EinKa - Leaving Alone to Summit (2021)

Romain Lanteaume aka EinKa returns on his own label with a new album « Leaving Alone To Summit », including no less than 16 tracks made during these last 3 years. As it’s name suggests, mountains played a huge role in the artist’s recent life. Not only the mountains for their aesthetic aspect, but also what it involves to climb them. The extreme cold, the mixture of incredible moments and deliberate suffering, all these things that a composer can hardly experience in studio, have brought some fresh inspiration and the urgent need to express it in a way or another.

Why climbing (Everest)? One once replied « Because it’s there » when asked. For Romain (who hasn’t done Everest by the way), the question was more like « What is mountain climbing? » Is it a combination of snow, icy rocks and glacial winds? Is it the incredible and otherwordly beauty that is felt on top of them? Is it the risk that one takes to reach its summit? Is it the peak seen as a concept? Is it a passing by feeling or something concrete? Different types of persons might have different types of responses and there’s already an extensive litterature on this subject. Words did the job pretty well.

But when it comes to make mountains-describing music, the one concerned would better see clearer where he wants to go because it’s tricky. A physical and touchable thing like an icy rockwall should not sound like what one feels while climbing it. Yet, EinKa didn’t really want to make that choice and no decision was taken on which approach would be best to transpose his mountains. Each approach could be interesting for a reason or another. So, without pretending to describe glaciers, shapes of glaciers, fear of glaciers accurately and with such an elusive and smoky thing as music is, Romain tried to bring back a little bit of what is there in mountains and enjail it into a few tracks that could hopefully contain a bit of it.

Overall, the album is kept on a solid 4/4 foundation yet on some tracks, EinKa did his very best to avoid the regular pulse’s restrictions as well as any restrictions that club music could impose and rather tried to follow his theme as closely as possible, using harmonies and melodies when they were needed but also field-recorded concrete sounds and atonal synth jets which only, crafted a certain way, might be able to reflect what a windy peak in winter sounds and looks like, how harsh the ice might get at night, or how rotten the brown limestone of Eiger feels like. Because that’s also what mountains are, a bunch of raw materials ranging from lights to sounds, nature made items and things, ranging from tiny snowflakes to gigantic peaks.

All that had to be taken in consideration because the beauty of mountains, for who would like to express it, should not be reduced to photoshopped summits and well organized winter holidays in a ski resort. That beauty is for tourists, for the ones who plan their winter holidays in June. They are forgiven but mountain climbing’s one is far beyond that, it is somehow one of the last bastions of adventure and exoticism in today’s world. Far from Ski stations, the other thing in which beauty’s not only lying in beauty, is there and only there, patiently waiting, protected by rockwalls, seracs and crevasses. Leaving Alone To Summit is about all that and some other things.