My pop sensitivities were pricked long ago, in my subconscious cultural dreaming, even before I was ever aware of such things, like in 1956 with Louis and Bebe Barron's all-electronic score for Forbidden Planet, or in 1963 with Delia Derbyshire's Dr Who theme, and the ongoing work of a certain Daphne Oram which ghosted my occult initiation into such matters as more than mere inspiration as I addressed my own craft to more feral concerns and 'serious music'. But the tide was ever rising until by 1976 it seemed it was everywhere, and this needed an occasional redressing if only to maintain my sanity. Hence CRAFT : WORK, I suppose, which was recorded that October as I battened down the hatches both actual and proverbial and effected a ceremonial synthesis in terms of my typical bucolia, however so informed by what was reaching my ears from elsewhere, all of which was a) Very Splendid Indeed but b) Nothing Really To Do With Me.

Its nature was doubly obscure with respect of my solitude at that time; I was living in ascetic retreat from the world with precious little human contact of any kind. My domestic company consisted of seven cats and I passed my time in the deviations of my craft - field-combing and gathering by day, music and macrame by night - thus establishing a routine of interwoven prayerfulness, dimly aware that the music was calling out into the vernacular realms from a solitary pastoral hell very much of my devising, but real enough, as these things are. In another age I dare say I would have been burned as a witch, but my local reputation as 'cunning woman' at least assured me some human company, even it was just the occasional local girl wanting advice on contraception. Occasionally they stayed for a day or so, happy to let me play mother; happy be the child I never had; happy to a child full stop, enjoying brief respite from the peer-pressure of village life.

1976 seemed the last of the truly innocent years I suppose, for all sorts of reasons; and this music is a testimony to that innocence. Handcrafted folksy electronica addressing itself to the slow weave of country life and the seasons whilst picking up on the News from Nowhere, as one does, as one must.

The pictures I took one sunny October morning of one of my macrame creations from the night before - seashells and a bone - hanging in my yard, or from the overhanging holly bush as nature has its way, as nature will, and time stands still and holds us a moment in silent awe as we glimpse the divine in our own weaving presence, which is, I suppose, the way of all art.

Hermione Harvestman.