download Press Release: ‘The Rack and the Wheel’
download HI-Resolution Photo: HNSPORTRAIT
Our first release, ‘Blueberry Tree’ ep is available for purchase here ————>
BIOGRAPHY
Heart of the Nearest Star (HNS) began as a remote collaboration across two regions of Southeast Appalachia connected by the Cherohala Skyway. Artists Christmas White and Monica Fields found in each other a common compulsion to craft the music of a dystopic South through songs textured and sinuous, sound and video steeped in the Southern Gothic.
Christmas White is an electronic musician, cinematographer and photographer in North Carolina. Monica Fields, a poet and acoustic musician from East Tennessee. They wrote their first songs remotely, before ever meeting in person, passing files back and forth across the disorienting darkness of that first pandemic winter in the rural South.
Their first song, “The Rack and the Wheel,” tells the story of their meeting in an ephemeral space, an Elysian Field impossible to maintain in the physical world. They sing together in a lush duet: “sigh, the patterns play / till I’m no longer made / I’m faded.” The song’s ghostly refrain: “you are unreal / I am the rack / you are the wheel.”
When they met, they became a couple, and the dark romance that infuses HNS’s sound intensified, heard in the deep bass undercurrent driving “Sometimes I Can’t Say,” created through field recordings of a large fire bell. The rich tone of a vintage organ drones on top, and layered vocals confess: “Sometimes I can’t say the things that I want / I’ve got a secret, and it’s gonna haunt you again / If there’s a future, then I don’t believe it / Sometimes I wake and can’t even remember my name.”
HNS’s lyrics weave a snake-charmer’s spell, poetry that casts a story. In “The Angel and the Haint,” electric guitar over Moog synth and acoustic ukulele accompany the aphorisms, “Where there’s protection, there’s a switch / Where there’s obsession, there’s a witch.”
Summer brought outdoor explorations and live recordings; transgressive tracks like “The Devil, Your Maker,” performed acoustically on guitar, voice, and dulcimer at Howard Finster’s folk art bunker, Paradise Gardens. It was recorded past midnight in the late artist’s outdoor chapel, replete with a hand-painted coffin that lies permanently in state. “No, you don’t have to fake it / when you go / to meet the devil, your maker / he knows / who you are.”
On the acoustic song “Flowers and Fire,” recorded live in the woods at Hot Rock Hollow, Tennessee, Monica sings, “You got a sky full of flowers and fire / but sometimes, the sky falls / that wheel’s coming down / on you / you know it’s true.” Christmas plays an impromptu drum set made of gas cans he found at the spot where they recorded. Back home he adds the sound of wolves and heavy reverb to the single take and creates the accompanying psychedelic video.
“Blueberry Tree” is the first, two-song EP HNS self-released. The video for the title track shows Monica skipping through a graveyard in a brightly colored vintage dress, stealing flowers. She prepares and serves to Christmas a porcelain cup of poisoned tea, singing “I’ve decided you’re a liar / you won’t find me / nonbeliever / hide behind a / blueberry tree.” At 2 minutes, 8 seconds, “Blueberry Tree” is equal-parts pop song and murder ballad, featuring layered vocal harmonies and hypnotic loops. The B-side of the EP, “Karma Corrector,” is as maximal as its A-side is minimal. “Karma Corrector” is five minutes of heavy hitting bass, soaring synth, and distorted vocals, a siren song woven with disaffection and admonishment.
The Rack and the Wheel EP presents the first five songs from the earliest days of the band. Four of the tracks include music performed and written by Deisha Oliver, an early collaborator who contributed the mournful, recursive looping ukulele line that forms the backbone of the EP’s title track. She added sweeping cello to the jangling and mystical warning song: “Dervish” and to the sardonic and psychedelic anthem “2 am.”
Since the time these five tracks were recorded, the HNS catalog has grown to include dozens of songs recorded in the woods, found spaces, and at home in the Blue Room, their studio outside the Tellico Plains in East Tennessee. Multiple concept albums’ worth of songs deepen and extend the sonic and psychological exploration born in the early days of the band and documented here as The Rack and the Wheel EP, uncanny music that takes you right to the heart of the underworld, sensuous and strange, into a secret you already know is true.
