Azilian Fragments by Hank Midnight

The summer of 2025 was full of warmth, collaboration and creation, and I feel deeply grateful to have spent it writing songs in the context of the Caza d’Oro artist residency, which generously supported the early production stages of a film that Chloé Mossessian and I are making on the subject of plant communication. Inspired by the decentralized ‘intelligence’ of mycorhizzal networks, I tried to conjure an elusive musical form on this album: one from which themes emerge suddenly and take on lives of their own, like a fungal network threading its way through the soil. I wrote mostly on guitars (acoustic and electric) and on keys, recording improvised melodies onto a loop station and out through a battery-powered amp, which gave me the freedom to experiment with tracking the fragments in various acoustic spaces, including a very old room with stone-walls, an arid hilltop, and a forest clearing. My pal Zubin Hensler (i.e. the one-man-Wrecking-Crew) contributed additional arrangements to my mixes, infusing them with blossoming counterpoint lines while fortifying the low-end. He also mixed and mastered the album, interweaving my fragments into a continuous musical flow. The album title is inspired by a cave that is walking distance from the residency house, and from which the ‘Azilian’ period (roughly 10,000 - 12,500 years ago) got its name. I love walking the sinuous forest paths of this region/département (Ariège) and thinking about the music of humans from that time. Like most prehistoric plants, their songs do not survive in fossilized form, but we can dream of what they must have sounded like.

Thanks so much for listening!

I make albums and film scores.

hankmidnightmusic.com