Making the Silent Harvest

We asked some of the artists who contributed to The Silent Harvest to tell us about the process of creating a track for the album. For context, the compilation is inspired by The Long Harvest, a 10 LP series of recordings of traditional folk ballads recorded by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger in the late 60s. We had asked each of the artists involved to use something from The Long Harvest as their initial inspiration for a new composition.

David Little of Lines of Silence told us, “We chose The Ghost Ship as inspiration, not trying to recreate an electronic or Kosmische version but to try and capture the haunted maritime feeling of the original, a story of a sailor murdering his sweetheart, only to face his comeuppance at sea.”

“We adapted an older piece of Dave Clarkson’s which fitted perfectly - adding new instrumentation, including synth lines, guitar parts and electronics. We used the glissando guitar technique popularised by Daevid Allen and Steve Hillage from Gong - vibrating the strings with a screwdriver - to add the eerie sounds that run through it and a Fieldtone Weaver for the intro and outro which, keeping with the Canterbury Scene influence, almost creates a Soft Machine echoed electric piano effect and adds to the uncertain, dreamlike atmosphere.”

By contrast, Ben Moore of Early Remains took a more impressionistic approach with his track, Feld: “The track wasn't really a re-interpretation of any specific song contained in The Long Harvest. Rather it was something which I felt captured the mood of the collection of works. I felt inspired by the imagery, the rural landscapes and nature. The unsettling atmosphere prevalent in many of the songs also appealed greatly.”

Jo Johnson’s track, Deluded Them All, was “inspired by a ballad called Fair Maid on the Shore about a woman who is kidnapped by a ship's crew for their captain - what we now call trafficking. She deludes them all by singing them into a deep sleep. Then she then steals all their money and the captain's clothes, and rows ashore using the captain's broad sword. Her sweet face and voice hides her bigger plan to not only escape but to beat them at their own game, leaving the captain naked.”

Tom Kennedy - Swansither - admits that “memories of making this track are somewhat hazy. I remember borrowing a helmet from my dad’s suit of armour, shoving a mic inside it and creating both percussive and strange scrapy sounds, although the reasons for doing this are no longer clear to me! I played some chords on my lute, and Benet (Mason Bee) came up with some beautiful violin. Then I got my moog and modular synths in. And so it went on.”

“I know that both Benet and I were equally taken with the story of The Baffled Knight. He was an arrogant kind of guy, who thought his heroic suit of armour and high status would charm all the ladies. He was baffled to find that he was wrong. It’s quite a funny story, so we wanted to do something quite fun and quirky, but using the lute and other suitable instruments.”

“It was fun reading through lots of the other stories in the collection. So weird and dark, some of them.”

IMAGES: in the studio with Swansisther and Mason Bee