The Mountain Holds a Dagger

Creating ecstatic, alien fusions of industrial, UK bassline and Afro-Portuguese dance music, 2rana 3crana - the project of Gum Takes Tooth's Jussi Brightmore - announces their new EPThe Mountain Holds A Dagger

for release November 28thon Infinite Machine. Shaped by a period of personal tragedy and physical incapacitation, it is a strange, vital celebration of life and movement.

The record's title comes from another story of being pushed to the brink. Prior to achieving lasting fame as an occultist writer, in 1902 the mountaineer Aleister Crowley was embarking on the first expedition up K2. One of his party fell ill, according to Richard Kaczynski's 2002 biographyPerdurabo,and feverishly told Crowley "there are three of me: two are well, but the third is a mountain, which holds a dagger." This passage chimed with Brightmore, whose sense of self had undergone its own strange unravelling.

After years making crushing, airless EBM with the acclaimed London band Gum Takes Tooth, Brightmore set out for a "fresh start" between the lockdowns – moving to an area just outside Lisbon with his young family. Soon after, however, he experienced a crippling abdominal injury which left him bedridden. "Moving so slowly opened the door to this really intense self-enquiry," he says. Having had his mobility ripped away, he resolved to never take it for granted again: to celebrate movement, by focusing his creative efforts on dance music. He would combine this with a costumed drag persona, reminiscent of Johannes J. Jaruraak's work as Hungry. "To dress up, to give rise to something within oneself," Brightmore claims, is another "celebration of living."

Regaining his mobility, he became a fixture of Portugal's strange underground club-nights. Having already drawn influence from the area sonically, his industrial leanings melding with locally-popular Afro-Portuguese rhythms like batida, these gigs gave his love of dance music a political dimension. Many of these nights featured no program, trusting artists to arrange themselves in running orders, and involved clubgoers jumping in to help out with the bar or cleanup: a utopian social vision, where "everyone takes care of each other."

Just as the project was taking off, in Autumn 2023 Brightmore's brother was diagnosed with cancer, and passed away. "It took up all of my mind and heart," Brightmore says. "Making dance music wasn't fitting with my state of mind," and he considered abandoning it altogether.

A year later, Brightmore was attending Supernormal Festival with his family, and Repeater Radio invited him to play some tracks on their sound system. Using the shelved, work-in-progress 2rana 3crana tracks on his USB to perform an impromptu DJ set, Brightmore magnetised the crowd. "People kept on coming and coming – dancing, having fun." He even left the decks himself to dance with his young daughter. The Quietus' co-founder John Doran was so excited by the set, he invited Brightmore to release an exclusive EP for the website's subscribers, following his debut EPVerniz Ripplein January of this year. "It charged the whole thing up again," Brightmore smiles.

Two of the songs onThe Mountain Holds A Daggerwere performed, in an early state, at that course- changing set. One is'Crash Era', bouncing between gelatinous, interdimensional takes on batida, grime and UK garage. The other is the hedonistic title-track'The Mountain Holds A Dagger': a stormy, techno- adjacent stomper. New creation'Cutting Beam'is the most unruly of the trio – a writhing, slippery industrial dance track, centred on sliding frequency sounds Brightmore likens to "a drill in the forehead."

Not belonging to either the plasticky fairgrounds of hyperpop or industrial wastelands of EBM,The Mountain Holds A Daggeris weirdly evocative of the natural world. Brightmore notes his use of "glistening, semi- organic, digital animal sounds," like the low cyborg howls on 'Crash Era', but then there's the noise washes on the title-track – eerily reminiscent of crashing waves.

As much asThe Mountain Holds A Daggerrepresents a deeply original kind of dance music, however, it remains rooted in the art form's basic principles: "the crucial value that I place on underground club culture as a social experience," Brightmore says. Having navigated losing his ability to dance, then his motivation for making dance music in the midst of terrible grief, his love for this art-form now seems all-consuming. "Being together, moving to the same music in the same place," he says, "is more important than ever."