It’s fair to say that Mountain Caller are both a unique blueprint for and a terrific standout band within the realms of both sci-fi and fantasy, as well as the post-rock, prog and metal genre’s that their music inhabits. We couldn’t wait to sit down and talk with them about their ambitious new chapter and record, Chronicle II: Hypergenesis. Thankfully, we’ve come to know this band is nothing short of both forthcoming and detailed in their answers, and they kindly spilled all the glorious detail for us. It is our absolute pleasure to share these details with you now.
New album, new chapter. What does “Hypergenesis” mean, in the context of this record?
El: “So it’s the name of the closing track, which we actually wrote at the same time as the first album. It’s the process that The Protagonist in our story commences through completing this next phase of her journey, her quest, and is depicted actually, on the front cover of the album, where she is beginning her process of remaking the world in a small way, in this instance allowing her power to burst forth into the ground and building this new kind of slightly alien forest space around her with unusual flora and fauna, and interesting creatures and things. So it’s this rapid growth of a whole new part of the world.”
And is that some Hannah Templer artwork we spy once again on the cover?
Claire: “Yes, we managed to get her again despite her busy schedule. It kinda needed to be, like for the the trilogy, we’re hoping to get her again, for… if there is a third one, no spoilers. But yeah, it kind of made sense for the continuity of it all, we were very, very pleased when she was able to squeeze us in. She’s done a cracking job again.”
Tell us about the imagery used specifically, El touched on some of it just now but we’ve seen that a certain titular Mountain Caller is on the back part of the artwork there.
El: “Well what the front cover kind of surrounds is the climactic moment in Hypergenesis that you also hear in in the track, when the tempo begins to go faster and faster, there are various kinds of phases of that song that where we’re trying to illustrate growth and creation in different ways, but the Mountain Caller part on the back, we have long held this idea that maybe he’s a benevolent helper, or maybe he’s a malevolent force. She’s not sure, but we have ideas about that. We love the idea that he’s constantly sort of present in her life in some way, whether it’s explicitly pointing something out or merging into the scenery, like growing himself out into a tree to observe her, and that he can just take all kinds of different spooky forms.”
Claire: “It’s kind of a deliberate thing of deliberate thing that we’re zooming in on her and zooming out on him a little bit as well, so the lens through which this album is told has sort of shifted a little bit.”
Is this continuing directly from the first record, and was the approach to writing and recording this one any different this time around?
El: “It does follow on directly, there’s maybe a gap of a couple of days. At the end of the first record in Dreamspirals, we were trying to portray this scene in which, after her memory has sort of started coming back to her, triggered by some of the pressures in the events and the terrors of Trial by Combat, she finally finds a moment of respite in this kind of cave outcropping on a mountain and begins to actually deliberately weave her magic for the first time and has more confidence in who she is and what she’s got to do, she now has a much clearer purpose. We talked about this idea that these star charts would draw themselves out on her skin, and she would use those to navigate to where she’s got to go to next, so when you meet her again, in Daybreak, the first song on the new record, she is maybe a few days, a few weeks into that journey, traversing the landscape looking for her destination, using these star maps on her skin to navigate.”
Claire: “So with the first record, we were very much finding our feet as a band, so a lot of it was in the room trying to suss each other out. I mean, El and I go back a while, but we’d never written music together before at that point. But I think we’ve got quite comfortable with each other toward the end and you can see the progress with writing and the songs themselves. The first album was written in a very linear way, in fact all the way back to the EP, each track was written chronologically so Dreamspirals was the last track chronicling that first part of the story. So you know, that would have been a very exciting prospect to take into the room again for album two, and then COVID hit, and we were all locked down just as we were sort of starting to really get some ideas bubbling away for the next one. So we ended up doing a lot of writing in isolation, there were lots of WhatsApp ideas going around, we’ve got a folder on our Google Drive called ‘the riff bank’, it’s getting pretty full.
But the magic happens in the room where you take in an idea, and it’s, you know, you think you might have got something, or you think you might have nothing, and then you take it in, and you work it through with the group and it just takes on a whole new life and goes in different directions that you perhaps didn’t think it would originally. I think one of the things that was different was when you’ve sat with an idea, and you’ve been working it around to the point where you kind of almost like talking yourself out of it, having the confidence to take that into the room after a few months and work it out is different than just coming up with something on the fly in the room. So it was it was a very different process, but I think having got comfortable with each other in that first record, and understanding that dynamic a little better, just meant that when we did take those ideas into the room, it was quite quick in terms of taking it forward, whereas before with the first one, it was a bit slower with with the idea of progression. I don’t know if the lockdown was a good thing or not for our writing on reflection, but yeah, definitely a different approach than the first record.”
El: “It was different in terms of how we approach writing next to the story as well.”
Claire: “Yes, yeah, we had a bit of the story, but we were working backwords from Hypergenesis, like we knew where she left off and we knew where we were gonna end up, and we had some flesh on the bones of the story arc, but it was a totally different approach in that regard too.”
When you’re writing these songs, how do you know when you’ve got enough songs for an album? How do you figure out which of the story beats you’re going to pick up and put down on, do things sometimes get kept back for later, with ideas used in other places than you initially maybe conceived them?
El: “I think because we had Hypergenesis, and we knew what that was and where that story point ended up, that sort of made it easier for us to figure out the different beats that we wanted to hit across the rest of the album, like, we’d like to have a moment where she finds this ancient library, who’s going to be there? How is she going to interact with that place? What kinds of things is she going to need to overcome? We loved the idea of her needing to learn a dead language and sit down and decipher texts and things, which is something that’s very close to my heart and interesting to me, just from my background and my personal passions around literature and the act of editing and, you know, the origins of language and how language morphs and changes over time, all of that stuff I’m a massive nerd about.
