilgrim to the Absolute, Peru, The Pilgrim to the Absolute

This entry was posted on Friday, December 31st, 2021 at 1:41 pm and is filed under Bootleg Theater. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.