Mono - Hymn To The Immortal Wind

With Hymn To The Immortal Wind, Japanese post rock group Mono have quite possibly delivered their masterpiece. Recorded and mixed in Chicago over the summer and winter of 2008 with legendary producer Steve Albini, Hymn To The Immortal Wind sees the band take their blend of shimmering post rock and merge it with a huge classical orchestra to create a vast, heavy but always beautiful album.

With seven tracks and a length of almost seventy minutes, Hymn To The Immortal Wind is unlikely to find itself played on many pop music stations. Instead this is an album that would find a better place as a film soundtrack. Full of epic peaks and powerful crescendos, violins and cellos marry in perfect symmetry with crashing cymbals, heavy timpani drums and layers of guitar noise. The tone is set on opening track Ashes In The Snow which gradually grows from a subtle and restrained birth to the sound of the world crashing in on itself. It is the evocative and cinematic nature of the music that brings imagery to mind so easily. On the tear jearking Follow The Map the listener can conjure a vision of a struggling hero crawling, hungry and exhausted through the storms trying to reach his destination.

With these references to immense strings and motion picture soundscapes one could imagine that Hymn To The Immortal Wind is simply an album of incidental music. This is not the case. It is certainly not a coffee table album. It is a cacophonous yet composed rock album, that demands the listener to immerse themselves in its textures; ideally alone with headphones in the dark.

If there is one criticism of Hymn To The Immortal Wind it is that the songs tend to follow a formula of slowly building quietness to grandiose atmospheric endings, but what a formula it is. Hymn To The Immortal Wind is an album that sets Mono above many of their post rock peers and takes them and the listener to a place far removed from the ordinary.

Mono @ Brighton Digital

Brighton Digital may not be the ideal venue to witness the Japanese post rock of Mono, a band whose musical scope has seen them enlisting a large chamber orchestra to work with them on their new album Hymn To The Immortal Wind. A black arched sea fronting nightclub, live music is very much an afterthought of Digital, the design layout being primarily focussed on suiting the needs of raving clubbers. In addition Mono themselves do not go out to be a visual band. With the exception of bass player Tamaki the group choose not to stand for most of the show, leaving the majority of the audience staring at what appears to be an almost empty stage and a bank of dazzling lights that blaze into the retina.

If this all sounds rather under whelming, then the music of Mono is certainly not. Mono deliver an instrumental soundtrack of ferocious guitar noise that rises and falls in chiming sonic crescendos, often displaying structures more associated with classical music. Every track they play evolves to find new dreamlike ambient textures and layers. There are moments of monumental beauty as well as hypnotic ear crushing darkness. Song titles seem irrelevant. This is a show that feels like one piece, structured into a series of sonic chapters.

Despite the walls of sound that Mono produce, the band also bring to Brighton a deep sublime elegance, with piano minimalism and light glockenspiel touches added to some of their compositions. It is a sound that slowly draws the audience in, enveloping in a powerful atmospheric otherworldliness. Obvious comparisons can be drawn to Mogwai and Explosions In The Sky, but in many ways Mono have a more focussed restraint than these bands. They forge a narrative that is brutal, cinematic and bigger, yet it is also full of intricate subtleties.

Mono are a band at the top of their game; staggeringly hypnotic and as a live act, potent beyond belief.