When putting together the finer administrative details for Ozbolt's new album Chasyng Drakens, I was particularly excited to see what Andy might have in store for us in his blog post. He captures the most beautiful photographs, has a lovely way with words through storytelling, and had visited an incredible part of South Africa. Immediately on receiving a collection of photos from Andy, I knew we'd have a very special blog post and hopefully it doesn't disappoint!

We talked about the release text to be included in Bandcamp and Andy prepared a short cryptic text, which is not unusual for him. We decided that this would in fact be a nice opening to our blog post, followed by an interview to hopefully reveal some of the stories behind his visit to the Drakensberg mountains. To bring it to life further, some of Andy's photos are included throughout.

If this raises your curiosity levels, at the bottom of the page is an embedded Bandcamp player where you can hear Chasyng Drakens...

The Draken will always be out of reach - beyond the arms' lengths of fruitless chasyngs. Yet in this shared reality of ours, the Draken is a very real place, an inside out creature that wears its pulsing intestines on the surface and tucks away its humming exterior, for no eyes to ever carelessly glance over - nothing superficial about the counterpointing edges, imploding perennials and amorphous cloud windows masking the prima materia.

This record is a dream journal covering my travels from Harkerville to the Drakensberg mountains and back. 35 hours on Inter-cape busses (that sparked an EP in its own right, 'Felt Interscape') and 4 hours in an ancient park ranger's truck, with our only common language being the heavy smoke of CHIEF cigarettes. He who understands the great subtlety of the fynbosian chatter will understand the subtle greatness of the besung & bewildered canyons. Canyons flowing like rivers down towards a psychic parking lot of trimmed meadows and off season chalets. She who understands that in these canyons the echoes never fade, will understand that only the truth shall be spoken within their open air chambers, and nothing but the truth - ignorance of the spirit shall be punishable by a cracking open of the skull through the means of microscopic boulders, camouflaged as atmospheric noise.

Not many places on this orb are still what one may call a house with no ceiling and no floor. Here every small victory will be rained upon; an umbrella of grace will be offered but its shaft spells defeat. The usage of the umbrella is tied to this acknowledgment. Not many places on this orb offer a chance to come to terms & ultimately to peace with this fact. And as above so below; here we don't look at a spotless floor where every shoed step will leave a mark - but at an anti-fragile ground, which will return this favour to the shoe and eventually its shook inhabitant.. And true to this narrative, an unfortunate but necessary jump on day 6 broke both the field recorder and my left leg's willingness to continue, and hereby defined the length and end of the record.

HT: How did the South African landscape shape your inner world during the trip? Were there any unexpected symbols or sights that stayed with you long after?

AO: South Africa has the capacity to always throw at me the very experience I need at a very given point in time, in a Jungian way. The good, the bad, and the ugly. And I'm grateful to not feel too much like a tourist - I got what I consider family there and one of my two pedals is firmly rooted in South African soil. Bipedal by nature and semi-antipodean by choice - I feel like there's some potential for a play on words here, but I can't put it together just now.

Anyway, I shall refrain from trying to answer the question you were asking, because I feel like I will butcher the magic by trying to express it. Sorry! A South African seal bone that goes by the name of 'Seal Bone' graces the wall on the foot end of my bed and I reflect on it every night before going to sleep. At different times in history it served as a belt buckle, as a divination wand, as an awkward object of interest for the German airport customs, and as the epicentre of an unspoken & on-going joke between Jon and me, a joke that transcends thyme & spathe. I hope you'll include the picture of me proudly presenting seal bone to the camera in this blog post.

HT: I already knew of your photography from your Instagram profile - your photography always captures something more elemental than just scenery, such as textures, moods and moments. When you’re behind the lens, what are you looking to catch? Do you have any thoughts on what photography means for you? What equipment are you using?

AO: I guess that's a good thing, so thank you! It's a fun medium to play with, but I know nothing about the matter really - I only ever shoot with the analog 90s point&shoot camera that my parents used on family holidays. So I got no clue regarding lenses, ISO, exposure times etc. The camera is doing the job for me. It's nice to have a way of documenting my life and the people around me a bit, in a way that has some sort of substance and personal gravity. I guess in the same way that I don't consider myself a harpist but more so a person that has a special relationship with this one specific harp, I have a personal bond with that one camera and somehow we function well together.

HT: I understand many of the recordings were captured in South African and then you pulled it all together when you got back home. How did you structure the approach to creating this record? Did you feel that you were processing the memories of the trip and etching these into a record? Or was it more of a blur?

AO: Yeah so all tunes use the field recordings from South Africa as backdrop, and sometimes as foredrop. I didn't intend to turn these into a record initially, I just had this harp and lived in a location where the wind was just perfect on most days, and I wanted to capture that sound. So I asked Gerdus, who at the time lived close by (and who also played on and recorded Felt Interscape), if I could borrow his field recorder. Shortly after, I embarked on the Drakensberg journey and he suggested that I take the recorder along.

Back in Germany, I listened to the recordings and started playing around with them. It's much easier to improvise on top of a nice field recording than to just play into the void of an empty digital space. I also didn't have any access to my devices for 3+ months while traveling, and the withdrawal was showing, so I just had some fun with it and the record was basically done within a week of me being back home. So yeah, definitely a very intuitive and non-cerebral blur, recorded while my cellular memory still carried a very clear imprint.

