Roy Montgomery: Guitars Infernal

"During his eight years in the White House, a glorious din poured from the underground's every corner, caterwauling responses to wars and world orders built on lies. It was an extended heyday for harshness that doubled as an escape hatch-the rock deconstructions of Mouthus, the ecstatic roar of Growing, the crackling tectonics of Yellow Swans. Where No Fun documented the subterranean groans of New York, Not Not Fun broadcast its wonderfully garish West Coast cousins. Lightning Bolt felt like guerilla fighters,"

"In New Zealand, though, the guitarist Roy Montgomery largely sat that moment out. Montgomery had long been one for disappearing; soon after his band, the Pin Group, released the first-ever single on the great label Flying Nun in 1981, he seemingly vanished for a decade. What's more, the music he made after returning in the mid-'90s was rarely savage. His four-track compositions felt like frames for walls of noise, not the noise itself."

American underground noise surged during the George W. Bush years as a harsh, urgent reaction to wars and discredited world orders. The movement produced abrasive bands, deconstructive rock acts, and provocative labels across coasts. Roy Montgomery, a New Zealand guitarist, largely abstained from that era after vanishing following the Pin Group's 1981 single on Flying Nun. His mid-1990s return yielded skeletal, beautiful four-track pieces that framed noise rather than embracing it, and he avoided the louder decade. He later recorded nine instrumentals in 2016 that mark his most obliterative, noise-forward work, explicitly dedicated to the late planet Earth.

Read at Pitchfork