There is a Chinese legend harkening back to the 3rd Century BCE of a man who dies working on the construction of the Great Wall during winter due to a lack of warm clothes and general exhaustion. His wife, not having heard the news of his passing, travels over rivers and mountains to bring him winter clothes, only to find that he had died before she arrived. Unable to locate where his body is buried, she begins to wail with such tremendous, weighty sorrow that it causes a section of the wall to collapse, revealing where her husband's bones have been laid. There is a haunting resonance of poetic angst to this tail that ricochets like a solemn rale through Ghost Mountain's solo release, October Country- a recognition of loss as a scrying prism through which we discover what treasures bind our souls, as well as the motivation to recover them, or the decrement to leave them in the depths of the grave. Here we find Wren Kosinski pricking his fingers and allowing the crimson runoff of his essence to trickle like ruddy, gory glops of wax over crumbling epitaphs and mingling with the crematorial soot of long extinguished funeral pyres, gathering the grieving wisdom of a thousand past lives to form a seal of approbation upon the bleached white envelope containing the sum of his contritions, destined to be burnt in a ritual to liberate the shades of his dissociative withdrawal and replenish the soil of his own absolution- like a self-immolating wickerman. A chilling tale of reclaiming oneself from absolute spiritual poverty and self-denial, one that casts a merciful corpse-like pallor over one's personage as we enter the open-air oven of these blistering summer days.
