Debut album To Cry Out In The Wilderness out November 8th via Idée Fixe Records
Today, the avant-garde, genre-defying, Ontario collective Scions are sharing their latest single, “The Mountain,” the second offering from their forthcoming album To Cry Out In The Wilderness out November 8th via Idée Fixe Records.
“The Mountain” is a raw, powerful meditation on nature’s fury, post-apocalyptic survival, and the inevitable reckoning with forces greater than ourselves. With its massive, rumbling soundscapes, the track conjures the image of an ancient, dormant mountain awakening in anger.
“This song imagines an ancient, terrifying guardian rousing in response to the world’s devastation,” says vocalist and co-writer Cormac Culkeen. “We wanted the listener to feel the weight of great stones falling, of nature speaking back.”
While staying true to the group members’ expertise across chamber jazz and drone, in “The Mountain” Scions combines their composition with traditions more commonplace in metal music, specifically black metal and grindcore juxtaposed with the ensemble’s euphonious performances to create a rich, dense soundscape. The piece was created in collaboration with Lucas Goudie on drums and Cameron Evans on bass guitar bringing their unique talents to the mix, conducted freely by Culkeen to unleash an unrelenting sonic force.
The track captures the ensemble’s evolving vision of a post-ecological collapse world—a theme that resonates throughout their upcoming album, where moments of beauty coexist with haunting chaos.
Speaking on “The Mountain” band leader Michael Cloud Duguay said, “Much of this record deals with quiet intensities. With ‘The Mountain’, I wanted to push the limit of those intensities by exploring brutal noise, garnished with the same beauty found elsewhere on the record, to investigate both poles of our composition and performance.”
He continues, “Including ideas from metal traditions, influenced by my love of the work of Bill Laswell and John Zorn, in this project was a priority to me from the moment of concept. I hoped to explore as many sonic and aesthetic iterations of drone expression as I could with this record – from dulcet to harsh – and The Mountain provided a platform for this vision. Fortunately, we have friends and collaborators in our improvisation community who perform in metal traditions, and this idea was easy to realize. I wanted the sound design of ‘The Mountain’ to sound and feel like the earth giving out beneath one’s feet, of mountains crumbling and canyons splitting open.”
PRE-ORDER THE ALBUM HERE