HARVESTMAN ANNOUNCES TRIPTYCH PART THREE TO BE RELEASED VIA NEUROT RECORDINGS TO COINCIDE WITH THE HUNTER MOON ON 17TH OCTOBER SHARES "CLOUDS ARE RELATIVE (THE BUG "AMTRAK DUB MIX")"
Photo Credit: Kylee Pardick
HARVESTMAN ANNOUNCES TRIPTYCH PART THREE
TO BE RELEASED VIA NEUROT RECORDINGS TO COINCIDE WITH THE HUNTER MOON ON 17TH OCTOBER
SHARES "CLOUDS ARE RELATIVE (THE BUG "AMTRAK DUB MIX")"
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 announces the completion of the trilogy with the arrival of Triptych Part Three on 17th October via Neurot Recordings to coincide with the Hunter Moon. The album features very special guests including The Bug, Wayne Adams, Sanford Parker and Al Cisneros to name a few.
Alongside the announcement Steve leads with the track, "Clouds Are Relative (The Bug - ‘Amtrak Mix’) which is a deep and earth-rumbling Amtrak Dub Mix from the The Bug - master of monolithic sound. The music is brought to life with visuals and animations from Thomas Hooper.
About the lead track, “Clouds Are Relatives (The Bug "Amtrak Dub Mix") Steve Von Till says; "with the original version of this track (the third piece of the series with Al’s bass) I wanted to replace my original percussion tracks with something better, so I called upon Wayne Adams of Petbrick since I had recently contributed vocals to one of their songs. He came up with a really heady combination of live drums and glitchy electronic drums. It added an alternative unique dimension, I wouldn’t have come up with on my own. When it came time to dub this track, my first attempt didn’t feel right, so I reached out to Kevin Martin aka The Bug to see if he would be into giving it a go. What you hear is the end result: a deep, dark dub by a master."
WATCH THE "CLOUDS ARE RELATIVES (THE BUG "AMTRAK DUB MIX")" VISUALIZER BELOW:
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, and with some notable guest appearances including; The Bug, Douglas Leal of Deafkids, Wayne Adams of Petbrick, Dave French of Yob and Sanford Parker, this final part of the Harvestman Triptych seeks once again for a lost world, with the voice of poet Ezra Pound extolling the virtues of "gather[ing] from the air a live tradition". Elsewhere, "Herne's Oak" provides seismic bass waves that physically halt the track in its steps - giant footfalls as Herne's antlers themselves are dragged along a corridor. Another curious and mysterious piece of British folklore brought to life by Harvestman.
Triptych Part Three album cover
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.
TRIPTYCH PART THREE TRACK LISTING:
Side A
Clouds Are Relatives
Snow Spirits
Eye The Unconquered Flame
Side B
Clouds Are Relatives (The Bug - "Amtrak Dub Mix") [visualizer]
The Absolute Nature of Light
Herne's Oak
Cumha Uisdein (Lament for Hugh)
Harvestman Triptych Part Three album credits:
Steve Von Till - guitars, bass, synths, percussion, stock tank, loops, filters and mutations
Kevin Richard Martin aka The Bug - dub mix of Clouds
Dave French - stock tank percussion on Herne’s Oak, frequency consult
Al Cisneros - bass on Clouds and Bug Dub
Wayne Adams - acoustic drums, electronic beats, and processing on Clouds
John Goff - bagpipes on Cumha Uisdean
Sanford Parker - synths, processing, mixing on Herne’s Oak
Ryan Van Blokland - organ, synth, found sounds and echoplex on Eye
Dovglas Leal - bouzouki on Eye and flutes on Absolute
Narration on Eye the Unconquered Flame - “Canto LXXXI” by Ezra Pound
Recorded and Mixed at The Crow’s Nest, North Idaho by SVT
Mastered by James Plotkin
Artwork and layout by Henry Hablak
Triptych Part Three will be available as a standard weight vinyl, in one color, Cloudy Clear + Black Galaxy effect vinyl, in dub style jacket (jacket sleeve with center hole cut out so label of LP shows through) a black paper inner sleeve and poly bag.
Part One was released on the Pink Moon on 23rd April and Part Two was released on 21st July's Buck Moon.
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