Martin Glass, Magic Mountain

Here's my sales notes for the latest one on Madrid's Glossy Mistakes label.

Selected Works is a regular newsletter by the Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa (Wellington, New Zealand) based freelance music journalist, broadcaster, copywriter, and sometimes DJ Martyn Pepperell. Yes, that’s me. Most weeks, Selected Works consists of a recap of what I’ve been doing lately and some of what I’ve been listening to and reading, paired with film photographs I’ve taken + some bonuses. All of that said, sometimes it takes completely different forms.

A few weeks ago, Mario from the excellent Madrid-based Glossy Mistakes label asked me if I’d like to write up the sales notes for their latest release, Magic Mountain, by Martin Glass. Having enjoyed Glass’s previous releases, The Pacific Visions of Martin Glass and 21 Commissions for Business, I was happy to oblige. Thanks Mario!

Like the other residents, Martin didn't know how long he had been on the mountain. Blissed with fever, he stayed out on his balcony late into the night, eyes blurring on the flatlands below. Books, cognac, morning walks and movie star chess club - this place was an X-ray for the soul, a rest cure for the international jet-set. "Marcello, I feel....saturated. Take my temperature, will you?" It was in the sanatorium, he thought, that Martin truly felt his best.

Magic Mountain is the third full-length album from the itinerant American businessman, composer, and producer Martin Glass. Inspired by German electronic music pioneer Edgar Froese, Vangelis, early Warp Records releases, The Orb and The Future Sound of London, the album is a Fellinian memory maze of new age wellness culture, mid-20th century Hollywood glitz, exhaustion, dreams, fantasy, desire and listless ennui. The less sense it makes, the more we can't stop listening to it.

Drawing from the impressionistic recollections of an unreliable narrator with an ever-loosening relationship with time and space, Magic Mountain tells the story of Martin’s feverish stay in a celebrity health resort in the hills beyond Hollywood. Over the course of thirteen evocatively titled tracks, the album unfolds like a half-remembered dream of a place somehow lost and imagined but not beyond our reach. Expressed through sweeping, retrofuturistic synthesisers, haunted old-time melodies, grainy samples and the occasional gently lulling rhythm, it plugs directly into emotion and pleasure, calling the listener to fall into the fantasy.

“As I’ve got older, I just want the music to be evocative, to take people away, to transport them somewhere, to move them,” Martin says. “That’s such a basic requirement of music, I know, but – to me, increasingly – it’s becoming the only requirement! How can this record stop somebody on their mobile phone and make them feel something, yearn for something, believe in something?”

When he released his first album, 2017’s The Pacific Visions of Martin Glass, Martin was in exile in Taiwan, working on a big deal that never quite closed. There, he fell under the spell of 80s Japanese city-pop and Kankyō Ongaku (environmental music) and drank deeply from their wellsprings before summoning up his own fourth-world fever dream for the digital era. Two years later, his second album, 21 Commissions for Business, found him dividing his time between California’s Esalen Institute and Forest Gate in East London while crafting miniature sonic business IDs, customer-hold music and bespoke office atmosphere pieces for a glorious but fading future.

With the release of Magic Mountain, Glossy Mistakes is very pleased to present the latest captivating chapter in Martin’s surrealist story in a limited edition of 300 vinyl LPs and digital formats.

FIN.