Miles Hewitt / Nighttime / Thor & Friends

The green murmuring of dreams has long echoed through Miles Hewitt’s work, whether in poetry or song. After years leading Boston art-rock collective The Solars, whose EP Retitled Remastered landed on DigBoston’s Best Massachusetts Albums of 2017, Hewitt returned to Harvard College to finish his award-winning collection of poems “The Candle is Forever Learning to Sing.”

In 2018, Hewitt made for the sylvan Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts, settling in a small hilltown just down the road from a friend’s recording studio and a few miles from where he’d spent his first year of life. It was there, amidst the cycling greens, browns, and blues, that the songs that would become Hewitt’s debut solo album, Heartfall, emerged. Drawing on British and American folk music, ‘70s songwriter rock, psychedelia, krautrock, and electronic music, Heartfall seeks what the late critic Ian MacDonald called “the chime.” It’s an album for album-lovers, redolent with longing and mystery, magic and dread, wielding the poet’s eye for enchantment, the musician’s ear for the unsayable, and the mystic’s heart of gold. 

“Blow wind, blow rain / blow it all away,” Hewitt pleas on the haunting “Love Comes to Those Who Ask.” “I know you know how, just give me any other shape.” This is music on an elemental scale — cycles and wheels, warped and misused, recur, as do fires, rain, heavenly bodies, spirits, and dreams — with Hewitt’s unmistakable silvery voice smiling near the center.

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Eva Louise Goodman and an evolving cast of friends and collaborators known as Nighttime craft cosmic odes to nature and time in upstate New York’s Hudson Valley.

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Polymath percussionist Thor Harris inaugurated “Thor & Friends” in the autumn of 2015 after five years of touring as the percussionist of iconic avant-rock ensemble Swans. The project is intended as a vehicle for experimentation with the conceptual vocabulary of American Minimalism collaborating with a rotating cast of Austin-based musicians.
 
A crafter of musical instruments and stylistic polyglot Harris is returning home with Thor & Friends and the resultant music is an elongated greeting and ode to his community, woodworking shop and the instruments his hands shape and bring to life.