Hermione Harvestman, Tertius Auris, Peter Burne-Jones, The Third Ear Band, Sedayne...

Hermione Harvestman, a.k.a. Sedayne, writes us a new vionary excursion into the esoteric Third Ear Band's soundscape...
  

"Hermione Harvestman is my hauntological  take on the electro-shamanic zeitgiest  that has been my life's dream since my brain first sang to Delia Derbyshire & Daphne Oram in my early childhood, though their names I wouldn't know until much, much later...  

Here, in Hermione's own dreaming, an encounter with the Third Ear Band in Durham in June 1971 plants a few seeds that become the Tertius Auris.

In reality, I heard a story once from Peter Burne-Jones of how he was at that gig but didn't like it so much because they were more like a normal rock band, complete with drumkit, so they all went back to his place and listened to "Alchemy" on his super hi-fi (Peter would go on to invent the PBJ tone arm!). 

In my dreaming Hermione sees the beauty in both....".

Listen to Sedayne/Hermione's two wonderful 

thirdearband-ish's ragas here

no©2014 Luca Ferrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)

"Alchemy", "the consummate essence of the 60s Zeitgeist". A short vision by Sean Breadin, a.k.a. Sedayne.

Folk shaman Sean Breadin, a.k.a. Sedayne, has  just sent me these few lines about "Alchemy", one of the our favourite albums ever...

"Hi Luca - Just wrote this on Sid Smith's call of for great 1969 albums on Facebook & got a few likes... Sometimes you get a clear vision of just what it is about the music you love that appeals to you so much, so here it is: 

Third Ear Band - Alchemy. 

Which somehow manages to catalyse an archetypal sound-magic by being utterly free of technological interference. It's one of those rare occasions when the mystical hype of the sleeve note (...a reflection of the universe as magic play illusion...dualities are discarded in favour of the Tao...each piece is as alike or unalike as trees, grass or crickets...) is matched / transcended utterly by the astonishing reality of the music, which lives and breathes in its timeless vinyl eternity. The elements are simple enough - Glen Sweeney pounding his shamanic bongo over which Paul Minns' oboe & Richard Coff's violin ascend as atonal modal larks along the ley lines that connect stone circles to the pyramids whilst Mel Davis' cello roots it all to the gnomic dark below. This LP is the consummate essence of the 60s Zeitgeist - a soundtrack to Michel's flying saucer vision of Ancient Albion that remains every bit as inspirational as "Bitches Brew". Witches Brew maybe?".

Any comments to this would be  greatly appreciated!

no©2014 Luca Ferrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)  

The core of it. Some personal autosuggestions of postfolk-shaman Sedayne about the Third Ear Band.

An artist is an artist - an artist, an artist, an artist - as George Sand would tell today about Sedayne (Sean Breadin), the English postfolk shaman devoted to strong fieldworks on traditional soundscapes.

These are some inspired suggestions by him to get us ready for the Autumn-Winter season...

"A visitor to my house recently looked through my CD shelf and was surprised to see more than the three old Third Ear Band albums they were aware of. They hadn't known of the Hydrogen Jukebox, nor yet the re-union era Italian albums, much less Abelard and Heloise and The Magus; they hadn't known of all the rarities that have emerged in recent years from The National Balkan Ensemble to the session material (ancient & modern) or the German DVD and the French TV footage.

Time was, I was well content with my three Third Ear Band albums - old habits die hard: on cold Autumn mornings I always play Macbeth. Alchemy is special beyond measure - I only play it when it snows! Elements I play on stormy elemental evenings remembering the friends I never saw again after I first played it to them - Gong they could cope with, but the Third Ear Band was going too far.

These days - God knows. I often find myself playing Brainwaves when I'm cooking. It's nothing special in the way the other albums are, but it is Glen - the heart and soul of the Tertius Auris; Shaman, Trickster and catalyst for some of the finest music I've ever heard. Hell, even The Magus has its moments of utter transcendence, and Druid Grocking on the German footage is one of the most astonishing things I've heard in my entire life. 

