Harry Flowers is an Antipodean writer and musician of English origin. A founding member of various Melbourne bands in the 1990s and early 2000s (notably Co-Star, 1999-2002 and Arabian Horse Express, 2003-2004), Harry Flowers moved from Australia to Houston, Texas in 2004 where he began writing and recording a series of solo EPs.
More than simply collections of songs, the four EPs released from 2005-2008 were characterised by a typically ambitious vision and scope, with each released song-by-song over a set period of time via the harryflowers.com website. The songs were accompanied by uncanny images and ambiguous, obtuse texts to create complete works of online art. In keeping with the ephemeral nature of the web (where publishing is more like performance), the 4 EPs are no longer available.
In 2006 Harry Flowers moved to the city of Ratae Corieltauvorum in the northern Roman province of Britannia where he lives and works today. Wyvern & Worm is his first full-length album.
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"Okay. Liner notes. Are we sitting comfortably...?
Wyvern & Worm is an album about England. I was born here, but left for New Zealand and then Australia when I was still quite young. I retained fragments and figments of the country, but these were mixed in with the unreliable recollections of a child - fantastical, impressionistic, memories shuffled like a deck of tarot cards. England became a mythic place for me, then, a repository of old thoughts and feelings, a cipher for what lay in the deeper recesses of my muddled psyche.
I didn't return to England until 2006, by then in my mid-30s. Summer was ending and it rained a lot. Everything was at once vividly familiar and incomprehensibly strange to me: It was like the vestiges of my childhood self had suddenly reanimated themselves and were walking the streets in a grown man's body. I started seeing the world once more through a child's eyes. I'd love to be able to explain in plain language how those first few months affected me, but I can't. The experience can only be described indirectly, through music.
In the Spring of 2009 after a particularly difficult winter, the songs came to me in a sudden rush, a purple patch of 10 songs in 4 months, often whilst abroad. I started sketching out the idea for an album, and did some preliminary recording over the remainder of the year. The next Spring I wrote 2 more songs, and the album expanded accordingly. I spent the rest of 2010 finishing off the record, and the result is Wyvern & Worm.
I’m sure we’ve all felt this kind of dislocation at some time in our lives. But how to capture the mood, these ineffable undercurrents of feeling? Well, you can’t approach the subject directly: to do so would be to render the profound banal. No, the only way to even get close is to approach one's quarry from side on, obliquely, and armed with an ample supply of metaphors and symbols, characters and scenes. That’s what I’ve attempted on this record. Musically, things are fairly straightforward - I have used the palette of 60s English psychedelia in its earlier pop formulation (short, structured, melodic) to paint my strokes, but have tried to avoid dreaded pastiche.
The result is, I hope, evocative of a certain mood, balanced between two worlds - of horror and wonder, disgust and delight, exuberance and melancholy; in approaching something deeply personal, my fondest hope is that the listener is able to glimpse, if only for a moment, something universal, a truth about the world”
- Harry Flowers, July 2011
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