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33​-​track 150​-​minute double album : SHARDS & FRAGMENTS (Music for the London Museums, 1985)

by Hermione Harvestman

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about

I spent a lot of time visiting London in the 1980s. The main reason being that I was beginning to feel old and isolated, craving culture and a measure of human contact, though mostly I suppose the experience sent me fleeing back home, my curiosity assuaged and glad of the silences and the open starry skies.

I admit that it was seldom so straightforward, and I found myself torn between the two. In this way I settled on a regime whereby I'd spend three days of every month in London, thus giving myself something to look forward to and providing an inspiration of sorts for the sort of music featured here, which comes out of my hated of crowds, especially those in the museums.

It was to that end that I invested in a Sony Walkman and composed several C90 cassette's-worth of Personal Museum Soundtrack Music to listen to as I wandered the galleries enchanted by the ancientness of the shards and fragments on display. I doubt there was anything specific I had in mind for each piece, though I broke my heart entirely over the various mummified & skeletal human remains on display which gave rise to a sequence of funereal anthems for 'our' ancestral dead.

For the most part, it was more by way of creating an intuitively ancient ambience which might be evoked so readily by a handful of post-cards from the gift-shop of the British Museum and the V&A pinned to the wall of my rural studio so I might then extemporise such music in smiling anticipation of listening to it on my headphones as I wander enchanted therein.

This is two albums linked by a common concept inspired by the antiquities that touched my soul in some way, manifesting as miniatures which seems appropriate to the focus of both music and artefact alike. In the organic realm of real-time freely improvised electronics, Sun Ra's words ring true : 'Nature never repeats itself, why should I repeat myself?' The fact is, we never can repeat ourselves - not really. All art & composition is a struggle against the chaotic entropy of nature. But I choose not to struggle. That is the nature of improvisation - it comes, it goes, and it only stays if we bother to record it. But even then it's more a matter of taxidermy or some other sort of preservation which feels entirely fitting in the context of music I made specifically to listen to whilst wandering around museums.

Hermione Harvestman.

PS : I am not a pioneer of electronic music - on the contrary, I'm a total traditionalist. I'm a feral folk musician who just happens to twiddle knobs on synthesizers rather than sing songs about drunken pigs and riddling demons. I am a medievalist who communes with a distant yesterday by immersing herself in the technology of today.

credits

released August 23, 2013

All music composed & performed by Hermione Harvestman 1985. Editing & digital transfer by Hermione Harvestman & Sean Breadin 2006.

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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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