![Steve Von Till 2017-web [photo by Niela Von Till]](https://www.earsplitcompound.com/site/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Steve-Von-Till-2017-web-photo-by-Niela-Von-Till.jpg)
[photo by Niela Von Till]
As Neurot Recordings prepares to release the fourth full-length from HARVESTMAN – one of Neurosis vocalist/guitarist Steve Von Till’s solo ventures – the opening track from Music For Megaliths, “The Forest Is Our Temple,” has been premiered at The Quietus.
Resonating like an instrumental drone scripture with ritualistic tones, textures and tempos, layers of gorgeous acoustic strings fuse and expand with ominous, distorted amplified undercurrents and a constant hurdy-gurdy hymn. In turn, “The Forest Is Our Temple” sets the tone for Music For Megaliths as a transformative passage of music, evoking realms of welcomed immersive introspection.
Explore HARVESTMAN’s “‘The Forest Is Our Temple” at The Quietus RIGHT HERE.
As with prior HARVESTMAN and other solo releases by Steve Von Till, Music For Megaliths sees the artist handling a wide array of instruments and approaches, including vocals, electric and acoustic guitars, bass, synthesizers, hurdy gurdy, effects, and more, fully performed, recorded, and mixed at his own The Crow’s Nest studio in Northern Idaho. Neurosis’ Jason Roeder also provides drums to the album’s fifth track, “Levitation.” The seven sonically and mentally expansive tracks were mastered by James Plotkin, and the album completed with artwork by Thomas Hooper.
Neurot Recordings will release HARVESTMAN‘s Music For Megaliths on CD, LP, and digital formats May 19th; preorders and bundles are available at the Neurot webstore HERE.
Ruins, monuments, and ancient sites of worship are multi-sensory experiences – at once residues of the sacred, the parchment on which the passage of time has been inscribed and templates for imaginative reconstruction, spaces in which to invest and immerse, to trade your bearings for an inexhaustible state of transition.
Over the course of three albums, Steve Von Till has, under the guise of HARVESTMAN, provided the sonic analogue, casting his net for what might have been and yet still be. Both a personal meditation and a tuning fork for the most ancient and enduring of resonances, his latest album, Music For Megaliths, further expands his journeys along the sonic lines that run between folk, drone, psychedelia, the ‘kosmische’ outposts of krautrock and noise: not as an act of eclecticism, but of divination, giving voice to an underlying continuity that binds them all.
Recorded over a period of several years in the dawn hours of creation, Music For Megaliths is an aggregation of moments and recordings that have allowed themselves to spell out a greater whole. Utilizing repetition, manipulation, and modulation, it’s a hallowed frequency dial that ranges across the pulse-regulated drone of “The Forest Is Our Temple,” revving up like a generator powered by arcane currents, the blissful gaze of “Ring Of Sentinels,” “Sundown”‘s ominous waves of interference and “White Horse”‘s rite of dissolution and regeneration, nomadic and devout. Music For Megaliths is a crossing over, whose multiple routes are testament to a singular and sensuously dilated vision. – Jonathan Selzer, 2017
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