The core remains the pure Alchemy of the four elementals though, as revealed on the French film: Richard is Fire - he burns & blazes, relentless, hungrily consuming the silences whilst lighting the very dark & warming the bitter cold; Paul is Air - he blows as the rushing wind that moves the waves & sets the very trees a dancing; Glen is the Earth - the stone circle dragon-alignments that set pulse and pattern to both enrich and 

 reveal the very chaos of nature; and Ursula is Water - she flows, she sparkles and she thunders in the depths of the unfathomable abyss. At least that's how I see it anyway.

Oh, and I forgot to mention New Forecasts, featuring Ursula on Sybilic Violin by way of pure Revelation, as the best of it remains, eternally...".

Follow Sedayne at:

http://ploughmyth.blogspot.com/ 
http://soundcloud.com/rapunzel-and-sedayne
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Rapunzel-and-Sedayne/217002238319466

                                                        Sedayne - "Mr. Fox's Equinox" (March 2012)
no©2012 Luca Ferrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first) 

A short essay on the TEB's music by 'folkorganic' musician Sedayne

Here's a short essay published on TEB's fan Facebook page (read it at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Third-Ear-Band/156660855584) written in March 2012 by folkorganic English musician (and old TEB fan) Sedayne.

Stone circles in Swinside, Cumbria (England)

"The Third Ear Band define the essense of Folk Music in an Indo-European sense; they seem to embody A L Loyd's notions of a Dreamtime of migrations of melismatic modal hunter-gatherers following the retreating ice-sheets across ancient continents before borders had ever been dreamed of.

These ancient cultures made Very Big Monuments like Thornborough, Avebury and Stonehenge that were Bigger than Themselves and, by implication and perspective, Bigger than Nature too. These monuments and stone circles sought order in the chaos of the natural world, they created perfect flat horizons, they looked for patterns in the sun, moon and stars; they perceived in the simplicity of arcs, circles, lines and elipses an order which was entirely Unnatural and therefore Good.

Scroll on 50,000 years and many of us feel that we've taken it too far; the ordered blandness of the human world is utterly artificial and entirely uninspiring, so we might seek after a more Natural music in which Organic Process is integral, be it from one rendering of a Folk Song to the next, or simply by Improvising without pre-conception. The music is still Traditional, just that the potentials are entirely unpredictable in terms of a Chaos which some of us now perceive as A Very Good Thing.

The music of the Third Ear Band is like this: organic, fluid, never the same thing twice, living and breathing in the liminal realm between Concept and Corporeality; each rendering 'as alike or as unalike as trees, grass or crickets' with the essence of the thing in the being there, the ceremonial excellence of pure experience".

 ©2012Sedayne/Facebook

no©2012 Luca Ferrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first) 

"Four Horses" to "Lark Rise".

As Third Ear Band music is still living in some great new music composed and played today... 

Here we have a new composition by Sedayne inspired by Dave Tomlin's "Lark Rise" (inspired by Thompson's book "Lark Rise to Candleford"...).

Listen to it  and enjoy at: http://soundcloud.com/sedayne-fiddlesangs/four-horses-to-lark-rise

His author says: ""Four Horses" comes from the singing of Hocky Feltwell and can be heard on "The Voice of the People" volume 5, though I think something of John Kirkpatrick's version may have crept in there too somewhere along the way. It too deals with a lost idyll, lost to us anyway, a vignette of vanished country life that chimes nicely (I think) in with Dave Tomlin's horse-drawn adventures in the heady days of the sixties, which is to say innocently, peaceably, and an era as much vanished as that they were seeking along the vestigial byways of forgotton Albion, long since ruined along with so much of our fast vanishing rural heritage - the true soul of England's dreaming".

THE LYRICS:

"There was a young fellow who first drove a team

And he took great delight boys in keeping them clean
And in keeping them clean, boys, he showed a good colour
And he gained a good character by being a good fellow

And his first horse was a white horse as white as any milk
His second horse was a black horse her coat shone like silk
The middle horse was a bay horse, bay spot on her brow
And his shaft horse was a chestnut her coat shone like gold

And he drove them along til he came to the fair
He watered them here and he baited them there
He paid up his reckoning just like a good man
And they said here comes a team of horses so great and so grand

And he drove them along til they came to the pond
And he watered them here and he drove them along
His feet being weary, his legs being tired,
And his waggon being empty he jumped up to ride

And he drove them all home and unharnessed them all
There was Captain, there was Short, boys, there was Boxer and Ball.
He spread out their bedding and laid them to rest
And he always kept thinking straight home is the best!" 

