MOUNTAIN is the newest Anni Hogan album and it gives us the chance to check some of her new music after the 2009 double CD reissue 'Kickabye'. MOUNTAIN is a particular project that sees Anni collaborating musically with Robert Strachan and Itchy Ear. What is its peculiarity? Well, musically Anni performed on her piano some tunes which Itchy Ear manipulated on pre-production and then Robert Strachan re-imagined and remixed. The final result is that the thirteen piano pieces now sound expanded and reinvented. Let me try to explain: you can hear that the main instrument is a piano, but under the main chords and melodies you hear many other sounds that create a spacey ambient and a sidereal effect. These sounds have been created manipulating the piano tracks created by Anni and they are able to bring you on a trip to the top of the Everest. Tracks like 'Sunburst' will make you feel the skin ice burned while the following 'Altitude' will make you tremble because of the wind like noises. Now that musically you have an idea of how it sounds, let me explain what there is behind this project, because this isn't only a musical disc, it is an hybrid CD/DVD disc that on the DVD side has a documentary by film maker Bob Wass and filmed by mountaineer Cathy O'Dowd during her Everest expedition. She also performed a spoken word comment on the track 'Deathzone', describing what she felt during that experience: fear, struggle and despair are there in front of you, bare naked. That track is the only one to have also a sort of rhythmic pattern and it ends into a dramatic crescendo. Five out of thirteen tracks have been used as soundtrack to the thirty minutes documentary and I have to tell you that the musicians (whom have composed the music taking inspiration from the O'Dowd visual material and from Rene Daumal's 'Mount Analogue') did a great job and now you won't imagine a better way to support those shootings. You'll see the majesty of Himalayan Mountains as well as the nature's power during the footage of the snow covering the tents while the wind blows'¦ it was always blowing, helping the sun to burn the noses even more. Fascinating'¦