Recorded January 6th 1977, EPIPHANY consists of two improvisations - one for the very cold long dark night of the soul and the other for the frosty following morning, which dawned with a particular brilliance although the tape ran out during the recording so it features here in two parts.

1) DEATH DREAMS OF THE DARK WINTER SOUL is a journey into the freezing shadows in search of light. A few old friends had already died that Xmas (1 suicide, 2 in a car crash) and my response was the reading and re-reading old books about Ancient Egyptian funereal practice - and The Book of the Dead - in solemn contemplation of possibility, if nothing else. How such things effected my dreaming is dealt with here by way of a more programmatic narrative recorded in the wee small hours around 2.45am having woken from a particularly ghastly dream to which I was loathe to return, so I got up, make a hot cup of cocoa and went to the studio and made this music by candlelight whilst gazing up at the constellation of Osiris who seemed like the wisest man in the heavens that night, and thus, I'm sure, my soul found salvation. Let nothing ye dismay echoes in resolution, whereupon I went back to bed, and, in the words of the poet, I lay awake until dawn.

2) RESPLENDENT YE BRAZEN DAWN was recorded throughout the sunrise looking into the wooded horizon of a clear eastern sky from about 7.45am onwards. In terms of any narrative programme, this is a hymn of pure jubilance and exultation; an epiphany of praise in the face of the Divine Godless nothingness of nature of which we are both part in terms of eternal matter, and apart in terms of inclination and a mythology / religiosity born from a cognitive terror of death, which we cannot conceive of, so we've spent the last 50,000 years making stuff up to obfuscate the obvious.

Spirituality is so much more than religion; spirituality both precedes religion and transcends it; spirituality abhors sanctimonious righteousness and the somewhat conceited notion that any religion can actually be true if only so people don't actually have to think too much. Abandon thought all ye who enter here. The repository of all such subjective wonderment is the human individual; the collectivity of empirical experience much be peer reviewed and falsifiable. Only in art can the subjective soul truly transcend, but always carrying the Tradition of their craft close to their hearts, for without it there can be no ascension. All music is collective in this sense; even me, sitting there in the brazen dawn of Epiphany 1977 playing this music on my synthesizers, alone in all the known universe, do so to commune with 50,000 years of perceptive human experience which defines everything I am, everything, indeed, we all are.

3) WINTER-SLEEP continues on directly from BRAZEN DAWN, there is no break in the music, just I lost three minutes or so changing tape reels which begs a question or two about electronic music production because I'm sure no violinist or pianist could break off in their improvising and change tape reels whilst their instruments continue playing without their immediate input. Some see this as evidence of proper or improper musical practice, but everything you hear here was played into the sequencers, tape loops & delays by way of a very primal ceremonial experience of human music making which electronic instruments allow, afresh as it were. Thus the music communes with a more ancient impulse in reverence of the cosmos, the very laws and patterns of which effect the organic nature of the music, which grows organic as the ice patterns on my window or the trees on the horizon that praise of the very sunrise, even in the dark depths of winter-sleep.

Hermione Harvestman, January 2004.