Sauna

The sauna that this album was inspired by is not a sauna that actually exists anywhere. It is about the idea of a small man-made wooden room crushed beneath a universe’s worth of bad weather; a concentration of extreme heat within a vast tough world. Inside this deliberate space a transformation occurs. The exaggerated atmosphere of flames, steam, smoke and dim light obliterate the usual sensations and new kinds of perception are exposed. Then the shocking plunge under cold water and the razor sword through sky. This is the same transformative potential of music, at least the kind of music that Mount Eerie has been attempting for the past few years. Carefully built worlds of sound and sensation, large weights and clear ideas, depth shown through simple moments. The singer is standing on the street in the rain, considering whether she hears a tractor idling or maybe an ancient memory of a mammoth tearing through brush. The view through the big windows at the airport in 2014. Sauna is described as an “ultimate” Mount Eerie album, and something about it does feel final, or perhaps the beginning of something new and big. The songs narrow these ideas to tight moments, a honed thesis.