Harvestman - Triptych Part Two
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.
Harvestman - Triptych Part One
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.
A Deep Voiceless Wilderness
“This is how I originally heard this piece of music. Without the voice as an anchor or earthbound narrative, these pieces have a broader wingspan. They become something else entirely and unfold in a more expansive way. The depth of the synths, juxtaposed with the strings and French horn, have space to develop and allow the listener to imagine their own story.” — Steve Von Till
Harvestman 23 Untitled Poems Spoken Word Album
For 2021, Von Till has reimagined Harvestman in a new format, delivering an intimate and captivating reading of the collection with sound enhancements. “Being a constant sound-seeker, I thought it would be more interesting to have some textures and treatments to break up the intimate voice recordings,”
No Wilderness Deep Enough
Von Till’s fifth solo album is a swirling and iridescent blend of ambient, neo-classical, and gothic Americana that swan-dives into the darkness of modern life, with the resulting emergence a sonic document of rural psychedelia that transcends the physical world—towards a greater spiritual acceptance that connects naturalism, spiritualism, and the corporeal form.
A Life Unto Itself
The title doesn't quite say it all, but it says some of it: A Life Unto Itself is as much the name of Steve Von Till's fourth solo album as it is the perfect description for the 25-plus years he's spent forging, with his brothers, the incomparable musical force that is Neurosis—not to mention the numerous sonic tapestries he's woven with Tribes Of Neurot and under his alter ego Harvestman. You can hear that rich musical history, and all the life experience that goes with it, on his new solo album A Life Unto Itself – and this album goes deeper still.
As the Crow Flies
As the Crow Flies is the bittersweet solo debut from Neurosis guitarist/singer, and Tribes of Neurot sound artist Steve Von Till. Reveling in an eminently beautiful and sad place, these dark and minimal acoustic songs extend upon the trance states induced by his other projects. Von Till now allows us a deeply personal and poetic insight into his own particular demonology of desire and dread.
A Grave is a Grim Horse
Perhaps the history of the song is innate within us. At least that's what we might glean from Steve Von Till's third Neurot Recordings solo outing A Grave Is A Grim Horse. Intertwined with interpretations of songs by Nick Drake, Townes Van Zant, Mickey Newberry and Lyle Lovett, Von Till's powerful yet subtly graceful originals merge with a lexicon that manifests as something beyond signature, something beyond the concept of persona that popular culture has repeatedly sold us over the past 50 years.
If I Should Fall to the Field
If I Should Fall to the Field is filled with urgent melodies and majestic crescendos of chiming guitars, cymbal crashes and distant vocal harmonies that lull behind Von Till's thick, weathered voice. Throughout, the song-writer's somber vocals are recorded with such breathy intensity it sounds as though each lyric were a whisper for only one listener to hear. He has clearly found the same powerful subtlety harnessed by Michael Gira, Mark Lanegan and Jeffrey Lee Pierce.
Music for Megaliths
“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 ley 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.” – words by Jonathan Selzer, 2017
Trinity
Trinity is a limited edition issue of the soundtrack to critically acclaimed Italian Director Alex Infascelli's film h2Odio (English title Hate 2 O). Under the moniker of his pysch guitar based project Harvestman, Steve Von Till of Neurosis creates an equally lush and beautiful, yet dark and disturbing backdrop to this psychological thriller. Juxtaposing the beautiful remote island landscape with the tormented psyche and tension of the plot, this soundtrack creates its own epic imagery in the mind of the listener. The sounds vary from lush, hopeful, and beautiful guitar based landscapes to sinister visions of psychic turmoil.
Beautifully packaged in black Arigato Pak by Stumptown Printers of Portland, OR. Limited to 1000 copies.
In a Dark Tongue
The first Harvestman record, A Grave Is A Grim Horse, was a dizzying confluence of delicate seventies British style folk, shimmery spaced out drift, and glacial doomdrone sprawl, a constantly evolving, organic song suite that seemed to exist in some glorious blissed out druggy spacefolk otherworld. On In A Dark Tongue, the glimmering strands of traditional folk music that had tethered the first record become even more tenuous.
