Latest from marginal Reading talent Hari Hardman is a CDR called The Wind Follows The Phoenix’s Wings (HH034) and barely exists in a micro edition of 100 copies.
Hardman occupies his own strange and unique world, sometimes hard to decode; admittedly, this one arrives with a positive abundance of clues in the form of printed inserts, treated photographs, and found texts, but as so often happens I am blindsided by the absurdist observations of this unique fellow. Sonically, each short track seems to start life as an incredibly banal field recording fetched from the streets, only to pick up speed (literally) and accrue multiple layers of gibberish until it reaches a fever pitch, and becomes an unlistenable stream of shrill spoken-word nonsense. I think this says something about Hari Hardman perceives real life as lived by the “normals”. Or else he’s emulating the mental processes of a schizophrenic, one unable to distinguish reality from their own paranoid phantoms. Indeed one of the inserts – possibly excerpted from a local paper, or completely fabricated – tells just such a tale of a troubled individual who “felt he had control over traffic lights and could change them from red to green”.
There’s also a photo of a patient in a hospital bed who had a delusion that he was the pilot of the USS Enterprise; while next to it is an image of a terrifying old lady – possibly a mystic or medium – holding up the latter H from a Scrabble set with a grim purpose, as if she had personally singled out Hardman himself, and was about to disclose his terrible fate with a prophecy from the ages. All this and more can probably be reverse-engineered from the torrent of information our man has captured on his haunted tape recorders; I expect he didn’t do anything by way of an artistic intervention to speed up the tapes, and they just ended up this way because there’s so much inexplicable psychic energy floating around this part of Berkshire, and it has the power to scramble common sense and change physical objects. If you don’t believe me, just catch a train from Paddington sometime and prepare to enter another dimension. (23/12/2025)