Lammas Dances (1984), by Hermione Harvestman

Lammas Dances (1984)

by Hermione Harvestman

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1.	Lammas Dance #1 : The Herbal Awareness of the Solitary Hedge-Witch. 10:04	buy track
2.	Lammas Dance #2 : Return to the Plough-torn Wilderness. 10:31	buy track
3.	Lammas Dance #3 : The Collective Pattern of the Mythological Scheme. 11:42	buy track
4.	Lammas Dance #4 : The Murmuring Song of King Barleycorn 15:29	buy track

about

August carries a prophecy of impending darkness; the signs of fruitfulness and harvest as the nights draw in whilst summer dries in the hedgerows wherein berries ripen. Aged 54 that year (1984) it seemed like August in my soul as I faced the onset of my personal autumn with a more than typical dread; empathic to something fundamental I caught there in the bone-dry green shadows, I began making a sequence of music.

These I called Lammas Dances, in reference a certain mediaevalism that I might think of as being seasonal without wishing to be too obvious about any of it. This is medieval music as it lingers in the immediate margins of the human landscape; it is folk music by dint of ritual continuity, one that remains, essentially, unsayable on account of its affinity with the nature we once lived in dread of, but now live in dread of losing.

It is modal, spontaneous, organic, real-time, and infused with the herbal awareness of the solitary hedge-witch at her nature table, or her synthesisers. However so solitary, the collectivity of its expression is defined by the singularity of its experience - and vice-versa, for as in folk, then so in life; we become feral beings as we make our return to the plough-torn wilderness, if only in our dreaming.

All in all I made maybe three dozen of these dances, but these four seem to represent the essence of the thing & make for a nice wee sequence besides. In listening to them I might revisit the hedgerows that inspired them; the log piles and the secret places, the crowns of thorns and the murmuring song of King Barleycorn that tells of death and resurrection between the scythe and the harvest home that finds such eternal resonance in the collective pattern of the mythological scheme which unites us all bar none, each and every single one of us - the living, the dead, the unborn.

Hermione Harvestman, August 2007.

credits

released August 1, 2014

All music composed & performed in real time spontaneity by Hermione Harvestman. Digital transfer & editing : Hermione Harvestman. Images : Hermione Harvestman. Cover : Sabrina Eden.

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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 ... more

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