pemdas
Breathtaking recordings. Essential, elemental sounds. Oh to be a bat hanging in the cave while Henry plays the Harmonicas. To be a Mexican tetra feeling the sound waves as they traverse the pond.
Henry Birdsey is a master of dualities. He writes music that is both fundamental and complex, tranquil and fierce, and conceptual yet familiar all at once. His music often reflects the expansive and isolated regions of his home state of Vermont with its vast natural splendor, both lush and harsh, haunting and entrancing. It is also often about nothing more than the pure spontaneous creation of sound with friends or alone by himself. This all being said, when thinking of Two Harmonicas in the Jeweler’s Court, his love and interest in geology is what felt most notable.
Two Harmonicas in the Jeweler’s Court is a work of dense layers, mysterious proportions, and geological time. It is an absolute music that feels more like gazing at the side of a sedimentary basin than a harmonica recording. Time feels suspended throughout each of the movements — marked by breaths but sustained by the air between the sounds, shimmering harmonics, and fluttering combination tones. The sharp teeth of semitone clusters and the glimmers of the wholetone relationships push upward, often bolstered by wider intervals in the lower end of the chords. It is a music of rising, diffusing, warping, cracking, and refracting. The tuning began with a mistake — accidentally flipping the reed plate of a diatonic harmonica while cleaning led to the discovery of a previously impossible arrangement of pitches. Ordinarily, the instrument is constructed so that only half of the reeds can be sounded by blowing out, the other half by drawing air in. In a diatonic harmonica, this allows for conventional harmonies and melodies to be played without unintended dissonances, but by flipping one of these plates, Birdsey inadvertently created a warped and beating stepchild of a harmonica that could produce all of its sound simultaneously with the air traveling in one direction.
Context is hard to escape with an instrument as emblematic as the harmonica in the American canon of music. Throughout its use in blues and rock and roll, we hear so many examples of the instrument singing and growling lines above drums and guitars, and its lonely, skeletal howl is a trademark of western americana. To strip these connotations without careful consideration is fraught with potential for a nightmarish dip into a gulf of mediocrity in the hands of a lesser musician. This is what makes Two Harmonicas in the Jeweler’s Court so special — by writing to the pure sound of the instrument and constantly pushing into denser polyphony, one can hear the “strata” of the sound forming. There are trapped crystals hovering in one layer, low-droned roots of limestone in another, and the ever-changing upper-range clusters are the alternating stripes of sandstone and siltstone. It is a beautiful prismatic work that has to be experienced in a patient manner, demanding careful listening in order for one to fully appreciate its scale and beauty.
Liam Herb, 2023
credits
released October 20, 2023
Henry Birdsey - Harmonicas
Recorded on 1/4” tape in October 2020
All music composed, performed, recorded, and mixed by Henry Birdsey
Mastered by Andrew Weathers
Hand drawn score by HB
Artwork by Dylan Hausthor
Graphic design by Johann Kauth
Liner Notes by Liam Herb
supported by 18 fans who also own “Two Harmonicas in the Jeweler's Court”
A ride across the disappearing land on the waves of the country drone, towards the endless twilight. Sitting on the porch, waiting for the sunset with wind chimes in your hair, looking back on the day, the week, life. Rusty banjos fly in the wind, something fiddles endlessly through the air, lulling you into a dream. Sleep, tomorrow is a new day. McHoob
supported by 18 fans who also own “Two Harmonicas in the Jeweler's Court”
A viola, violin and bagpipe are trying to maintain a nice heavy human drone. They each bring a secret weapon (introduce another thing), it all stays together. Great work. autovac
The debut from Vermont duo UNIONBLOCK features homemade electromagnetic banjos creating haunting drones in religious space. Bandcamp New & Notable May 24, 2022
supported by 18 fans who also own “Two Harmonicas in the Jeweler's Court”
This episode was featured on the April 24, 2023 episode of Foxy Digitalis Daily: https://foxydigitalis.zone/2023/04/24/foxy-digitalis-daily-4-24-23-old-saw/ Brad Rose