Raga of the Dreaming May came about one rainy afternoon at May's end 1977 whilst developing a reel of film from earlier in the month. Outside, the blossoms were all but gone, rain lashed and faded away in deep and vivid greens. In the darkroom, however, they blossomed in wistful freshness, holy fragrant to the cause of sweet becoming in which I dared to dream of a Raga in a philosophical mode of musical creativity I call Tertius Auris.

I came up with the idea of the Tertius Auris after chancing upon the Third Ear Band at a gig in Durham University in June 1971. After the performance I went back to a party in which their LPs were played very loudly on a huge hi-fi and I found myself further beguiled by the resonances of free-form improvisation, modal folk, global & medieval references all woven around the hypnotic shamanic pulsing drum rhythms that formed the core their visionary music.

Such was the impression I took away with me and over the following weeks began experimenting with a music I came to think of as Tertius Auris in honour of the Third Ear Band's seminal inspiration.

Unlike them however, I was only once person. Unlike them I was totally electronic. So I set about ways of realising simple drum parts using tape loops and synchronising them to sequenced drones, over which I was free to improvise to my hearts content. In these improvisations I was more mindful than usual of Indian raga, Scottish piobaireachd, Persian radif and other essentially improvised monophonic modality, both high and low, which informed the Tertius Auris as a visionary musical process analogous of other organic universal structures up to, and including, sonata form.

All derive from the same biological subroutines that determine everything from basic linguistic structure to folk tale morphology, and, ultimately, the pattern of the very cosmos, from the spiralling of galaxies to the minute intimacies of May blossom. And deeper, if we had but the means to delve into realms of the atomic and sub-atomic that determine everything in perfect cosmic unity.

And so I sat at my synthesizer, which I had set up in the bay window of my cottage. I'd pinned a few prints of the may blossom photographs on the frames, looking between these and the deep greens of the garden as the rain fell ever heavier whilst dreaming in a deeper green drone-time of blue skies and sunshine; keeping the balance in my soul where life rages in this quiet corner of universal space time where nothing will ever be the same again.

As so often happened, the tape ran out after 17 minutes, so that became Part One, which necessitated another 17 minutes for Part Two, just to keep things balanced, although it came out exactly a minute longer because I wasn't counting. It uses the same drone sequence & the same drum loop made from sounds recorded several years earlier when my friend Emily, who has a lot of drums from all over the world, was happy to play them for me so I might 'sample' them, though back in 1971 I'm sure sampling wasn't the term I used. I saw it more a matter of stealing their souls, assuming that drums have souls, which, I suppose, is something that lurks in the essentially shamanic nature of this music.

So. Once upon a time, and long, long, long ago...

Hermione Harvestman.