Throughout 2024, and marking three full moons, Harvestman (a.k.a. Steve Von Till) will be presenting his ambitious “Triptych” project, a three-part album cycle. This album trilogy is a distillation of a unique approach that finds a continuity amongst the fragmented, treating all its myriad musical sources and reference points not as building bricks, but as tuning forks for a collective ancestral resonance, residing in that liminal space between the fundamental and the imaginary, the intrinsic and the speculative.
Today, Harvestman share “Damascus” from the upcoming “Triptych Part Two”, which will be released on July 21st, 2024, via Neurot Recordings to coincide with the Buck Moon. “Part One” was released on April 23rd on the Pink Moon, and “Part Three” will be coming on 17th October’s Hunter Moon.
Watch the “Damascus” visualizer below.
“This is ‘Damascus’”, says Steve Von Till. “Both a steel forged of different layers and a city of ancient origin. And it was the result of fortunate serendipity. The track was born of my first experiments with software utilizing loop based composition. After years of using the same linear process as analog recording, I wanted to branch out into being able to manipulate rhythms, analog phrases, delay and modulation effects to a set tempo. I invited my friend, Sanford Parker, over to coach me through my entry into that world. While this began as a tutorial of sampling, cutting and syncing percussion loops, it quickly led to him guiding me through looping my fuzzed out guitar improvisations with it. We moved on and walked away from it. It might have become a throwaway work sample had something in those beats and fuzz guitars not peaked my imagination later. After several months, out of curiosity, I opened the session and revisited the piece. I was immediately drawn into the vibe, put down a solid bass groove, synths, and found an organic sequence of the loops that gave it life and flow while still maintaining the loop based nature of the foundational tracks”.
Pre-order & pre-save “Triptych Part Two” here.
Tracklist:
1. The Hag of Beara vs. the Poet
2. The Falconer
3. Damascus
4. The of Hag of Beara vs. the Poet (Forest Dub)
5. Vapour Phase
6. Galvanized and Torn Open
7. The Unjust Incarceration
At its heart, music has always been a questioning of inheritance – a dialogue with predecessors and forebears, the forging of one’s own perspective in relation to what has come before, and for some, a plunge into the boundless realms between. For Steve Von Till, that process has always taken on an added dimension to become the most sacred of tasks. Whether through the apocalyptic uprising of Neurosis, the sonic deconstructions of their sister project, Tribes of Neurot, the invocatory intimacy of his eponymous solo albums or his instrumental psychedelic reveries in the guise of Harvestman, that dialogue has never just been with musical influences, but with what underpins them: the primordial, elemental forces now banished to the peripheries of our contemporary consciousness, yet still broadcasting a signal for all who will listen.
Drawn to the megaliths, ruins and ancient sites mapped out along the British and European mainland’s geographical and psychic landscapes, the folklore and apocrypha forever resurfacing as portals from a rational world, Triptych is a meditation forged from traces and residues, and an hallucinatory recollection of artists who have tapped into that enduring otherworldliness embedded within us all. It’s a dream diary narrating a passage through Summer Isle where Flying Saucer Attack are wafting out of a window, a distant Fairport Convention are being remixed by dub master Adrian Sherwood, celestial scanners Tangerine Dream are trying to drown out Bert Jansch and Hawkwind are playing Steeleye Span covers, all prised out of time yet bound to its singularity.
Woven together from home studio recordings that span two decades, this latest outing as Harvestman finds parallels with nature’s cycles not just in its release dates but in the repeated structure that binds each album, like an imprint refracted though three separate strata. As with April’s “Part One” and the forthcoming “Part Three”, “Part Two”, starts on a collaboration with Om bassist and long-term friend of Steve’s, Al Cisneros, with a dub take opening the B-Side. Here, the opening track, “The Hag of Beara vs The Poet”’s languid, tribal groove expands into a chromatic wash, like an endless drip of oil spreading out under a midsummer haze.
If “Triptych” is a multi- and extra-sensory experience, it extends to the remarkable glyph-style artwork of Henry Hablak, a map of correspondences from a long-forgotten ancient and advanced civilization. As with “Triptych” itself, it’s an echo from another time, an act of binding, a guide to be endlessly reinterpreted, and a signpost to the sacred that might not indicate where to look, but how.
Line-up:
Steve Von Till – Guitars, bass, synths, percussion, loops, filters and mutations.
Dave French – Drums on The Hag, stock tank percussion on Galvanized, frequency consult.
Al Cisneros – Bass on The Hag and Dub
John Goff – Bagpipes on The Unjust Incarceration
Sanford Parker – Live assistance on Damascus
Narration on The Hag of Beara – “The Lake of Innisfree” by W.B. Yeats
Album credits:
Recorded and Mixed at The Crow’s Nest, North Idaho by SVT
Mastered by James Plotkin
Artwork and layout by Henry Hablak
Weblinks:
www.vontill.org
www.facebook.com/SteveVonTill
