Hawthonn

Hawthonn

Earth Mirror

Ba Da Bing!

An Earth Mirror is a magical device. Found in German occult literature, it is a clod of earth sandwiched between layers of glass. Gazing into the Earth Mirror is said to reveal the locations of hidden treasures. Magical visions and the revelation of mysteries in the landscape are two prominent features of Earth Mirror, the new album by Layla and Phil Legard alias Hawthonn, and their second for Ba Da Bing. Somewhere between moon musick and ethereal pop, the songs of Earth Mirror reflect the band’s transition from studio project to live performers in the wake of 2018’s Red Goddess (Of This Men Shall Know Nothing). The themes for the songs on this latest reflect the Legards’ experiences, magical and mundane, in the wake of Red Goddess and as the world then headed full-tilt into pandemic.  On Earth Mirror, Layla’s heavenly voice accompanies a sonic palette encompassing field recordings of ice cracking on an ancient Corpse Road, mysterious hymns sung in disused medieval chapels, spectrally processed horse shrieks, rumbling organ, crystalline electric piano, electronic textures, and modulated jaw harp. No guitars appear on this album. Nor do conventional song-structures: the compositions here organically developed from dreams (“Dream Cairn”), experiments with inducing magical visions (“Odo Galse”, “Vehiel”), ruminations on lunar beings (“Crowned Light”, “Circles Of Light”), and ecological anxiety (“Cat’s Cradle”). Their literary influences include English witch Andrew Chumbley, nihilist philosopher Emil Cioran, the Enochian language of John Dee and Edward Kelly, and even Kurt Vonnegut. As true practitioners of niche...

Hawthonn

Red Goddess (Of This Men Shall Know Nothing)

Ba Da Bing!

The music of Hawthonn is dense and atmospheric, but not inaccessible. Experimental electronic techniques fuse with doom-laden organ riffs, crystalline piano, elemental drones and haunting vocals. Largely guided by their own unconscious muse, the band’s chief inspirations lie outside of music, in Romantic poetry, dreams and reveries, esoteric symbolism, the history of magic and witchcraft, folklore and the English landscape.  Hawthonn is Leeds-based duo Layla Legard and Phil Legard. Having previously collaborated in music, as well as text and photography, they officially formed in 2014 to deepen their uniquely imaginative approach to music-making. Often developing from obsessive explorations of a particular theme, their work precipitates dreams and imaginative journeys, which inform the direction of their music. Their earliest music explored the afterlife mythos of Coil’s Jhonn Balance through the image of the Hawthorn tree and Cumbrian landscape where his ashes were scattered. Their approach draws lyricism from the psychoacoustic phenomena of “phantom words”—sonic textures translated from geographical space into droning sound spectra, and verbalized dream imagery.  The prime symbol of Red Goddess (Of This Men Shall Know Nothing), is mugwort. An herb associated with dreaming, travel and menstruation, mugwort particularly favors edgelands: those abandoned, untended places, part man-made, part rural, where nature begins to reclaim what humanity has left behind. The music here unfolds a mandala of symbolism from these liminal spaces, drawn from a web of fascinations which unfolded during the recording process.