Mount Florida

Arrived Phoenix

Arrived Phoenix January 30, 2001 “From the swirling electronic tones and blunted galactic beats of the opening sequence to the sheet metal stridencies of ‘Postal’ and the dense fuzztones of ‘Bombast,’ Mount Florida make like Killing Joke conspiring with Alex Paterson to play tricks on those with chemically impaired memories.” — Ken Hollings, The Wire Mount Florida are proud to unveil their debut album, ‘Arrived Phoenix,’ containing 12 brand-new compositions. Mount Florida are the Glasgow duo of M.P. Lancaster and Twitch. Together four years, they released a couple of limited singles before hooking up with Matador for three UK-only EPs released over the last year. Both of them have long and varied backgrounds in music. M.P. has been working with electronics for longer than he would care to remember. Almost signed by ZTT back in the day, he narrowly escaped the ignominy of having to live with a dubious collection of electro pop star press shots. Instead he ventured down a more left-field road, recording music for various installations before releasing a solo album on Twitch’s defunct label Pi recordings — which is how they met. Most recently he has composed the soundtrack to “109,” an audiovisual representation of the table of the elements currently touring Bristol and London. Twitch has been a DJ for longer than he too would care to remember, spreading his musical gospel around the world. Co-founder of the legendary Edinburgh club Pure, he claims credit/apologizes for bringing techno to Scotland in the late 80’s. Pure has just ended after its tenth birthday and these days Twitch is active in club and concert promotion as well as the upcoming launch of a new label O.S.C.A.R.R. His cardinal club night is the Sunday night Glasgow firebrand Optimo — currently the most celebrated, technologically advanced, and outrageous club in the city — where his radically diverse tastes can finally find an outlet as well as a fanatical following. Optimo recently hosted Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry to a sellout audience of 2000 people; Mount Florida opened the show in what was their first ever live performance. Mount Florida do not have an agenda, they just like to do things differently. For Arrived Phoenix, Mount Florida used a multitude of source material, ranging from traditional rock instrumentation to their own field recordings to DAT tapes provided by local musicians (which were then manipulated and fed into their machines) to the odd contributor invited to play live in the studio. Arrived Phoenix moves still further from the three Matador UK EP’s (themselves radically different from one another) and is no more a “DJ album” than records by Coil, KLF, Cabaret Voltaire, or Muslimgauze. The end result is a one-hour travelogue that defies easy categorization. From slo-mo experimentalist pop and edgy dub landscapes through psych-out percussive lyricism to deep transcendental pastoralism. Somehow this all comes together as the coherent joy that is Arrived Phoenix.