Hello. My name is Jason. I play in the band and this is the story of the Talking Mountain.
I had a dream that I was walking up a tall mountain, and it started to talk. I couldn't hear what it was saying, but I could see the words. Everything it said was either utter nonsense or seemed jumbled and ridiculous. When I woke up, I realized that many of the words and sentences were just turned backwards or upside down. It was one of those dreams that feels particularly important, and I wanted to remember as much of the dream as possible so I could try and turn the words the right way around and figure out what the mountain was saying.
As those sorts of dreams sometimes do, it stuck with me for awhile. I tend to obsess over things anyway, and I couldn't stop thinking about the dream. After a few days, I started to notice similarities in that dream to a dream I had six or seven years previous.
In that dream, I was forced to sever my own left arm by the voice of someone who I could hear, but not see. I'll save you the drama and just say that this was at a time in my life when I didn't feel particularly happy about many things. I woke up from that dream feeling absolutely devastated, as though I had actually lost a limb (or worse), but over the course of a few days started to feel really good about everything again. I even wrote a song back then about my strange new happiness and complete lack of sadness in my life.
After realizing the similarities, I was even more disappointed in the talking mountain dream. The severed arm had been this weird turning point in my life and I felt that the mountain dream was supposed to serve the same purpose. The severed arm left me happier, but the mountain was just disappointing me. I even wrote a song about still feeling that arm, but never finding it again.
Honestly, I still haven't figured out the talking mountain, and I still obsess a bit over the dream although the memory of it is pretty hazy at this point. If anything, I suppose it just shows how absurd dreams can be, and how ridiculous we are sometimes for trying to figure them out.
I decided to take thoughts I had, stuff about friends, decisions I've made, regrets, and successes and try and encode them the way that dreams are. Strip away and replace the facts and the concrete information and create absurdity that still can convey the same thought or message, while at the same time, not shoving those original thoughts, ideas, and feelings down peoples throats.
Talking Mountain is from Omaha, NE. We play songs using drastically modified guitars, homemade synthesizers, loops and samples of ourselves and my dog, and terrible drum machines. Sometimes they are loud, sometimes they are quiet, and sometimes they are both.
Press:
Orange Alert - The Watch List 8/7/10
Indiependent Music 8/7/10
The Sound in the Signals 8/5/10
Macrowavve 2/25/10Lazy-I 2/25/10Omaha City Weekly 2/24/10Pirates Press Record of the Week 2/3/10Lincoln Journal Star 7/16/09The Needle Drop 11/25/08Omaha City Weekly 9/17/08
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