Thanks Sedayne for your great music, deeply inscribed in the purest tradition of the Third Ear Band! 

As Glen and Dave would say: "Nice one!".

no©2012 Luca Ferrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)

"Shaman in the snow". A gift for Xmas and the Winter Solstice by Sedayne.

Dear TEB obsessive addicts, 
here we are with a very exclusive gift related to the Thirds from our friend (and great musician!) Sean Breadin, a.k.a. Sedayne.

A dream on friendship, shamanic poetry, Glen Sweeney and the snow (with a wonderful TEB medieval Xmas song at the end).

Sedayne, the Green Man.

SHAMAN IN THE SNOW

"Hi Luca,

a while back I sent you a mock up my friend Raymond Greenoaken did of the inside sleeve of "Alchemy" featuring himself as all the members.  He's recently been in hospital having a heart bypass, which filtered into my dreams in the guise of Glen Sweeney as a guiding Shaman.  Here's what I wrote about it:

Raymond was in my dream last night - we were up on the top of Glastonbury Tor with Rob Ayling watching Glen Sweeney dancing, chanting & storytelling in the snow with a huge Shaman's drum decorated with tiny animated figures which on closer inspection turned out to be Grayson Perry's interpretations of characters from the Beano & The Broons intermingled with graffiti from St Alban's cathedral - including the famous Hare, which was being chased by Baby Face Finlayson who in turn was being chased by PC Murdoch. Raymond asked Glen if he could play his whistle with his drumming, but Glen said (in those enigmatic tones so familiar to avid collectors of Third Ear Band bootlegs) 'You're not ready for that yet' before vanishing away into the blizzarding squall... All the while I just sat there, in trembling awe, my fingers numb, and my fiddle-faddle locked away in its case. On the way back down we stopped to take photographs of the hawthorns on which the blossoms grew through the snow in time-lapse unfolding before our very eyes...

Sedayne - Southwell

Two things worth mentioning here. One is a wee book I have somewhere of Christmas Games, Customs & Stories (Jack Spriggans and the Magic Bean indeed) which promises an abundance of fiddle-faddle stuff... & talks of maggots in a mad-man's brain. The other is the last time Raymond and I were at the top of Glastonbury Tor we played weird improvised Third Ear Band style music in the ruins of St Michael's to a wee gathering of tourists and hippies - that was a perfect sunny Friday in the Summer of 1985, on our way to the festival after a merry magical mystery tour hitching around Wiltshire... On that occasion I was playing my old viola, and Raymond his trusty Conroy penny-whistle and a Chinese hand-drum from Ray Man. That was the occasion that we first met Rob Ayling who came with us to the festival (which was a washout) & has been a pal over the years, and very succesful too with his Voiceprint label.  

Raymond at the  "Alchemy" tomb.

Festival memories are vague - I was carrying a newly bought copy of John Sampson's classic XXI Gypsy Folk Tales with me and I read out 'The Squirrel and the Fox' one night huddled from the downpour - a story which has been the core of my repertoire ever since.  We also played with the synth group Another Green World, which was nice, and Robin Williamson dedicated Free Born Man of the Travelling People to the recently trashed Convoy & Raymond bought a Principle Edwards Magic Theatre album from the same stall as I bought Lol Coxhill's Fleas in Custard.

Anyway, Raymond's op was succesful & he's home now."

Rapunzel and Sedayne (2011).

Rapunzel & Sedayne's Third Ear Medieval Xmas song:

http://soundcloud.com/winterflora/personent-hodie-11-12-11 

A special interview with Rapunzel & Sedayne about their last album "Songs from the Barley Temple" at:

http://www.ameliasmagazine.com/music/an-interview-with-rapunzel-and-sedayne-on-the-release-of-new-album-songs-from-the-barley-temple/2011/10/05/

The album is available at Police Folk Recordings:
http://www.folkpolicerecordings.com/home.html

Sedayne (2011)

You can contact Sedayne at:
http://ploughmyth.blogspot.com/

no©2011 Luca Ferrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)