Audiopile Review: Absolutely blissed new album from Martin Glass, who hasn’t been seen on the physical format since his 2017 sleeper hit The Pacific Visions Of Martin Glass, now fetching some notable sums on you-know-where. While his first album was indebted to the plastic grooves of City Pop threaded through balmy lounge and downtempo aesthetics, Magic Mountain is more wistful and ambient-centric in its approach. Playing out nicely as a single end-to-end listen, Glass mines a similar zone here as Anthony Naples in his sleepier moments, interconnecting the wide-scope of influences that trace the throughline from the flighty missives of OG 70s German cosmonauts through to the balearic tones of 90’s chill-out rooms, all while hinting at the woozy turquoise-tinted psychedelia of early BoC. Stunning follow up to his now much-loved debut. Act fast, edition of 300 and we have very few to go around!

Magic Mountain is the third full-length album from the itinerant American businessman, composer, and producer Martin Glass. Inspired by German electronic music pioneer Edgar Froese, Vangelis, early Warp Records releases, The Orb and The Future Sound of London, the album is a Fellinian memory maze of new age wellness culture, mid-20th century Hollywood glitz, exhaustion, dreams, fantasy, desire and listless ennui. The less sense it makes, the more we can’t stop listening to it.

Drawing from the impressionistic recollections of an unreliable narrator with an ever-loosening relationship with time and space, Magic Mountain tells the story of Martin’s feverish stay in a celebrity health resort in the hills beyond Hollywood. Over the course of thirteen evocatively titled tracks, the album unfolds like a half-remembered dream of a place somehow lost and imagined but not beyond our reach. Expressed through sweeping, retrofuturistic synthesisers, haunted old-time melodies, grainy samples and the occasional gently lulling rhythm, it plugs directly into emotion and pleasure, calling the listener to fall into the fantasy.

“As I’ve got older, I just want the music to be evocative, to take people away, to transport them somewhere, to move them,” Martin says. That’s such a basic requirement of music, I know, but – to me, increasingly – it’s becoming the only requirement! How can this record stop somebody on their mobile phone and make them feel something or yearn for something?”

Limited first run of 300 copies.