Songs from the Black Mountain Music Project is a collaboration between Mirah and Ginger Brooks Takahashi with assorted guests. The album consists of nine full-length songs, interspersed with nine shorter instrumental interludes.
The eighteen-track album was written by Mirah and Takahashi in a secluded house in the Blue Ridge Mountains in 2002, where the friends spent a month writing songs about their experience together, and recording using a Tascam four-track, and a mini-disc recorder. According to Allmusic, "the chirping birds, lonesome train whistles, and buzzing insects that pop up throughout Songs from the Black Mountain Music Project make it feel like a collection of audio postcards from Takahashi and Mirah's vacation."[2]
K Records released the album on August 19, 2003. It received a positive reception from AllMusic, who gave it 3.5/5 stars, and praised both the vocals, instrumentals, and whimsical and emotional nature of the songwriting.[2] A reviewer for Pitchfork commented that the album is "a 28-minute sound collage that nestles five or six songs among freeform instrumentals, unprocessed ideas and found sounds", and added that "I don't know what's at the root of this need to bury songs in ephemera, but it's beginning to look a lot like fear of responsibility."[1]
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