Music for Megaliths

Harvestman

Official Description

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.

My Thoughts

I am a huge Steve Von Till fan, and not just because I have a serious case of beard envy. I have recently been on a listening kick of his projects, spurred by his newest solo album, which I’ll post here soon. Anyway, this has reminded me just how incredibly good Music for Megaliths is.

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Ḷḷagüezos is located on the border between Lena and Quiros conceyos, and contain the eponymous mountain peak, a field where a yearly lamb roasting festival is held, and Dolmen Mata’l Casare. The dolmen is part of a much larger funerary complex stretching from Ḷḷagüezos to the neighboring peak of Cobertoria which is famous as a brutal climb on the Vuelta a España bike race.

Not far from my house is a dolmen, a megalithic tomb from the third century BCE. It happens to be one of my favorite places to walk, and near to where I am teaching my children to climb. Every time I hear “The Forest Is Our Temple”, I am reminded of the dolmen, and have to go for a visit.

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.

Released under the Harvestman moniker, this is a true Steve Von Till solo album, both in composition and execution.

This is European folk music through the Neurot lense; not quite the pagan spiritualism of a Wardruna, but not the full-on psychedelic drone of Neurosis either. Experimental Folk Music? Dark Pagan Neo-Folk? I don’t know. Let’s call it Folk Drone or Folk Ambient.

For Fans Of

• 40 Watt Sun
• Luster
• YOB