The Silent Harvest Volume One
June 5, 2026
Ambient / Electronic / Folk
Over a few short months between 1967 and 1968, folk singers and song collectors Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger recorded a ten LP set of English, Scottish and American variants of traditional folk songs and ballads, released by Argo Records as The Long Harvest. The Silent Harvest is our tribute to this series of albums. We asked the artists we have featured here – various modulists, ambientologists and other electronic musicians from the UK – to immerse themselves in the arcane and sometimes unsettling imagery of the songs and ballads on The Long Harvest, and to each select one of them as the inspiration for a new composition. This is the result. Many thanks to all the artists involved for their generosity in giving their time and creativity to this project. *** SILENT HARVEST: RECONNECTION THROUGH MUSIC, COMMUNITY AND NATURE Just a few years before Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger’s The Long Harvest was released, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring. This was a foundational work for the environmental movement. It exposed the devastating effects of pesticide use and brought widespread awareness to the cumulative, often silent, effects of human activity on nature. More than 60 years later, nature continues to be ravaged by industrial farming. Across the vast territories of technological agriculture, the harvests are similarly silent in a way that resembles the spring imagined by Carson. Much of modern farming allows little space for birds, bees or wildlife generally within its endless hectares. Barren monoculture landscapes of maize, rapeseed or wheat are created, where wild nature is constrained and gradually eliminated. The Silent Harvest is underpinned by an ideal metaphor for our times. A silent harvest is not only literal; it also captures the less tangible and often invisible dimensions of our lives - ongoing, unheard seismic shifts. It speaks to the silent harvesting of personal lives: the fields and meadows of our identities quietly scraped by a virtual plough, creating avatars of ourselves to be extracted and sold without our consent. In his 2018 work Being Ecological, Timothy Morton calls on us to pay attention, to recognise our deep connection to nature and to harness art and creativity as a means of reconnection. The Silent Harvest sits very much in that spirit: artists producing work that speaks to this central challenge of our time. Among the linear fields and sharp edges of our towns, cities and industrial farms lie the beautiful, rambling islands of nature, lovingly cared for by The Wildlife Trusts and their indefatigable army of volunteers. Despite their goodwill and dedication, they need donations to provide essential resources required to maintain their work to protect valuable and endangered wildlife. All profits from this album will be donated to the Wildlife Trusts. If you would like to find out more about their work or donate directly, please visit: https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/ Vyv Huddy, Sheffield, May 2026