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Montgomery is legendary among contemporary sound artists, partly for his tireless contributions to the so-called cassette culture in the 1980's (he was co-founder of the excellent Generations Unlimited tape label)), and partly because of his uncompromising dedication to sound art in general (he ran a sound art gallery in NYC for a time). Montgomery occasionally describes himself as a "noisician", but in fact his sonic experiments are just as likely to be ambient as noisy. He never seems to have any discernable private agenda or ulterior motive, i.e., doesn't really have anything to "say", but instead gets his kicks simply from discovering and manipulating sounds for the consideration of his audience. In this respect, he is one of the more "pure" disciples of John Cage (complete with a similarly droll sense of humor), although he is less of a theoretician than Cage, and more of a practitioner. One criticism of Cage has been that his ideas were often more interesting than the music generated from them, but Montgomery doesn't necessarily regard all sounds as equal (he is in fact a connoisseur of sound), and while the element of chance is found in his work, he seldom allows it control his process.

This very welcome double-CD retrospective of Montgomery's work contains a very short 1982 track, "Static/Hiss", from what the artist calls "The Cassette Years", but the remainder of the program runs from 1989 to 2000 and represents the mature Montgomery in a number of guises (or disguises). Montgomery's purely conceptual side (and humor) are displayed in the thirty-three second title track, which was created at a time (1992) when Montgomery was still exchanging art with other sound artists, but was himself taking a sabbatical from recording and thus did not have any aural artifacts to exchange. His solution was to take sludge from the bottom of a pond on his property, and slop it into CD jewel cases or cassette cases for exchange with his correspondents. The "sound" of the pond sample is, of course, no sound at all, and it serves as a clever variation of Cage's infamous "4:33", which requires a musician to sit at a piano and not play anything for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. Montgomery's tongue-in-cheek conceptualism is also manifested in his more recent sound work with a laminator, and his creation of a Ministry of Lamination, an official Lamination Ritual, and a published laminography, which is nothing more than an incomplete list of objects that Montgomery has run through a lamination machine. (See here)

Other dimensions of Montgomery's peculiar genius are revealed in the thirty-minute plus "Father Demo Swears", a 1989 live noise jam collaboration with David Myers, (AKA Arcane Device), in Myers' studio, and the fifty-two minute "Droneskipclickloop", an interactive piece recorded live at the Experimental Intermedia Foundation with a dancer/filmmaker, where the sound mix was projected spatially through loudspeakers surrounding the audience. Of course, the full effect of the latter piece is not captured in CD format, although the slow mutation and blending of the four separate sound sources (literally a "drone," a "skip," a "click" and a "loop") has a certain trance-inducing quality, and the regularity of the rhythms sometimes suggests a kind of austere, minimalist techno.

The basic core of Montgomery's work, and the key to his motivation, is really found in his 'Domestic Release' series, numerous excerpts from which are presented on the first of the two CDs here. Titles such as "Egnekn's Fridge", "Bath Drain", "Bird Eating" and "Shortwave Band" are in one sense self-explanatory, but in these and other pieces on the CD, Montgomery reveals an obvious delight in the sounds he is presenting, to the extent that he will not only chose certain sounds rather than others, but will manipulate them in order to "bring out [their] sonic characteristics and inherent musical qualitiesSum." And while Montgomery's use of the laminator (for example) may offer the opportunity for some philosophizing (and outrageous puns), the laminator has been chosen primarily because of the interesting sounds it produces during the lamination process, especially when it is outfitted with contact microphones. Ultimately, very little of what Montgomery does can be reduced to an intellectual exercise. Above all, he is interested in the magic and mystery of sound, and on this CD he actively invites the listener to share in his discoveries.