Mountains Coming Out of the Sky

More about Mountains Coming Out of the Sky

Inspired by
https://deepdreamgenerator.com/ddream/mhm79nxvle3

I bought Fragile in 1971 at Kmart in Modesto, California. It was one of the first three albums I ever bought. Up to then, my musical education had been mostly Motown coming through an AM radio, which was a pretty good education, but it did absolutely nothing to prepare me for Yes.

I put Fragile on my little record player and, frankly, I didn’t know what the hell I was listening to.

It took me a while to figure out that whatever these people were doing, it was actually quite good.

There was something strange about the sound itself. Everything seemed compressed and intensified, as though the music, voices, distance and time had all been squeezed through some invisible machine. Jon Anderson’s voice especially had that quality for me—so high and clear and compressed that it seemed capable of shooting straight through the ceiling. Sometimes listening to him felt as though the top of my head might blow off.

And then there was Roger Dean, the artist who did all the cover art on Yes Albums.

For the image I made here, I used Tiny Planets and Waterlogue because I wanted that impossible geography: lakes curling into themselves, mountains coming out of the sky and simply standing there, worlds behaving like thoughts rather than geology. I was trying to get somewhere near the territory Roger Dean had been mapping all those years ago.

I’ve had a fixation with Dean for maybe fifteen years. Oddly enough, accordions got mixed into it.

I was listening to a program about accordions on the local co-op radio station, and somehow the idea came up of an accordion album with a gigantic accordion in a Roger Dean-type landscape. That image lodged itself in my head and apparently refused to pay rent.

So when I saw Natasha’s avatar of her playing the accordion, I immediately thought: There it is.

I wanted to remake her as a giant playing an enormous accordion in one of those impossible worlds—a tiny planetary landscape curling beneath her, mountains floating in the atmosphere, lakes bending around the horizon, everything obeying musical laws instead of Newton’s.

And somehow that takes me straight back to 1971: a kid in Modesto putting a record from Kmart onto a little turntable and hearing something he couldn’t understand.

Maybe that’s why Fragile stayed with me.

I had to grow into the landscape.