We kept Hypergenesis back for this album, restructured our first set of recordings, which originally included the EP as a double album, which was a bold outing for a new band so we chose to split those up differently because we needed to keep something back so we could reshape what that first album looked like. I’ve already got all sorts of mad ideas about where it’s gonna end up, and I think we’re all chomping at the bit to start writing together again already.
I remember there was a point when we went away for a bit of a writing break, because we thought that getting in a room for a long weekend would accelerate us getting over a few tricky decisions in the songs. We were writing out the the narrative beats of the second album and trying to think about peaks and troughs in the story, and we felt that we needed a different opening track, we needed to start her somewhere else narratively, and we thought that in terms of the music, something else should come first. And there are a couple of other things that we wanted to ensure that she did. So we then set about trying to write songs to convey those moments from new stuff or riffs we already had.”
Claire: “As well as setting it up for what’s coming next, sort of laying the foundations for that as well. No writing has happened for that bit yet, we’ve just got a rough idea of where it’s going to go, how we’re going to elevate and progress the story. I think because our songs are so deliberate and we’ve agonised over all the details of it, it’s not like we’ve got loads of stuff left on the cutting room floor.
I think going into the studio we weren’t as confident too, like we were confident that we’d got the record, but we weren’t as confident in actually playing it yet because it was all so fresh, so that was an interesting thing to take into the studio being like, oh god it kind of feels only just about baked! And I actually feel like that’s that’s a positive thing because you’re more open minded with different tones, how it might sound, your approach to the production of it all, because you’ve not got a set idea of how it ought to be in your head just yet. So yeah, that was a slight difference from the first record as well.”
Moving onto the lore side of things now, can you delve into the plot running through the record, to give us an idea of what’s going on as we listen through?
El: “So you’ll be pleased to learn that this time on the inside of the gatefold for the vinyl, we have actually written out some story, some biscuits to go with the tea basically, if you are so minded, to read that at the same time. So I mentioned we rejoin The Protagonist during the first track ‘Daybreak’. She’s been travelling for a period of time, following these directions drawn out on her on her skin, not necessarily knowing what she’s going to find but feeling purposeful and determined. She comes to this ridge, and at the top of it encounters an island suspended in the sky as though it’s been ripped out of the ground by massive hands and it’s floating in the air. It’s hewn to the ground by these massive chains, and has waterfalls running backwards up to it. On the top of it, she can see there’s some kind of building and begins to climb up these chains to reach it. The closer she gets the more easily she can see that this is a very strange ancient building that defies the rules of physics and mathematics with its strange angles and how it’s pieced together. As she passes into it we move into the single ‘The Archivist’.
On the inside, it all looks very dilapidated, it’s all disintegrating away with the passage of time except for the various books and scrolls and things on the shelves which are all somehow still in immaculate condition. She hears this noise, this heavy, thudding, crunching, sparkling noise coming towards her at speed and braces herself as she’s confronted with this immense crystalline being; The Archivist. Made up of clear and pale pink crystal with a sharp, tall crystalline head. It speaks in her mind, it can read her thoughts and it feels what she wants. And when it moves, it breathes in this sort of musical chime, as its crystalline body is moving around. It thunders off to find things because she’s been thinking things like: How can I learn from the past to make the future better? How can I prevent the failures of this great civilization from happening again. So, it seats her at a desk and begins to put books in front of her, and as she begins to try to read them, she’s opening things up and finding that she doesn’t know this language, it’s a dead, lost language.
And so we’re into the single ‘Dead Language’, she’s sitting there trying to decipher these completely alien runes, markings, patterns and things. Days and nights pass while she’s studying, and then things begin to pull together and she can finally understand it. She comes across this illustration, this heavy, black ink illustration; It’s this dark silhouette of woodland with some kind of tree seed in the middle, and she as she’s looking at it, she sees the bony hand of the Mountain Caller, pointing at it and then disappearing into nothingness. She doesn’t really understand some of the references in it, but there’s some kind of failsafe known only as ‘Göll’. So she continues her journey, using this new knowledge to find the answers that she’s seeking, she has to make her way now ‘Into The Hazel Woods’.
So she needs to delve into the Hazel Woods, she’s walking through and there’s lots of beautiful sounds, there’s breeze running through the trees, there’s this funny sort of hooting mechanical sound, she hears the flutter of metallic wings overhead. Out of her peripheral vision she clocks these mechanical owls with jewels built into them following her about, but as she presses further on, she notices that everything is becoming quiet, and then eventually everything goes completely silent, all of the noise and all of the colour has been sucked out of the surroundings. All except for a distant, but rapidly approaching hurtling of something massive toward her direction. Bursting through the trees pushing them aside, she is confronted with this black inky swirling mass. Across its surface, these screaming, tormented faces coming out at her and then disappearing away and dissolving into nothingness.
They square each other up, they circle around each other and then they commence battle; we are very much now into the track ‘March Of The Göll’. They sling magic at each other, locked in an intense battle, neither of them really gaining the advantage, and so The Protagonist, to try to skew things in her favour, she reaches out into its mind. But instead of gaining the upper hand, they stop stock still, as what she senses from it is actually guilt, fear, self loathing and this terrible heavy weight of sadness. So now, instead of wanting to destroy it, because of connecting with it, she’s created empathy and understanding. She looks at it and understands that it’s sort of a manifestation of her own self doubt, and her own darkness, and as she realises that it begins to dissolve until it just disappears on the wind. She heads on into the centre of the woods, and finds this seed that she saw back in the ancient library, a seed that has the power to create. With that in her possession, it connects with her magic, and she reaches her hands down to the floor and begins to remake the world around her, bringing us into the final track, Hypergenesis.”