Henry Birdsey - Two Harmonicas in the Jeweler's Court (LP, 2024, Poole Music)

full stream: https://henrybirdsey.bandcamp.com/album/two-harmonicas-in-the-jewelers-court

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... more
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