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Music for a Goblin Seance (1984)

by Hermione Harvestman

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about

The Goblin Music of Hermione Harvestman.

Q : Why Goblins?
A : Like many people, I grew up with the illustrations of Arthur Rackham; they informed my infant dreaming and my concepts of faery, offering me a vision of the goblin realm forever on the edge of a more familiar reality. It was a vision of the world my infant mind gladly seized upon to the extent that my reality became a gloss to the image, which is to say the image defined my experience of the woodland landscapes of not just my childhood, but my later life too.

Q : What is the relation between these images and your 'Goblin Music'?
A : Before I could read, the illustrations informed my visionary imagination to such an extent that when at last I could read I found the words such a terrible disappointment. So I jettisoned the text and kept the images, which would, in later life, became a source for the sonic-seances I might often think of as goblin music - wordless communions with the essence of nature as I came to understand it long ago.

Q : How do you go about the process of composition?
A : I don't compose - I improvise.

Q : Why eschew composition?
A : I don't eschew composition, it's not an either / or choice. Some people compose, others improvise. I belong to the latter category. I prefer to work in real time. That's why there are no overdubs either - everything you hear in my music happened in real time.

Q : What then is the nature of improvisation?
A : Improvisation IS nature. I deal in real time organic music. There are no preconceptions, no multi tracking as I say. Everything I do lives and breathes in real time. I'm creating a poetic and ritual reality within which to experience my visions of the fantastic. Such a reality only exists for a specific duration, though it can, if recorded, be played back. At that point it exists as a composition, if you like - albeit one that has been spontaneously composed. The recording is a documentation of that process that can be revisited in its own time and space.

Q : No preconceptions?
A : I'm aware of a vocabulary, which has a structure - a syntax, and a grammar if you like - born from an intuitive aesthetic sense by which I might determine a piece of music - rather like one might freely improvise in conversation or a gardener determines the form of their garden. Gardening is a real time organic process in which one communes with natural laws. My music is something like this. I plant seeds, I let them grow, only they grow quickly. The process of improvisation is one of nurturing and pruning. It is about letting some things grow, whilst weeding out others and keeping the bugs down. As Blake said - Where man is not, nature is barren.

Q : Is this why your music, though electronic and freely improvised, is not quite as experimental as others in this area?
A : By experimental I assume you mean avant-garde? Because - I'm not so very interested in the avant-garde. My vocabulary is essentially modal and monophonic, and as such derives from medieval music and earlier forms, even ancient and folk forms. This is its root, but the rest of it exists in terms of colour and sonority and texture and duration. I don't presuppose any of it, but I do have intuitive expectations - I might reject a piece if it isn't working for me. The process is occult, ceremonial, mediumistic and revelatory. Let me tell you - there are other realms at work here - liminal realms - quantum realms -

Q : Goblin realms?
A : Yes, very much so - into which I venture via the medium of pure Electronic Music, itself informed by a living tradition of such music. In this sense, my music is at once as Traditional as it is Experimental but I'm not creating music of the future, rather seeking a temporal tangent whereby I might access ancient & otherworld sonorities - Goblin if you like - via electronic means. The ultimate aim here is one of timelessness and equilibrium that is born of the moment.

Q : Elements you detect in Rackham perhaps?
A : Unconsciously, innocently, intuitively - or else I would remain unmoved by the memory, the layers of which accumulate to create a meaning that can only ever be subjective, however so common. This is the nature of Traditional Music - or rather Musical Tradition - because that's the nature of humanity - the subjective individual empowered by the objective cultural context in which they find themselves, however so briefly, by the accident of birth. The whole is mutable, organic, impermanent, and, at times, absolutely terrifying. Thus we might seek those things that terrified us as children as a salve against the more immediate horrors of the modern world.

Q : So, escapism basically?
A : Not so much escape as respite, by way of essential therapy, which allows for a deeper magic to take shape as one allows for other possibilities.

Q : Such as?
A : Such as - being able to get on with ones life without going insane. Otherwise - I really don't know. Its nature is darkly occult, deeply mysterious as our evolving minds inquire into the shadows by means of science and art and vision and myth and poetry -

Q : And religion?
A : No. And not politics either. Religion and politics both presuppose objective reality that is itself a myth - a functional and systematic delusion without which they fail. Religion is fixed in time and space but the mytho-poetic vision is as timeless as it is intuitive. It goes back to the primal resonances we detect in, say, early cave painting which is visionary in the same sense as what I'm talking about here, we're just a few thousand years further along the road that's all, moving from collectivity into realms of assured and cherished individuality - moving from the primal, through the traditional, into realms of the experimental and the creative, which is all about renewal and an awareness of commonality on the one hand and idiosyncrasy on the other. It is different for everyone though, simply because everyone is different - unique in fact - a uniqueness denied by both religion and politics which insist on conformity. I am just one voice.

Q : Crying in the wilderness?
A : No. I love the wilderness. In the wilderness there is peace, and quietude. There is no need to cry out because there is no need to be heard. The music is compelled by its own silences. No one need hear a thing. All is occult process and organic mystery - it grows as the trees grow, in sacred silence which is at once autonomous and anonymous and without consequence other than one human being looking out upon the nature of The Cosmos and asking themselves - What The Fuck?

(The Goblin Music of Hermione Harvestman, an interview by Clarissa Caruthers, was published in Gone to Seed, Autumn 1984. Reproduced here with thanks to the author)

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released November 22, 2014

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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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