Harvestman - collection '2005-2010

Tracks list

 Musical missive number two (or three if you count the sidelong Fear Falls
Burning remix from a few years back) from Harvestman, the cosmic folk space raga
alter ego of Neurosis Steve Von Till.
The first Harvestman record, Lashing The Rye, was a dizzying confluence of
delicate seventies British-style folk, shimmery spaced out drift, and glacial
doomdrone sprawl, a constantly evolving, organic song suite that seemed to exist
in some glorious blissed out otherworld. On In A Dark Tongue, the glimmering
strands of traditional folk music that tethered the first record become even
more tenuous. Even at its spaciest, Harvestman seemed grounded and earthbound,
certainly with an eye to the stars, but the sounds evoking frosty mountainsides,
deep forests, blackened skies, as much as strange shapes in the heavens and
mysterious galaxies, the soundtrack to a strange terrestrial world, lit by the
contrails of mysterious bodies streaking across the heavens.
Like Lashing The Rye, In A Dark Tongue is also a weathered megalithic sonic
artifact of an unknowable culture, its symbols obscure yet magnetic, calling one
into communion with its ancient spirit. Enduring, unnerving, moving. Evoking
arcane rites, cold hazy sunrises, a god/dess visible only in the massive
wheeling patterns of nature and sound. But … Dark Tongue moves beyond its
predecessor, creating a linked, yet wholly other sonic landscape, at once more
abstract and ethereal, but also heavier and more dense, with a black hole
intensity woven into the otherwise kaleidoscopic drift, the sound constantly
shifting from woozy, bleary eyed psychedelia to loosely propulsive spacekraut
groove, fluttery delicate thrum to wild metallic squall, all doused in effects,
a warm fuzzy patina of gauzy blur and muted buzz.
Its almost as if the songs here are not so much songs as transmissions,
broadcast from a lost land, messages from the original Harvestman, sprawling
lysergic druidic rituals, wreathed in the sonic detritus of the sounds endless
journey, a message home - or a message lost and drifting endlessly through the
black expanses of time.
Recorded in his home studio deep in the forests of North Idaho, Harvestman draws
from the surrounding landscape, unfurling softly buzzing, spidery barely-there
melodies that hover in druggy expanses of Tangerine Dream warped guitar blur,
hazy and delicate yet dark, an alien psych folk rendered in shades of space
rock.
Soft whispery steel string strum gives way to ultra distorted ur-drone ragas,
the guitars super saturated and crumbling, leads that sound more like bagpipes
than guitars, the sound warped and blown out, but still warm and tranquil.
Fluttering mellotronic flutes flit dreamily around slow shifting sheets of soft
swelling chords, smeared with streaks of glitch and whir. Slowly sprawling
grooves underpinned by squalls of outer space FX and upper register feedback,
all draped over brittle layers of jagged crunch, throbbing motorik beats wrapped
in thick swaths of delay, decay and rumble, everything locked into hypnotic
lurching loops.
The vocals are sparse, in fact on … Dark Tongue the vocals creep to the
surface on only one track, the brooding expansive By Wind And Sun. Von Tills
raspy croon, equal parts weathered Tom Waitsian bellow and Neurosis-style
metallic howl, rough and raw, but still soulful and dramatic, a haunting
ritualistic chant, although as the song progresses, Von Tills voice begins to
transform and splinter into strange fragmented shapes, the various shards sent
spinning into the ether, gradually evolving into another washed out and heavily
effected layer of sound, that seems to melt into the swirling and whirling
sounds all around it.
Theres even one track, “Music of the Dark Torrent”, with what sounds
like a Koto, super spare and abstract, channeling Eastern classical music, but
layered with slivers of minor key guitar growl, the whole thing eventually
erupting into a malfunctioning electronic freakout. The whole record is a
constantly shifting sprawl of electric guitars and synthesizers, dulcimers and
ring modulators, loops and vocals, delay and distortion. Members of the Grails
and Om contribute, but here they play acolytes to Von Tills high priest,
together invoking the spirit of German Oak, Amps For Christ, Can, Six Organs Of
Admittance, Sunn 0))), Faust, Growing, Amon Duul, their sonic shadows dancing on
the looming stones assembled in the flickering firelight, beneath a sky of
diamond and obsidian.
In A Dark Tongue is a gorgeous slow burning psychedelic song cycle, smoldering
minor key epics, the sounds lustrous and organic, the guitars viscous and
virulent, the atmosphere murky and mysterious, all the while strangely sun
dappled and dreamlike. Strings soar and sing, melodic fragments are hurled
spinning into the abyss, monolithic guitar drones flow into fields of ephemeral
stasis, a sound not heavy so much as darkly effulgent.
The two longest tracks appear to be the space rock centerpieces, channeling the
extended heart-of-the-sun outros of Hawkwind and the smoked out stomp of old
Monster Magnet into classic krautrock heaviness, each a mesmerizing soundtrack
to some seemingly and perhaps ultimately doomed mission into the unknown, both
rife with relentless rhythms, roiling psych drone tumult and thick warble-y
synths, underpinning moody meandering melodies and frictive soft focus textures.
While Harvestman most definitely exists within an esteemed sonic brotherhood,
the sound transcends. Von Till proves to be a master of more than massive
pummeling heaviness, displaying a flair for the delicate, the tenebrous, the
contemplative and the hallucinatory, having created with In A Dark Tongue a
sound both portentous and elegiac, an arcane and esoteric bit of beauty, of dark
hued mystery, of folk flecked abstraction and churning leviathan heft. A
breathtaking and expansive glimpse beyond the firmament, into the soul of a
sound, where the already blurred lines between drone and doom and drift and
psych and kraut and space cease to exist at all.