HT: Tell us all about the harp in the tree! Many of us may never have seen a real harp - how did you discover it could be played by the wind and how much of the album uses sound from these recordings?

AO: Well I always knew about and loved Aeolian harps, which are these huge stringed soundboxes that the ancient Greeks put up against the ocean, so the wind would play them in praise of Aeolus, the god of... you name it. My first and only attempt at building one of these was actually a couple years prior to me building my Celtic harp - but I never finished that project because I was 16 years old, not the most skilled craftsman (I'm still kinda subpar) and perhaps too lazy to actually go through with it. But yeah, when you own a harp, it will be exposed to the elements from time to time, and so it will be doing 'the thing' from time to time. So I guess most harpists will eventually encounter a situation where the harp plays itself. And it's pure magic when it does. It's just the most beautiful thing ever.

At Dunajam I played an unplugged set on a rock in the ocean - after my set I turned the harp by a 90° degree angle and it decided to play the encore without me. People were freaking out, and in that moment I realised that I had basically just unemployed myself. The real challenge is to find a spot where the wind is blowing and breaking steadily and at medium speed. Because only then do you get these frequency build-ups and the strings pick up enough momentum to sing. If the wind is too strong and chaotic, it mainly triggers the higher strings and just gives you odd little bursts.

My friend Jon lives straight at the cliffs, and one day when walking around the fynbos I noticed this wind tunnel that seemed perfect for my needs. I located the spot where it was breaking evenly & nicely and it happened to be up that tree - it was rather awkward to place the harp and I was quite worried that I'd drop it - well, I didn't. Listen to 'Deja Vu' for the unfiltered solo harp + wind + tree experience. Also the album's opener, 'Yielbongura' features the wind harp. And so does 'Aeolus' Dream' from the Sleeplaboratory Compilation, but that one I recorded at the Irish coast, with much stronger wind.

HT: In the liner notes of the CD, you reveal that a 'a field recorder, kindly provided by Gerdus Oosthuizen, was destroyed in the process of creation'. Could you share what happened to it?

AO: Yeah well, on my last day in the Drakensberg mountains I hiked up a somewhat steep and narrow canyon that had a stream running down and a snake-like path crossing it a couple times. I ended up on this massive open plateau that was leading to a cave with an adjacent natural pool that I wanted to check out. It was drizzling but I assumed it'd be fine and since it was my last full day and I really wanted to check out that pool, I went anyway. The route was longer than anticipated and by the time I was walking back, things had turned into a full-blown storm and I was moving around in this thick mist, so I couldn't see anything and the lightning started to zero in on me.

When I rushed down the canyon again, I was suddenly confronted with the end of the trail and an indifferent & hard wall of African forest texture. So I retraced my steps and tried to see if there was any diversions or split-offs I had missed, but couldn't find anything and just came to face that same dead end again. The storm was pretty bad, now it was slowly getting dark and I had to make a plan - I knew that somewhere further downstream the path would eventually have to cross the river again, so I decided to just work my way down the river bed until I'd find it. The stones were quite slippery and it involved some jumps down little waterfalls but it was my only feasible and reliable way out of there, so I went for it. The last jump was quite tricky because it was higher than the other ones and I had to land on a sloped and semi-submerged stone.

Anyway, I somewhat managed but my left foot didn't find any grip, so I twisted my leg and my backpack hit the rocks. The impact cracked the field recorder and the on-switch broke off, so that was that. In addition I had this stabbing excruciating pain going on, and couldn't put any pressure on that foot for a couple weeks. This story marked the end of both me hiking & me recording. Definitely a very humbling experience. Thanks for hearing me out.

HT: You release music as both Ozbolt and Andy Aquarius. How do these two sides of your creative self differ? What does the Ozbolt project let you explore that Aquarius doesn't, and vice versa?

AO: Andy Aquarius is a specific frequency that I'm honing in on and that I try to map out. It's an on-going exploration and activation of my inherent and partially dormant spirituality I guess. With Ozbolt every album is its own entity and there's no greater picture. I mean, they all do connect to each other in the way that they're all me, of course. But Ozbolt so far seemed to be more of a travel log, where I expose myself to a location and let this location then speak through me. Aquarius, I guess that's more of me speaking.

HT: What are your plans for the rest of the year? Any forthcoming projects you'd like to share a little on? Where can listeners follow you so they can stay in tune with your work?

AO: I have a couple little Aquarian things planned, yeah! I have two keys to two Croatian churches and I shall see what they have to say. Plus an EP and an album that are both in their final mixing stages but I prefer to not talk too much about things until they take their final shape. Besides Chasyng Drakens, there's nothing much happening in the realms of Ozbolt (except a potential reissue of The Organs Of Matter Wheel!) but so far all Ozbolt albums arrived in the form of non-premeditated surprises, so I shall see. Thanks Harry!

'Chasyng Drakens' is available in a limited run of 100 gatefold vinyl-effect CDr editions as well as a digital option in a range of high quality format options. You can take a listen to the album in full or buy a copy HERE!