Biography: Heart of the Nearest Star formed in the pressurized isolation of the pandemic. Chris White, Monica Fields, and Deisha Oliver joined together in the fall of 2020 to write The Rack and the Wheel, recording songs and cinematic soundscapes together remotely, an isolation generating creativity and longing, the psychedelic disassociation and urgent presence woven through these early tracks. With the world shut down by a virus and planned-for futures dismantled, in three months they had 15 original songs recorded. 

Until they met in 2021 to play music live together in Tennessee, much of the collaborative work was done at a distance across ambient channels they constructed. But their shared proclivities for boundary-pushing and creative exploration suggest they could have grown up together. Chris White, an experimental electro-acoustic artist performing and releasing recordings as Magicicada, spent his childhood chasing sound through tape decks and the manipulation of found recordings confronting an  involuntary commitment to church choir. Deisha ditched the orchestra and took her classical training on the cello to a place of high art, experimentation, and collaboration, to her project Flight of Swallows, producing work performative, improvisational, hypnotic. Monica learned how to bend the color of the voice from Native American singers who taught her as a kid how to make the voice haunt, a sound she took to psych-folk guitar and to recursive poetry, regeneration, and decay. All are figments of the margins of the Southeast; to the Tellico Plains, a haunted Appalachia that Heart of the Nearest Star is inextricably linked to and informed by. 

HNS is the sound that happens when you take folk, experimental, and post-rock music expressed through guitar, synthesizers, found sounds like knitting machines, and the internal hum of a firebell caught through geophone microphone, cello, piano, ukulele, and the voice; combine it, and give it a story that is organic and strange and alive and warm, transformative and transporting across distance down to the dark center that speaks and loves and bleeds.