This concert was organised by the same Steve who was behind my Saint Cecelia recital in Durham some six years earlier. In 1981 he was doing post-graduate research work in York and contacted me to see if I would be interested in participating in a '...low-key festival of electronic music events..' he was organising by way of an '...alternative fringe...' to the Early Music Festival. This seemed to me too unlikely an idea to pass on so I readily accepted his invitation and so it was that I found myself, one glorious summer's evening, performing to an audience of 12 in a side chapel of the medieval church of All Saints on North Street with a small PA, two Korg MS-20s and two echo units, determined as I was to 'travel light'.

It was whilst doing the customary sound-check improvs that I noticed the singular images on the medieval stained glass window (c. 1410) above me to my right, and determined therein a sequence of fifteen episodes each bearing a 'legend' which I couldn't make out but which nevertheless began to inform the music I was playing. I played three short pieces in a state of near trance, utterly beguiled by the beauty of the images in this window, photographing them for later reference as I played*. Afterwards, Steve's girlfriend Alyson was able to tell me all about it, and thus I became, as it were, in an instant fascinated by the famous Pricke of Conscience Window : fifteen scenes from a 15th century poem concerning the apocalypse, also known as Stimulus Conscientiae, by one Richard Rolle.

I determined there and and then to divide my recital into 15 pieces, each one dealing with an episode from the narrative sequence as depicted, using the images as immediate inspiration for each improvisation - arranging my 'set-up' accordingly (so I might get a better look; I actually sat in profile to the audience) and invited the lovely Alyson to introduce each miniature (I calculated that no piece should be longer than 6 minutes...) with the appropriate verse in the vernacular of the time along with a translation. Sadly nothing of Alyson's inspired recitative survives as the music was all recorded DI into the tape machine, a fact I only gleaned upon playback a few days later. I rang Steve to ask if Alyson might come up so I could record her narrative but it seems his love had strayed rather with a young Italian tourist in York for the Early Music Festival and Alyson had departed broken hearted for a family holiday in the south of France, so the the music was left as it was.

This is what you have here : 15 short improvisations recorded live using two MS-20 synthesisers each going through its own echo machine, though the way it turned out one of the MS-20s I used mostly as a drone as I immersed myself into the medievalism of the church, the window, the poem, the occasion... Yeah! Even the medieval city of York with its churches, Minster, timber-framed buildings great & small, its Shambles and Snikelways and, of course, its celebrated festival of early music which I availed myself of for a few recitals that year, the most memorable of which was a performance by the very lovely Esther Lamandier on her medieval harp, portative organ and lute. Here, such medievalism is, as ever, occult. It lingers in the modality, monophony, drones, pulses (I'd hardly call them rhythms) and parallel organum that ghosts a notion of polyphony but rarely ventures beyond an occasional tremulous and unresolved minor third in echo of some dread interval that ever tolls in my soul.

Other than that, I'll let the music speak for itself.

Hermione Harvestman.

* Note: all three of Hermione's Stimulus Conscientiae sound-check improvisations are included here as bonus tracks. Also included are Hermione's photographic details.