Lyrical Muse

There’s a quiet defiance to Mokotow’s latest release, one that resists the churn of an algorithm-driven industry. Tales From Lonely Mountain, out March 13, doesn’t announce itself loudly; it lingers, unfolding like a memory you didn’t realize you were holding onto.

Written, recorded, performed and produced entirely by Mike Mokotow in 2010, the record was born inside an attic studio at Baby Viking Mountain—bare, half-built and snowbound.

Armed with little more than a Fender Rhodes and pure instinct, Mokotow imposed a strict creative rule: each track had to be written and recorded the same day it was conceived. What remained were unfiltered sonic document that felt fragile and strikingly human.

The four-track project moves like a seasonal cycle. “From Above” captures an almost wordless sense of arrival; “Memory Lane Lullaby” drifts through personal nostalgia, tracing threads of childhood and paternal memory.

“Carousel Blues” introduces hypnotic repetition – its faint, ghostlike refrain (“round and round and round we go”) echoing life’s cyclical patterns, while “Midnight Mass” dissolves into the hum of a summer night, blurring the line between composition and environment.

Though the songs quietly existed for years under a co-publishing deal with BMG, they remained largely unheard, held in reserve until the rights returned. That moment arrived post-pandemic, when Mokotow’s relocation to the Catskills and collaborations with visual artists brought the project into focus.

Now, the album extends beyond sound. A companion exhibition opens March 21 at The Roscoe Collective, merging landscape, film and music, including Fog in the Valley – Carousel Blues. Mixed by Jeff Berner, who is also co-producing Mokotow’s forthcoming work, the album marks another evolution in an artist whose trajectory spans electronic production, band frontmanship, solo songwriting, and film scoring.

In an age of excess, Tales From Lonely Mountain finds its power in restraint—proving that stillness, when preserved honestly, can resonate louder than noise.

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