HARVESTMAN: Music For Megaliths Streaming At Noisey; Album Out Next Week
Niela Von Till photo
Neurosis vocalist/guitarist Steve Von Till will release Music For Megaliths -- the anxiously-anticipated fourth album under the banner of his solo outfit, HARVESTMAN -- next week through Neurot Recordings. Advancing the album’s public release, Noisey is hosting an early listen to the exploratory album in its lush entirety.
“Neurosis singer/guitarist Steve Von Till makes music with his main band that more or less sounds like one of these boulders slowly colliding with your head, but his solo work under his own name and as the drone project HARVESTMAN provides a more placid kind of heaviness, as the new HARVESTMAN album Music For Megaliths demonstrates,” Noisey offers in part. “The album is a great example of the ever-bountiful intersection between heavy metal and experimental music, feeling like the former without ever exploding into pounding riffs and drums.”
Explore HARVESTMAN’s vast Music For Megaliths at Noisey RIGHT HERE.
As with prior HARVESTMAN and other solo releases by Steve Von Till, Music For Megaliths sees the artist handling a wide array of instruments and approaches, including vocals, electric and acoustic guitars, bass, synthesizers, hurdy gurdy, effects, and more, fully performed, recorded, and mixed at his own The Crow’s Nest in Northern Idaho. Neurosis’ Jason Roeder provides drums to the track “Levitation,” and the album’s exploratory, mood-altering, spiritual atmospheres were mastered by James Plotkin, and the album was completed with artwork by Thomas Hooper.
Neurot Recordings will release HARVESTMAN‘s Music For Megaliths on CD, LP, and digital formats next Friday, May 19th; preorders and bundles are available at the Neurot webstore HERE.
"Ruins, monuments, and ancient sites of worship are multi-sensory experiences – at once residues of the sacred, the parchment on which the passage of time has been inscribed and templates for imaginative reconstruction, spaces in which to invest and immerse, to trade your bearings for an inexhaustible state of transition.
Over the course of three albums, Steve Von Till has, under the guise of HARVESTMAN, provided the sonic analogue, casting his net for what might have been and yet still be. Both a personal meditation and a tuning fork for the most ancient and enduring of resonances, his latest album, Music For Megaliths, further expands his journeys along the sonic ley lines that run between folk, drone, psychedelia, the “kosmische” outposts of krautrock and noise: not as an act of eclecticism, but of divination, giving voice to an underlying continuity that binds them all.
Recorded over a period of several years in the dawn hours of creation, Music For Megaliths is an aggregation of moments and recordings that have allowed themselves to spell out a greater whole. Utilizing repetition, manipulation, and modulation, it’s a hallowed frequency dial that ranges across the pulse-regulated drone of “The Forest Is Our Temple,” revving up like a generator powered by arcane currents, the blissful gaze of “Ring Of Sentinels,” “Sundown”’s ominous waves of interference and “White Horse”’s rite of dissolution and regeneration, nomadic and devout. Music For Megaliths is a crossing over, whose multiple routes are testament to a singular and sensuously dilated vision." – words by Jonathan Selzer, 2017