The Mountain Came To Us

So yesterday evening was the night where I got the pleasure to see the canadian symphonic ensemble Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band.

A band once a side project of the massive post-rock act Godspeed You Black Emperor.

The Memorial Orchestra defines itself in making long symphonic and dark voyages beyond what is normally done in neither post-rock or indie as such. It's sort of psychedelica meets orchestra.

One of the strengths of TSMZ&TLLB is that they use a lot of vocal harmonies. Everyone in the band, counting all 7 of them, has a microphone and everyone uses it from time to time.

Nevertheless there's a feel of Efrim being their "lead singer" (even though he doesn't see himself as such) and the rest is just in for support, but they actually do a very fine job making harmonies and beautiful moments that makes the songs very fulfilled and does make it feel like a whole experience.

So last night I got to see them once again. Last time was a couple of years ago and at the exact same venue.

This time they did the show exactly as last time, standing in a half circle fronting each other.
I kind of like that, it shows a band being in focus on playing together as a whole and not as a band of individual presence and performance persons.

Yesterday evening this felt very fine as well.

So the only difference from last time was the songs they played, else it was pretty much the same experience.

The experience of drifting away to their long repetetive escapades that evolves and diminishes in & out of everything and nothingness, quite effective & quite spellbinding.

The fact that the band also seems very relaxed, down to earth, and had a good sense of humour, talking about everything from losing their gear in london, making Ian the guitar player forced to play a shitty epiphone guitar that he leased, all the way over to the fact that the internet is made of dead people, that essentially is diamonds that also is used for blood transfusions, gave just another view of a relaxed and humoristic band.

Silver Mt. Zion is an interesting band and I definately prefer to see them live rather than listen to their albums, but that's a taste thing i guess. Nonetheless i will encourage to go to this YouTube video and just see a nice clip, what they're all about (sadly i can't embed it).

THEE SILVER MOUNT ZION ORCHESTRA & TRA-LA-LA BAND @ YOUTUBE

And just take a look at this live bootleg video, a song they also played yesterday.



Last off, here's also the song they opened the show with : 1.000.000 Died to made this sound :