photos by Kylee Pardick
HARVESTMAN, the psych/ambient project of Neurosis’ Steve Von Till, continues unveiling its most exploratory and ambitious works to date with the three-album series titled Triptych, with each installment coordinated for release on specifically chosen full moons this year. Triptych: Part Two will be released on Von Till’s own Neurot Recordings with the rising of the Buck Moon on July 21st.
Triptych: Part Two was recorded and mixed at The Crow’s Nest in North Idaho by Steve Von Till who creates the movements with guitars, bass, synths, percussion, loops, filters, and more. The record features guest contributions from Dave French (Yob) who acts as frequency consultant and performs drums on “The Hag Of Beara vs The Poet” and stock tank percussion on “Galvanized And Torn Open,” bass from Al Cisneros (Sleep, OM) on “The Hag Of Beara vs The Poet” and the “Forest Dub” counterpart version of the song, and John Goff (Cascadia Bagpiper) who plays bagpipes on “The Unjust Incarceration.” Live assistance from Sanford Parker was implemented on “Damascus,” and the narration on “The Lake Of Innisfree” was read by W. B. Yeats. The album was mastered by James Plotkin (Khanate, KK Null, Earth) and completed with artwork and layout by Henry Hablak.
With the lead single, Von Till writes, “This is ‘Damascus.’ Both a steel forged of different layers and a city of ancient origin. And it was the result of fortunate serendipity. The track was born of my first experiments with software utilizing loop-based composition. After years of using the same linear process as analog recording, I wanted to branch out into being able to manipulate rhythms, analog phrases, delay and modulation effects to a set tempo. I invited my friend, Sanford Parker, over to coach me through my entry into that world. While this began as a tutorial of sampling, cutting and syncing percussion loops, it quickly led to him guiding me through looping my fuzzed-out guitar improvisations with it. We moved on and walked away from it. It might have become a throwaway work sample had something in those beats and fuzz guitars not peaked my imagination later. After several months, out of curiosity, I opened the session and revisited the piece. I was immediately drawn into the vibe, put down a solid bass groove, synths, and found an organic sequence of the loops that gave it life and flow while still maintaining the loop-based nature of the foundational tracks.”
Watch HARVESTMAN’s visualizer for “Damascus,” created by Steve Von Till, now at THIS LOCATION, and find the song streaming everywhere HERE.
Triptych: Part Two will be released on Transparent Ruby Red + Black Galaxy Effect vinyl as well as CD and all digital platforms on the Buck Moon, July 21st. There will be a limited edition 11” x 11” exclusive risograph art print of the original cover art by Henry Hablak. Preorders including bundles can now be placed through Neurot Recordings HERE.
Watch for additional visualizers and more to post shortly.
Triptych: Part 2 Track Listing:
1. The Hag Of Beara vs The Poet
2. The Falconer
3. Damascus
4. The Hag Of Beara vs The Poet (Forest Dub)
5. Vapour Phase
6. Galvanized And Torn Open
7. The Unjust Incarceration
At its heart, music has always been a questioning of inheritance – a dialogue with predecessors and forebears, the forging of one’s own perspective in relation to what has come before, and for some, a plunge into the boundless realms between. For Steve Von Till, that process has always taken on an added dimension to become the most sacred of tasks. Whether through the apocalyptic uprising of Neurosis, the sonic deconstructions of their sister project, Tribes Of Neurot, the invocatory intimacy of his eponymous solo albums or his instrumental psychedelic reveries in the guise of HARVESTMAN, that dialogue has never just been with musical influences, but with what underpins them: the primordial, elemental forces now banished to the peripheries of our contemporary consciousness, yet still broadcasting a signal for all who will listen.
Released periodically on three of 2024’s full moons – April 23rd’s Pink Moon, July 21st’s Buck Moon, and October 17th’s Hunter Moon – the three-album cycle, Triptych, is HARVESTMAN’s most ambitious undertaking yet. But it’s also the distillation of a unique approach that finds a continuity amongst the fragmented, treating all its myriad musical sources and reference points not as building bricks, but as tuning forks for a collective ancestral resonance, residing in that liminal space between the fundamental and the imaginary, the intrinsic and the speculative.
Drawn to the megaliths, ruins, and ancient sites mapped out along the British and European mainland’s geographical and psychic landscapes, the folklore and apocrypha forever resurfacing as portals from a rational world, Triptych is a meditation forged from traces and residues, and a hallucinatory recollection of artists who have tapped into that enduring otherworldliness embedded within us all. It’s a dream diary narrating a passage through Summer Isle where Flying Saucer Attack are wafting out of a window, a distant Fairport Convention are being remixed by dub master Adrian Sherwood, celestial scanners Tangerine Dream are trying to drown out Bert Jansch and Hawkwind are playing Steeleye Span covers, all prised out of time yet bound to its singularity.
Woven together from home studio recordings that span two decades, this latest outing as HARVESTMAN finds parallels with nature’s cycles not just in its release dates but in the repeated structure that binds each album, like an imprint refracted through three separate strata. As with April’s Part One and the forthcoming Part Three, Part Two starts on a collaboration with Om bassist and long-term friend of Steve’s, Al Cisneros, with a dub take opening the B-Side. Here, the opening track, “The Hag Of Beara Vs The Poet,” the languid, tribal groove expands into a chromatic wash, like an endless drip of oil spreading out under a midsummer haze.
A filtering of the alpha-state travelogues of its predecessor, Part Two reaches even deeper into primal yet pristine states. It journeys from the undulating drone and slow-thawing wonder of “The Falconer,” as if the Myst soundtrack were being broadcast from outer space, through the perpetual-motion of “Damascus,” dreamtime bazaar and the “Vapour Phase” seismograph frequencies measuring supernatural tremors to “The Unjust Incarceration” and its distorted bagpipes, sounding a noise-frayed lament.
If Triptych is a multi- and extra-sensory experience, it extends to the remarkable glyph-style artwork of Henry Hablak, a map of correspondences from a long-forgotten ancient and advanced civilization. As with Triptych itself, it’s an echo from another time, an act of binding, a guide to be endlessly reinterpreted, and a signpost to the sacred that might not indicate where to look, but how.
https://www.vontill.org
https://www.instagram.com/stevevontill
https://twitter.com/stevevontill
https://www.facebook.com/SteveVonTill
https://www.neurotrecordings.com
https://www.facebook.com/neurotrecordings
https://twitter.com/OfficialNeurot
https://neurotrecordings.bandcamp.com
https://www.instagram.com/neurotrecordings