mountain climbing songs – a reading soundtrack to Daumal's 'mount analogue' (Tape)

Rene Daumal’s Mount Analogue (first published in 1952) is a spiritual adventure novel about a group of people who embark on an ambitious journey. In their search for a mystical mountain, they travel far out and deep within.

In his youth, the French avant-garde poet and novelist Rene Daumal studied Sanskrit as well as Japanese and later in his life, his biggest passions became mountaineering and the applied spiritualism taught by G.I. Gurdjieff. Both of these elements, he poured into his final novel, Mount Analogue. The alchemical result of these potent ingredients is a book which Daumal never managed to finish. He suddenly died from Tuberculosis in 1944, leaving behind a novel that ends mid-sentence.

To me, the whole reading experience felt like G.I. Gurdjieff hijacking a Jules Verne novel, playfully turning my world upside down, and thereby making me see things pataphysically clear.

Any reading soundtrack for this cult novel (and there have been such endeavours by marvellous musicians) must respect its mystical properties and aim to bridge Heaven and Earth. The curated music here does just that. It includes many direct references and close connections to the allegorical world of Daumal. Get the book, do the journey. Mount Analogue and its reading soundtrack take you on an extraordinary voyage to the center of the self.