mount maxwell: the people's forest

A founding member of Vancouver Island's MMR Collective, and head of the Canadian experimental electronic label Hotham Sound, artist and musician Jamie Tolagson (Mount Maxwell) currently lives and works in Vancouver, BC. His music is a unique blend of analog synths and acoustic instrumentation, calling to mind such artists as Boards of Canada, Bruce Langhorne, and Tangerine Dream. A preoccupation with childhood perception, utopian thinking, and the landscape of the Pacific Northwest runs throughout his work, which has been featured in Discorder Magazine, Tabs Out, Cassette Gods, Retromania, Free Form Freakout, Last FM, and NTS Radio. The People's Forest is his fifth album. "The People's Forest is packed with micro-earworm moments, nourishing synths and playful crunchy percussion. It's got a skyward gaze and nostalgia for futures never realized, packing a kind of childlike optimism inside an arpeggio-laden, hermetically sealed little sound world. When the loose, hip-hop fueled drums kick in over warm synthesizer pads, you'll probably feel the same warm sense of familiarity I picked up. Music for fans of Boards of Canada, sure, but Mount Maxwell has a wide-open pastoral landscape and identity all its own." --Optimistic Underground "Composed of seemingly small sounds, The People's Forest has an oddly natural quality to it despite being created almost entirely through synthetic means. Subtle synth lines coordinate effectively with bits of sampled audio including vocals and sounds of nature in a way that transports you to another place that feels like a home that you are yet to visit. Subdued percussion carries almost every track through these wandering soundscapes in a manner that gives the listener something to hold onto as they drift along in this other-worldly place that resembles Earth." --Rounding the Fringes