Jeremy Harmer :: “Idiosyncratics and Swallows Wings”
Hailing from the land of Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon, UK, Jeremy Harmer is a singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, writer, and teacher whose soft style is situated around contemporaries, such as Pentangle/Bert Jansch, John Martyn, and Nick Drake, which he knew very well. Harmer once remarked about the late musician’s compelling debut, “Five Leaves Left": “Nick Drake's first album was a beautiful young man's astounding virtuosity and nuanced post-adolescence. When he brought over a test pressing and we listened on an old Hacker, I knew in an instant how supremely amazing he had suddenly become (and remains, even after the bad stuff)." That same year in 1969, Harmer released his debut, “Idiosyncratics And Swallows Wings,” which should be on your lavish list of underground delights if you're unfamiliar with his cosmically contagious pull on both the avid listener and confident collectors worldwide. Its sophisticated approach to storytelling is fundamentally infused with a lyrical legion of quickly vanishing ghosts that simultaneously target the heart in a romantically relatable way. Harmer’s alchemical approach to his newly established craft is sustainable in the shadows of space and time while eagerly expressing the songs contained within the reversed ritual of songwriting with several tracks demonstrating this effort like “People Smile With Ghosts In The Land Of Make Believe", “A Sad Song,” “Self-Contained” and the album’s polished opener “Pastiche.”
“Idiosyncratics And Swallows Wings” breaks into the volatile vault of memory by eradicating the walls of time and its radical relationship with the human spirit. Harmer quickly transcends these tonal temperatures by displaying a vastly unique universalism in his songwriting that is just as classic as anything that came before him. Where poetry meets performance, the album was conceived in one night the year prior at the BBC studio of Anglia Television, Norwich, while Harmer was still attending the University of East Anglia. Consisting of contributions from the school board, Harmer rallied John Trevitt from the School of Fine Arts to help create the orchestral arrangements while he constructed the rest of the album’s lush compositions. The album’s most notable guest feature came from the legendary David Costa of the highly influential band Trees on guitar, who brought to the album an entirely new level of melodic magic with his sonic style and feverish approach to the iconic instrumentation that swells in its ghastly depths. Agreeing to join the project after Harmer played Cohen’s “Suzanne” for him, the album’s conception, like most from its time, was done in the most cost-effective manner and without much background from the engineer, who was more familiar with T.V. at the time. Pressed in a low quantity of less than a hundred, the album’s lore and legend has only grown over the last half-century into this reverberating tale of atmospheric accidents and historical harmonies advanced in galactic growth. The album’s first official reissue on the great archival label, Guerssen Records, brings an entirely different light to Harmer’s mighty debut after all these decades, even if he doesn’t consider it a fine piece of music majesty.