Albums:
2005 Lashing The Rye FLAC
2009 In A Dark Tongue FLAC
2010 Hawkwind Triad FLAC
2010 Trinity FLAC

 2005 Lashing The Rye
01. Harvestman - Amongst The Heather
02. Harvestman - The Burning Of Tara
03. Harvestman - The Sea Maiden
04. Harvestman - Scarborough Fair
05. Harvestman - Over Nine Waves
06. Harvestman - March To Loch Barren
07. Harvestman - Melleadh
08. Harvestman - Sheep-Crook And Black Dog
09. Harvestman - Jack Orion
10. Harvestman - The Thunderer
11. Harvestman - Surround Me
12. Harvestman - Green Hills Of Tyrol / The Battles Oer

2009 In A Dark Tongue
01. Harvestman - World Ash
02. Harvestman - Karlsteine
03. Harvestman - Birch-Wood Bower
04. Harvestman - By Wind And Sun
05. Harvestman - Music Of The Dark Torrent
06. Harvestman - Eibhli Ghail Chiuin Ni Chearbhail
07. Harvestman - Headless Staves Of Poets
08. Harvestman - The Hawk Of Achill
09. Harvestman - Carved In Aspen
10. Harvestman - Light Cycle
11. Harvestman - In A Dark Tongue
12. Harvestman - Centre Of The World

2010 Hawkwind Triad
01. U.S. Christmas - Master Of The Universe
02. Harvestman - D Rider
03. Minsk - 7X7
04. Harvestman - Down Through The Night
05. Minsk - Assault And Battery / The Golden Void
06. U.S. Christmas - Psychedelic Warlords
07. Minsk - Children Of The Sun
08. U.S. Christmas - Orgone Accumulator
09. Harvestman - The Watcher
10. U.S. Christmas - You Shouldnt Do That
11. Harvestman - Magnu

2010 Trinity
01. Harvestman - Harvestmesse
02. Harvestman - Trinity
03. Harvestman - March To Loch Barren
04. Harvestman - Pure Space
05. Harvestman - Amongst The Heather
06. Harvestman - Dig
07. Harvestman - Dont Play With Water
08. Harvestman - Dead Flowers
09. Harvestman - Pure Phase
10. Harvestman - Reflections
11. Harvestman - Pure
12. Harvestman - Melleadh
13. Harvestman - Separation
14. Harvestman - The Thunderer
15. Harvestman - Sheep-Crook And Black Dog
16. Harvestman - Pure Space II

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