Harrius' 'Proud Flesh' NOW AVAILABLE from Ehse Records

Harrius' 'Proud Flesh' Soundtrack now available in LP format from Ehse Records.

"Some amazing tweaking of the idea of the Western film and, by extension, America itself." -- Arthur Magazine

Jenny Graf Sheppard and Chiara Giovando release the soundtrack for their experimental Western featuring a 70-year old female gunslinger seeking redemption.

"...discrete passages that vary between ominous guitar drone, suggesting rumbling thunder, drizzled with piano melody; solemn monastic chant; cryptic tape manipulation; and H0 scale clatter. This is just in the record's first 10 minutes." -- City Paper

Blast from the Past: Review of Harrius' 'Enter the Cotton Ring' (2007) from KFJC FM

Harrius - “Enter The Cotton Ring ” - [Ehse]

Jenny Graf Sheppard (Metalux) and Chiara Giovando are the mistressminds behind Harrius. This is a bizarre dream of a record, indeed “Ringer’s Glove” sort of reminded me of the sleep sequences from the outstanding film, “The Manuscript Found At Saragoss.” Something about the succubus sounds and the tick-tock plunking percussion re-conjured up images of drinking from a skull. Indeed the music here is allegedly from an unsound soundtrack to a “psychedelic Western recently shot in the Badlands” (and that’s straight out of the horse’s web site). The title track is a sort of ladies lost in the canyon free-fall-folk ditty. “The Wedding Ring” has many bands, chopped and wobbly bands of sound. “L’OK” feels like a small slice of Fursaxa heaven. “Ebolatime” has a low rumble guitar and more voice-acting song could be a cross between Obuh records and Mauve Sideshow… but really this is willfully weirdly its own brand of wonder! “Proud Flesh” works a deep subconscious rupture…like a blood vessel mic’d up to volcano level? Lastly “Uppera” is another oddly divine number, like angels pacing back and forth in some scrambled universe. And then a very faint looked groove at the end! This is a fantastic twisted, yet intricately so, release! Do not miss!

- Thurston Hunger

Harrius' 'Proud Flesh' Movie Trailer

It is 1886 in South Dakota, and Harrius, a 70-year old wounded wanderer, seeks redemption. Through her encounters with a parched landscape and beings both physical and metaphysical (including a virtual labyrinth of mounds, geisha dancers and her pious lace-maker double, Alma), Proud Flesh is no mere re-visioning of the American Western. It is a meditation on the iconography and gestures contained within the genre itself. -- Jenny Graf Sheppard / IMDb

Harrius' 'Proud Flesh' reviewed in Arthur / Feb 09

Harrius' 'Proud Flesh' reviewed in Arthur.

It’s a beautiful thing, made from a private, internal symbolic system and some amazing tweaking of the idea of the Western film and, by extension, America itself.

Harrius' 'Proud Flesh' reviewed in City Paper / Jan 09

City Paper review of Harrius' 'Proud Flesh' Soundtrack

Knowing that the score's creator, Harrius (Jenny Graf Sheppard and Chiara Giovando), is the main duo behind the movie helps explain why this record makes so much sense, why it feels so, well, cinematic, functioning as its own taut, affecting narrative. It starts in quick successions of beeps/squeaks, like a computer rendered chew toy. It gives way to a brief, lovely verse of traditional vocal folk , which is abruptly cut off by a percussive blast (gunshot, perhaps). Those vocals return throughout the 35 minute composition, breaking up discrete passages that vary between ominous guitar drone, suggesting rumbling thunder, drizzled with piano melody; solemn monastic chant; cryptic tape manipulation; and H0 scale clatter. This is just in the record's first 10 minutes.

Harrius: 'Proud Flesh' -- New LP Release on Ehse Records

Harrius -- the musical duo comprised of artists Jenny Gräf Sheppard (of Metalux) and Chiara Giovando -- has recorded a sound program for the film 'Proud Flesh', also directed and produced by the pair. It will be released on February 24, 2009 by Baltimore’s Ehse Records (www.ehserecords.com ).

“'Proud Flesh' is the sound program to a movie of the same name by Chiara Giovando and Jenny Graf Sheppard. The film was shot largely in the South Dakota Badlands and stars the artists' mothers. An introspective study of the balance between wilderness and civilization within individuals and groups, it is comprised of a set of personal symbols, textural, behavioral, topographic, and through the casting of friends and family members who make up the cast, both archetypal in a way that is drawn from direct human relationships. Like the film, the sound that adjoins it is a gauzy world of private experiences interwoven into a taut narrative, something far more alien and beautiful than you're used to hearing on a record. There are references to American-ness; there are unexpected and intuitive structural leaps; there is the strong sense of something awry and rebalanced by the anxiety which results from it; there is a sense of vast and difficult terrain, through the sheer variety of sounds of styles of ordering them. But it's all finely wrought with lacemakers’ hands, and the result is something stunning that I don't quite have a handle on, and for the sake of a respect for wonder, I'll keep it that way.”
-Ian Nagoski, Baltimore

“Consider it 'Persona' by way of Alejandro Jodorowsky and Sergio Corbucci, scored to hybridized folk music that bleeds into disorienting drones.” - City Paper