About this item

The latest project from Half Cousin songwriter Kevin Cormack.

A psychedelic celebration of decay, Harry Deerness manifests a ghostly script for a half-finished, half-started film; a beautifully intricate composition of lost and found sampled cassette material loosely bound with accordion, keyboards and the sounds of breaking down.

Harry Deerness is an ambitious, immersive sound-collage assembled principally from the contents of an unmarked collection of cassette tapes, procured from an anonymous source by Cormack on a trip to Orkney.


“I know a girl. She’d been helping a man in his house - either as an official carer or caring relative, I’m not entirely sure. He used to be a musician. She gave me a couple of bags of cassettes from his place as she was clearing up - I used these tapes in making the ‘Harry Deerness’ album.

She likes to draw the people she visits and write down some of the conversations afterwards - ultimately she’d like to make an audiobook of everyone’s stories, so I encouraged her to start a blog as a means to get her ideas down.

She feels a little uncomfortable about it all though so would rather go under the name Marro, to ensure herself and her subjects somehow retain their anonymity..”

Kevin Cormack, August 2011.

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