Comprised of Superhumanoids‘ Sarah Chernoff, Kisses‘ Jesse Kivel, and Classixx‘s Michael David, Mt. Si is a collaborative side project that can trace its origins to when David and his bandmates in Classixx were working on their first album. As the story goes, the trio of Chernoff, Kivel and David had been writing songs that were meant to appear on Classixx’s debut album. “Mike and I wrote a track that I was supposed to sing,” Kivel explains in press notes, “but Sarah came in and stole the show, From there we realized that we had good chemistry as a trio, writing and producing in a subtle, refined way.”
Now back in January, I wrote about the act’s breezy and summery debut single “Either/Or,” a single that paired a production consisting of skittering drum programming, shimmering and cascading synths and keyboards with Chernoff’s ethereal cooing floating over a two-step worthy mix. Sonically speaking, the song managed to channel early 80s synth pop and funk — in particular Patrice Rushen‘s “Forget Me Nots” and Oran “Juice” Jones’ “The Rain” — with an urgent and plaintive sense of longing just below its shimmering surface.
“Oh,” the latest single off the band’s debut EP Limits has the act pairing propulsive cymbal-led percussion with shimming and undulating synths, ambient electronics and anthemic hooks with Chernoff’s yearning vocals in a song that’s reminiscent of Soft Metals impressive Lenses and Roisin Murphy‘s Hairless Toys but with a quiet sense of calm and breeziness that belies the song’s yearning nature.
The recently released music video for “Oh” was shot by Garrett Curtis and features Chernoff atop a mountain range outside of Tel Aviv, Israel, which inspire the artwork and themes of the EP. As Mt. Si’s Jesse Kivel explains in press notes, “The concept was to bring to life an image, someone else’s memory of a trip they took to their homeland. That picture and its stillness has come to define Mt. Si and the patient space the group exists in. Sarah stands before a mountain, thousands and thousands of years old. The sun goes up, the sun goes down. Life, death, an existential crisis, floating in the Dead Sea, stuck in limbo, it’s all in there.”
