A few months ago, Junip was offering a free download of ‘Rope and Summit’, a sort of precursor of their new LP, ‘Fields’, that was just released a few days ago.
The EP contains 4 songs of long inner exploration and atmospheric landscapes that can be fascinating and hypnotic.
The music goes in one direction, focuses on the horizon and revisits the same path over and over till it makes a deeper and deeper groove in your brain.
There is something light and eerie about José González’s voice constantly floating over the tracks, almost never changing the delivery, and always very focused. This gives to the music a lot of direction, a lot of determination to go somewhere, whatever happens. But in fact, nothing really happens, the music is repetitive with spacey rhythms looping on themselves.
So if it is going over the same path many times, each time the repetition gives us a better idea of where we are going even though we are going nowhere, as if the goal of the journey did not matter when we have this trail to follow over and over, accumulating all these mountain of sounds. ‘What’s your guiding light/when you don’t have force’ he sings in ‘At the doors’, the journey can be exhausting indeed.
The song ‘Rope and Summit’ has that mysterious mantra-groove, which seems coming simultaneously from an ancient time and an exotic country.
‘Got our rope and summit/But we need to wake up’, the lyrics are like the music, spacey and secretive, I just wonder if the rope is destined to help us reach the summit or, on the contrary, represents a possible decision which would prevent to reach this summit forever.
Junip was formed by Gonzalez with drummer Elias Araya and organist Tobias Winterkorn in the late 90s, and after a five year hiatus, they have just released the EP ‘Rope and Summit’, and the LP ‘Fields’.