Montano

montano playing live

members

  • Shanan Holm: field recordings, electronics, production
  • Michael Upton: field recordings, electronics, production

blurb

No synths, no drum machines, only samples from the streets of Melbourne.

Montano is a project of two ex-pat New Zealanders in Melbourne, Australia. Over the course of two years, we transformed street corners, railway stations and the Queen Victoria markets. Every sound in our compositions was originally sourced from recordings of Melbourne's inner city, with washing chords formed from snippets of squealing trams, melodies made from automated train announcements, and beats assembled from crickets, crossing signals and fork lifts. The results are some surprisingly poppy electronic tracks with fragments of the raw city sounds coming through the mix.

The plan for the project was to choose a location in the city, make a recording there and then create pieces of music using only the sounds from that specific session. All of the compositions we've released were made from the sounds of the corner of Spring and Flinders Sts on a rainy afternoon, the corner of Spencer and Flinders Sts on a baking hot morning, a train ride from Parliament to Melbourne Central, a stroll through the food stalls at the Queen Vic markets on a Saturday morning, and a visit to the CERES Environmental Park in Brunswick.

The project is moving into a whole new phase, with both of us now back in Wellington. At the moment we're making up our minds about what direction our music-making will take and whether or not we'll even keep calling it Montano!

releases

Wellington label Capital Recordings released Montano's self-titled album in New Zealand, December 2005.

The album is available as high-quality MP3s at a dirt cheap price via Amie Street .

downloads

Here are some MP3s from the first album:

  • Dollar Kilo (4.7mb) - This one is all based on the session we did at the Queen Victoria markets. Bass and melody sounds are from people's voices, drum tracks are from all kinds of random noises going on... including the fork lift mentioned above.
  • Deme (5.4mb) - A much more ambient excursion from a second set of recordings we did. These recordings were at the Ceres environmental park in Brunswick. For the Ceres tracks we've experimented with letting each block of recording run fairly untouched, with processed sounds building on what naturally occurs.

We were interviewed for Radio New Zealand and have been kindly given permission to put it on the site. It includes music from a whole bunch of tracks from the album. The interview was produced by Kirsten Johnstone and runs for about 10 minutes.

Let us know what you think by sending us an email.

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