To set his muse free, Jonathan Miller, who has written and recorded as Hand Sand Hands for the past dozen-or-so years, ran away from his music for long stretches of time before slowly piecing together his latest introspective effort. But the time apart wasn’t exactly intentional. Created on the down-slope of grieving lost loved ones (including his father, who succumbed to Alzheimer’s), Miller returns with Bad Mountain, a sometimes-delicate, sometimes-cacophonous rumination on lives-lived and carrying on in the aftermath of living without. As always, Miller manages to create a weird tension between the music’s sound and its raw subject matter that is bizarre and beguiling and ultimately uplifting.
TMT is proud to present a full stream of Bad Mountain, which also happens to be out TODAY (July 7) on Arrowhawk Records. Before charging into the full-length at full-speed, feel free to get itchy feet by viewing the album-teasing video for “Magazine.” The clip offers a contemplative scene which pairs Miller’s therapeutic passions: music and running. For Miller, running, like creating music, is a way to unload the clutter of the mind (or, as the great novelist Haruki Murakami writes in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, “I run in order to acquire a void”).
After Filling and healing your own void (you know you’ve got at least one), feel free to run heart-and-head-first into Hand Sand Hands’ Bad Mountain in its entirety, in which renewed hope outpaces morbid reflection by a country mile.
Bad Mountain tracklisting:
01. Bad Mountain
02. Vowels
03. Great Noise
04. Precipt
05. Magazine
06. Poorer
07. Shoulders 1
08. Shoulders 2
09. Shoulders 3
10. Shoulders 4
11. Mono
More about: Hand Sand Hands
