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Flow and Eddy (1990)

by Hermione Harvestman

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about

This music happened over a weekend in the November of 1990 when having come off my bicycle and broke my right arm I was reduced to doing things left-handed.

Trying to be of good cheer meant going over some photographs that had lately come back to me from my holiday on the north Norfolk coast near Wells-next-the-Sea the previous May : lovely sunny vistas of spring and renewal whilst all around me autumn was tearing it all up again which was rather more than the soul could bear as a cack-handed sinister south-paw with her arm in a sling. I was 60, menopausal, brittle and ancient; I was a sere and yellow leaf dreaming of being a freshly bursting spring bud dancing the Texas Tommy Wiggle.

Keeping things brief I set about each piece with the minimum of fuss. Each is realised in real time (no overdubbing, no edits) using various drones & loops by way of layering perspectives, as in a landscape. Each one an organic flow replete with eddies and whorls, catching and refracting the surrounding light as of gulls wheeling to snatch my chips at Wells-next-the-Sea or the ebb tide that reveals the mud flats in the picturesque harbour at Burnham Overy Straith. Each is a contemplation, a paean; each is an organic process in itself, a communion with the cosmic flow of which we are all uniquely manifest however so collective our vested self-interests.

Even in music - yeah, even in THIS music, which in being somehow experimental in the purest sense (i.e. 100% improvised in real-time using electronic means, noise & randomness as its agency) is nevertheless as Traditional* as any other.

Each piece becomes a contemplation on impermanence. It begins, it flows, it eddies, it ends. As do we all. If we exist at all, we do so in moments of transience because everything is flux and flow. Everything is moving. Everything in nature is changing, growing, unfurling and there is only now for all eternity, or for however long it lasts, supposing even eternity has a beginning and an end.

No past, no future, we're never the same from one such moment of transience to the next. Our very beings exists in moments of being and becoming, coming and going, all of us just passing through and maybe not for the first time either, nor yet for the last, which is but one of a number of impossibilities passed off as truth in the name of religion.

Even as a nun I was a pragmatist though, an empiricist and an Atheist in the trust sense**. Part of that is to understand that we humans have a deep and obvious need to believe in such things. Hence the proliferation of gods and religions none of which are actually true but are nevertheless born from the same deep and ancient yearning we all share to a greater or lesser extent. Born from our innate spirituality, which comes first, before any religion was ever dreamed of, it is religion that gives us the notion that we are entitled to the eternal.

The primal state of being - before we entitled ourselves in the creation of gods and so bypassed the essence of simply being - is to simply be alive in the here and now.

Simply. Be. Here. Now.

Hence : Flow and Eddy.

Enough! Too much!

Hermione Harvestman.

* The Tradition begins some 100,000 years ago, when Modern Humans emerged with laughter, language, art & music. Anciently unbroken, there will be music as long as there are Modern Humans on the planet to make it afresh with each new birth.

** The truest sense of Atheism isn't so much a matter of not believing in God but being clear as to what manner of God we're not prepared to believe in, i.e. the God (& gods) of religion. I become Agnostic in my contemplation of the sci-fi creation myths of Nigel Kneale (Quatermass and the Pit) and Arthur C. Clarke (2001 : A Space Odyssey) wherein the gods of creation are all too natural, just further along the evolutionary scale than we are, hence Clarke's Third Law : any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

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released December 31, 2021

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Hermione Harvestman UK

'I feel like Wainwright - we are both hermetic ramblers. He made his books for when he was no longer capable of rambling his beloved fells, and I made my music for when I'm no longer able to ramble the by-ways of Albion - but only to listen, and think "Was that really me? That solitary figure who stood in a landscape dreaming of ages past in dread fear of the future."

Hermione Harvestman
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