Seth Mountain releases new album 'Hush' in time for Christmas

American folk musician Seth Mountain introduces a song during a concert at Baekusaeng Makgeolli's bar in Ahyeon Market, Dec. 17. Korea Times photo by Jon Dunbar

Seth Mountain released his latest album, titled "Hush," on Dec. 6, bringing a moody and hushed reverence to the Christmas shopping season.

"Actually, I consider 'Hush' to be more of a regular album about or inspired by Christmas, than a proper Christmas album," the American folk musician living in Seoul told The Korea Times.

"As a folk musician, it feels a bit like a rite of passage to make a collection of personalized takes on Christmas songs, and whether you are religious or not, having a Christmas repertoire almost comes with the territory."

The seven songs represent various traditions stretching over about 1,000 years of history. All but one are traditional.

"Hush," the title track, is a mix of two poems from Amy Carmichael (1867-1951), a Christian missionary from Ireland who lived for 55 years in India, during which she focused on rescuing girls from temple prostitution.

"Hush can be a gentle and warm or caustic and cold word for 'be quiet,'" Mountain said. "It can be about silence that comes with a sense of awe and suspense, as in 'a hush fell over the crowd.' You have to hush first if you want to hear something carefully, but we are surrounded by noise. It’s a word that makes me feel warm and reminds me of motherly love, but also it signals a time to be silent and serious."

"Good King Wenceslas," probably the best-known song on the album, pulls from a legend about a 10th-century Bohemian king and uses a 13th-century melody first published in the 1500s.

"Friendly Beasts" traces back to 12th-century France. "Mary Had a Baby" and "Poor Little Jesus" are Black spirituals. "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day" comes from a 1863 poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as a lament over the American Civil War.

"I chose this batch mainly because they are what I was loving most this fall and winter," Mountain said. "Taken together, they make a very brooding, diverse bundle that I think underscores the pain, hope, longing and radical, revolutionary, anti-authoritarian, peace message that used to be central to Christmas but is now mostly drowned out by jingly commercialism."

Seth Mountain performs at Phillies in central Seoul's Haebangchon during Block Party, Oct. 9. Korea Times photo by Jon Dunbar

But Mountain said this album isn't intended to be too radically anti-consumerist.

"It is what it is," he said of the state of Christmas these days. "Anything today’s consumer culture touches it perverts and distorts. But Christmas is still a living, folk tradition, so the anarchist in me loves when mass un-culture tries to consume and appropriate the Christmas season. It’s swallowing a Trojan horse with a belly full of revolutionary messages and beautiful, profound art."

He added that this album isn't intended for Christians only, and he shared his complex relationship with God and organized religion.

"I love voluntary religion, and believe in 'God' — because I love freedom and culture and hold life to be sacred — but I have been fighting organized religion, especially organized Christianity, for most of my adult life," he said. "I still am opposed to any organized religion to the extent that it violently dictates what others can and can’t do or believe, against their will. And that includes the biggest and scariest organized religion of them all these days: 'The Cult of Technological Progress,' with its faith in certainty, its intolerance of all 'undeveloped' or still-too-human peoples and cultures, and its worship of AI, comfort, infantilization and tech-surveillance-enforced morality as the answer to all our problems."

Seth Mountain sings "Trooper's Lament" by Utah Phillips in the underground bowels of Seoul, Dec. 9. Korea Times photo by Jon Dunbar

Through the album, he explores various themes he's been grappling with in recent years. "Especially about the relationships between pain and love, silence and wisdom, hope and the reality or absence of the sacred in most of our modern techno-consumerist dystopia. I wanted to let the songs and their history speak through me, not just for those listening but because I think I really needed the encouragement of their messages and historical spirits too," he said.

"I’ve also been processing a lot about the way that mothers, children, animals and the Earth have all become, as I see it, increasingly objectified, disregarded or even hated as inconvenient or dirty in popular tech-driven development culture these days — yes, I mean leftist and progressive circles too. When I read the responses to the Itaewon tragedy and watch one town or market after another get bulldozed around me to make way for shiny new — and 'green' — high-rises, as people increasingly move their waking life and various identities out of the physical world and into the 'untact' virtual frontier, I feel more and more that the world I find myself in is barely human, and we are mostly united not in culture, but in our alienation, addiction to tech mediums and collective hatred of Earth ('Mother Nature'), non-tech tradition, mothers, children and many other 'types' that slow down efficiency and progress."

Mountain confessed that "Hush" is not his first Christmas album.

"About 15 years ago, another musician friend and I were broke and living on our buddy’s farm," he said. "We made a wild, lo-fi, somber but also silly album, mostly meant to be a sort of gift for friends and family. To my joy, it actually was pretty well-loved, but a few years later, for personal reasons, we agreed not to share it publicly anymore. Since then, I have wanted to make another Christmas album, but time and circumstances never allowed it."

Joe Kim works behind the bar during a Seth Mountain concert at Baekusaeng Makgeolli's bar in Ahyeon Market, Dec. 17. Korea Times photo by Jon Dunbar

This album was recorded, mixed and mastered by Mountain's friend Joe Kim, who has more recently opened Baekusaeng Makgeolli, which offers Kim's own traditional alcohol, as well as classes on making makgeolli. Kim runs a small bar in western Seoul's Ahyeon Market. For the past year Mountain has been hosting frequent concerts at Baekusaeng, featuring musicians from various folk and indie genres, in support of the new shop and as a way to celebrate the connections between local music, traditional markets and homebrew culture.

Visit sethmartinandthemenders.bandcamp.com to hear the songs of "Hush," or go to baekusaeng.com for more about the brewery.