[Photo Credit: Niels Verwijk]
Throughout 2024, and marking three full moons, HARVESTMAN – the psych project of Neurosis’ Steve Von Till – will be presenting his ambitious Triptych project, a three-part album cycle. Today, HARVESTMAN shares the elegiac ‘Give Your Heart To The Hawk’, taken from Triptych: Part One, confirmed for release on April 23rd via Neurot Recordings to coincide with the Pink Moon.
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.
Triptych: Part One was recorded and mixed at The Crow’s Nest in North Idaho by Steve Von Till who creates the movements using guitars, bass, synths, percussion, percussion, loops, filters, and more. The record features guest contributions from Dave French (Yob) who performs stock tank percussion on ‘Nocturnal Field Song’ and provides frequency consultation for the album, bass from Al Cisneros (Sleep, OM) on ‘Psilosynth’ and ‘Harvest Dub’, and John Goff (Cascadia Bagpiper) who plays Northumbrian smallpipes on ‘Mare And Foal’. The album was mastered by James Plotkin (Khanate, KK Null, Earth) and completed with artwork and layout by Henry Hablak.
About the process of creating ‘Give Your Heart To The Hawk’, Von Till reveals, “This track originated with a simple electric guitar loop recorded in the living room of my A-frame house with tall ceilings. I uncovered a few simple harmonic guitar shapes that kept it evolving with subtle shifts of mood. After taking it back out to my studio, I plugged my old Hondo jazz bass into a great sounding preamp and instantly had a beautiful warm round bass tone that somehow reminded me of Geezer Butler’s tone in ‘Solitude’ from Master Of Reality. The bass parts flowed naturally. A few simple mellotron overdubs and a piano part completed the instrumental portion. After watching a documentary on poet Robinson Jeffers, I realized that this piece was waiting for this voice and these words.”
About the contemplation behind the track, he adds that he was inspired by, “The ability of poetry to reconnect our minds and hearts with our wild nature and thus heal our relationship with the infinite.”
Watch HARVESTMAN’s ‘Give Your Heart To The Hawk’ visualizer
Triptych: Part One will be released on LP, CD, and all digital platforms through Neurot Recordings on April 23rd. The vinyl is packaged in a dub style jacket with a die cut hole in the center, and the vinyl will be a Bone White + Black Galaxy Effect variant. There will be an art print available in a music bundle which includes CD, LP, and a limited edition 11”x11” exclusive risograph art print of original cover art by Henry Hablak, printed by Risolve Studio in Lancaster, Pennsylvania on sustainable Mohawk Via Vellum Bright White 80lb Cover paper using eco-friendly rice-based inks. Risolve Studio is 100% solar powered and uses low-energy printers.
Preorders for all formats are available HERE
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.
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.
HARVESTMAN’s Triptych: Part Two will be released on the Buck Moon July 21st, and Triptych: Part Three will be released on the Hunter Moon October 17th.
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