Philosopher, musician and anti-art activist, Henry Flynt has long foregone the academicism often associated with “serious music” in favor of a uniquely intuitive, emotional approach to composition. In the 1960s and 1970s he was a part of NYC’s vibrant avant-garde scene, studying with Hindustani singer Pandit Pran Nath and developing his own proprietary technique on violin.
You Are My Everlovin’, Flynt’s first published musical work, finds the composer in peak form at a lower Manhattan loft in late spring 1981. Featuring solo electric violin and pre-recorded tambura, this sinuous performance elegantly brings together disparate vernaculars – Southern blues, modal jazz, Appalachian fiddle, North Indian raga – into a new and bracing whole.
As Flynt writes in the liner notes, “The electric violin timbre is crucial; it allows me to crush the diverse styles into a unity. I imagined the genre as open, radiant improvisation… an open plain that could absorb anything.”
Incorporating themes and melodic phrases from his earlier work, Everlovin’ becomes Flynt’s own Gesamtkunstwerk – a work that is at once rooted in and liberated by the drone, revealing the profound mutability and utter singularity of this American iconoclast.