The Ghost Stories of M R James have provided the inspiration for a lot of my music over the years - on those dark nights in the dark months, when both image and narrative have had a particularly profound effect on me, so I seek an exorcism in music. Or is it more a matter of seance?

To be sure, I think seance is the more likely somehow. I was never given to exorcism - even in my most solemn habit and was called upon to do so, upon occasion, albeit out of bounds of the common order. Ever since childhood I have sought to better understand my own subjective fear in order to more deeply experience and commune with the objective condition of fear itself - especially the more tangible manifestations thereof - like Ghosts. And don't go telling me there are no ghosts, because if that were true, then from whence our instinctive fear of them? Much less our deep seated fascination?

We tell Love Stories in order to better understand the nature of love; and the same might be said of Ghost Stories. Yet who can define the objectivity of either love or ghosts? For both are subjective figments of individual experience, engendering, perhaps, a commonality only by dint of the effect they might have on us be it joy or terror, though I think, more terror in Love than in Ghosts!

Music is like Ghosts in that it is more than mere sound. It can effect us deeply, it can be used by way of ritual enhancement; it can be used by way of both seance and exorcism, but in itself it is a manifestation of the human need for strangeness. The musician is a ghost-writer in a literal sense; a medium for the voices of the spirits.

This is definitely the case here, although there must always be the element of narrative which is implicit in the structure and nature of a music which must tell its own story, if only as an echo or an analogue these Ghost Stories - if only by way of illustration as oppose to mere accompaniment. These are vignettes details and fragments, the inspirations of which are hinted at in the titles in the hope that the listener might know what I'm on about - or, if they don't, in the hope that they might be moved go and jolly well find out...

Hermione Harvestman.

soundcloud.com/hermione-harvestman

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A note on the Supplements: Hermione was never too happy with the idea of releasing too much of her M R James music, feeling that the 1976 session was an adequate representation of her work in this respect . As supplements to this I include a sequence of pieces she offered as complimentary : The Malice of Inanimate Objects from 1985 (which she edited into two parts during digital transfer, insisting that at nigh on 50 minutes it was too long) and The Tractate Middoth from 1981 (which occupies a dreaming pentatonic modal space she reckons came to her in a dream after reading the story; seems she recorded this in the wee small hours whilst she was still asleep). Of the rest of it she said:

'That has to be music for my ears alone for it's quality is evocative in a very particular sense but rarely any good in a purely musical sense as my mind, I fear, was very much elsewhere. It's all down to chance, dreaming trance and enchantment. This is magic music that very often terrifies me and I would hate anyone to be similarly effected by it. Ghosts are real, just as UFOs are real. How we interpret them is one thing - that much is open to objective debate - but how we experience them is quite another, for that is very much the reserve of the individual for whom such experience will always be real. Enough said!'

Indeed.

Sean Breadin / Sedayne - October 2013.