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In Focus: Roy Montgomery

New Zealand, 07.06.24

Focus on Roy Montgomery, Dissolve, Dadamah, The Pin Group

New Zealand guitarist Roy Montgomery's music was once described by NPR journalist Lars Gotrich as "swimming through phantoms" – it may sound like an overwrought analogy at first, but simply spend half an hour enveloped in Montgomery's tones, and you'll understand.

Originally a part of Pin Group in the 1980s, releasing Joy Division-indebted post-punk on the revered Wellington label Flying Nun records, Montgomery eventually unmoored himself from the strictures of verse-chorus-verse songwriting, and other musicians entirely, composing drifting, gauzy guitar instrumentals that channeled his own personal grief and loneliness into a seductively baleful magic.

Tracklist