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Ascension of the Birch Bride (1977)

by Hermione Harvestman

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about



I think, perhaps, I’d rather say nothing whatsoever about this music, except that it was, as ever, 100% improvised in real-time with no recourse to editing or over-dubbing; that its processes are both modal and organic, and that for each piece I used four independent tape loops onto which the various elements were mixed as part of the overall performance - to wit : one small monophonic analogue synthesiser with sequencer, three echo units and an EHX Small Stone phaser pedal.

I guess this involves somehow splitting the brain between the purely technical and the wantonly self-indulgent in acknowledgement that what one is doing on a material level and what one is hearing on a spiritual one are two completely different things - or else the consequence of happily wandering the hinterland that lies between the two.

Add to that having to simultaneously engineer the actual recording process (at least keeping an eye on the VU meters) whilst investing emotionally in the music by way of artistic experience, then it’s hardly the wonder that 20 minutes can pass in a blink of a proverbial eye (or else the opening of a corporeal ear) and that one emerges at the end of it all feeling somewhat frazzled, to say the least.

I have never myself had a child, but I have attended plenty of births wherein the temporality of creative process is similarly enhanced. I think of that as birth-time, or in this case, birch-time.

The Birch Bride is a tree that grows in my garden. I have a notion that trees are multi dimensional beings on account of their very nature which I somehow feed off in this music. At once rooted, it aspires to touch into the very heavens and the eternity from which it derived and with which, like ourselves, it is a part.

Unlike ourselves, however, trees feel no need to be anything anything else other than what they are. They grow in the moment in which they live and die, they do not attend church nor yet do they believe in God much less feel the need to inflict such fictions onto others on the pain of death or damnation. In winter time they sleep under the transfiguring snow; in springtime their buds burst and their catkins pollinate; in summer they reach for the sun and rejoice in the transfigurations of photosynthesis*; in autumn they shed their leaves in resplendence, numinous in and of their empirical glory.

Thus I might pause and take stock of this, to somehow learn a lesson or else use it as a means for creative endeavour in the realisation of a music which is simply what it is, nothing more, nor indeed anything less. It starts with nothing, it ends with nothing and seeks to be nothing along the merry way of each duration. It is at once organic process and a celebration of same; and in being entirely artificial** it reveres the absolute material majesty cosmic divine as all there is, was, or ever will be.

Otherwise, I made this music as an answer to a commission for a double LP - one track on each of the four sides. Sadly, this never happened; maybe one day it will?

Hermione Harvestman, December 24th 1999.

* The overall heading I give such music is Photosynthesis; be ye therefore as leaves and rejoice unto the sun.

** Whilst Keith Jarrett might scoff that ‘synthesiser for the moon is more progress filibustering’, all material artifice nevertheless derives from cosmic reality & the materials thereof - be it the plastics and metals that comprise the instruments or else the electricity that powers them.

Removed from nature in our spiritual quests, we humans find harmony with it through our technological ones, however so ill-advised at times. Mostly, however I’d say it's all for the best, certainly on an individual level where there’s only so much one person can do or hold themselves accountable without slipping into realms of over-weening superiority and self-righteousness.

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released December 24, 2020

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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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