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Heathen Spirituals(Joyful Noise Recordings)
Add date: 5.20.2025
Release date: 5.16.2025
Like a scene from a dream, Thor Harris stood upon a crowded stage, 13 players deep: tapping, plucking, bowing, blowing lyric-less love songs to a grand auditorium of 325 shining red seats – without a soul sitting in any of them. This was the creation of Heathen Spirituals, the fifth recorded work by Harris’ adventurous ambient ensemble Thor & Friends and the first that accurately resembles the skyward repetition of the Austin-based group’s live performances.
It’s a century-old concept: cutting a record in an empty music hall. Masterminded by intrepid producer and lifelong Harris’ collaborator Craig Ross (Patty Griffin, Spoon), Thor & Friends’ roster of musically accomplished misfits spent two days wired up, playing free-flowing meditational pieces on unamplified orchestral instruments inside Jessen Auditorium, a stunning Art Deco relic from the early days of the University of Texas’ Butler School of Music – the esteemed institution that Harris dropped out from decades ago.
A craftsman, artistically and otherwise, Thor Harris is master plumber, carpenter, and woodworker. In musical contexts, his name is often followed by the five words: “known for his work with,” having been a member of avant rock godheads SWANS and high-minded indie favorites Shearwater, while also factoring into important recordings by Bill Callahan, Devendra Banhart, and Shahzad Ismaily. In many circles, Harris is equally well-known for being an openhearted mental health advocate with a devilish sense of humor and a penchant for entertaining social commentary (Harris’ “How to Punch a Nazi” instructional video got him famously banned from Twitter in 2017).
The Texas-born multi-instrumentalist plays percussive, string, and wind instruments — including many that he’s crafted himself. It was being gifted an instrument, however, that proved to the inciting incident for Thor & Friends to come into existence in 2015. While recording with the experimental rock band Xiu Xiu, Grammy Winning producer John Congleton gave Harris a marimba – which is a strange present due to its specificity and size, akin to gifting someone a horse.
“Having one in your house changes your life,” Harris says of the instrument, which is in the mallet family, within the pitched percussion phylum – similar to a vibraphone, but with larger wooden bars. The marimba’s soft tone and pure resonance made for the perfect tool to indulge his love for mid-century minimalist composers as well as the electronic genre: simple, repetitious, rhythmically centered.
“With Thor & Friends, I really wanted to get away from all the rock and roll instruments,” he says of the band he launched with his partner Peggy Ghorbani and Sarah “Goat” Gautier. “Because I’d played in rock bands for so long, I didn’t want any of those elements: bass, drums, or guitar.”
After four beautiful records of mallet-struck compositions that explored avenues of rapture and darkness, Gautier decamped to New York in early 2020 and Harris fell into despair, believing the beloved project to be doomed. But the next year, as a pandemic subsided and color returned to a greyscale world, many beautiful souls in Thor and Peggy’s creative circle encouraged them to play shows and expressed interest in collaborating. As such, Thor & Friends’ membership multiplied and Harris’ artistic openness inspired a sense of musical autonomy amongst the players. The compositions continued to grow, in length and freedom.
“If you’ve ever been at a band practice, waiting or the bandleader and everyone’s holding their instruments so you start playing something with no ambition, it’s as if you had a pen and a stack of blank paper and you’re just doodling – I want that feeling for Thor & Friends,” explains Harris. “My favorite music is the doodles. It’s the most pure and least contrived.”
Heathen Spirituals, arriving May 16th, 2025, on Joyful Noise Recordings, contains three original pieces with a 35-minute runtime. The rhythmic repetition of opening seance “Anne Sexton’s Glasses” evokes a cognitive crescendo, while the spellbinding “Christmas Eve at the Wizard’s House” evokes a sense of weightlessness, sucking the listener up into the firmament then floating them back down. The crashing, choir-backed “Heathen Spiritual,” meanwhile, stirs a gorgeous requiem for a dying planet.
Harris allows that there could be a spiritual nature to these compositions — a surprising enough admission, considering he’s a card carrying Atheist.
“People meditate for a long time because they want to get from one mental, spiritual, or emotional place to another… and these are monstrously long pieces of music,” he reasons. “If repetitive music pieces do something to our brains to produce euphoria, to me, that’s pretty spiritual.”
Personnel:
Julia Austin (clarinet)
Brent Baldwin (grand piano)
Victor Bracht (french horn)
Peggy Ghorbani (marimba)
Claire Hamilton (bass)
Lyman Hardy (marimba, vibraphone)
Thor Harris (marimba, duduk)
Jonathan Horne (acoustic guitar)
Lacey Lewis (vibraphone)
Jeff Piwonka (upright bass)
Joey Reyes (cello)
Millie Twine (bass clarinet)
Travis Weller (violin)
Craig Ross (recording, editing, mixing)