The Mountain Says No Coalesce Behind a New Album

"I'm so fucking sick of hearing about Farm," jokes Andy Frappier, bassist of Enosburg Falls rock quartet the Mountain Says No. He's referring to the experimental folk trio that in some ways birthed TMSN. Frappier plays alongside guitarists and former Farm-hands Jedd Kettler and Ben Maddox, as well as drummer Justus Gaston. When Farm was put out to pasture several years ago, Kettler and Maddox linked up with longtime friends and collaborators Gaston and Frappier. Maddox was something of a mentor to Gaston in his teen years, always keen to introduce him to his latest music gear and the projects he was working on. It should be noted that Gaston is in his twenties, while his bandmates are at, as they put it, "prime top condition" in their forties. Frappier occasionally played saxophone with Farm and briefly collaborated with Maddox in a loop-based project called Mouthbreather. (Maddox beseeches you to not look it up.) And here's a fun fact: Frappier was Gaston's band teacher at Enosburg Falls middle and high schools. TMSN are definitely not a Farm reboot. When it was in the early stages, Kettler and Maddox knew that whatever their next project was going to be, it needed to be much, much simpler. Farm's music is a complicated, dreamlike offering of experimental, boutique folk, using exponentially more instruments than there were musicians to play them. TMSN's music is burly, eclectic rock that occasionally encroaches on nightmarish but holds a 1-to-1 ratio of instruments to musicians. The stylistic transition, as well as a general coalescence between its members, makes TMSN's new album, Golden Landfill, its most cohesive offering to date. The Mountain Says No celebrate the release on Friday, February 17, at ArtsRiot in Burlington. Sitting in the Cave of Legends, a subterranean lair beneath Flying Disc, Maddox's café and secondhand media emporium in Enosburg Falls, the band begin to unravel their process. The Cave is their designated space for chain-smoking, sipping from mason jars filled with unidentifiable brown liquid and, most importantly, rehearsing. Kettler says that one of the main differences between Farm and TMSN was that Farm was a "studio band," meaning that their intricate compositions demanded complex live performances. To accurately reproduce an album's worth of Farm songs for a live show required laborious reconfigurations from song to song, all of which had to be worked out ahead of time and perfectly executed during…