John Hyatt

Hello my friends,
Well, it has been over a year now since they found me floating in the block of ice which had encased me since my fall from the starboard bow of the icebreaker, New Antelope 2, in 1991. As you can imagine, it took considerable time to thaw, and be ready for action again. Fifteen years in a state of frozen immobility was quite a trip. My freezing was of my own doing, when I leant out into the arctic wind over the rail, straining to hear, and trace a melody that was weaving in and out of the breeze from the creaking ice-flows off into the dawn sea fret. I can only presume that I was frozen solid in an instant as I plunged into the chill waters. The last thing that I remember was the lungs inside my chest constricting and clamping up hard.
I was presumed dead and lost at sea for the next fifteen years. What many do not realise is that, whilst it meant no activity from The Three Johns, once their vocalist was lost to the elements, I was far from inactive during my stay in the hard water hotel. The melody that had called me away stayed with me and guided me on an inner journey, becoming a pathway across the hills and meadows of an interior landscape. This was a landscape made of music. The hills were bass-line movements, the trees vibrations of strings, the rocks were beats.
Thank goodness for this one benefit of global warming. The ice flow that had encased me for so long broke apart in the heating up of the atmosphere. My crystal chrysalis drifted south, diminishing in size as it went. Until, Captain Arctica, I was spotted by a Norwegian scientist (now my very good friend) off the coast of Scandinavia. Quite amazingly, when I awoke, stiff and blue in Dagfin’s hut just north of Norway, I was quite lucid and had perfect recall of the sonorous somnambulist sojourn I had enjoyed for fifteen years in the world of sound.
Dagfin hypothesises that a perfect spherical space, within the ice, had encased me in a bubble. He thinks the inside of this sphere within the ice was mirrored and so my reflection was reflected back at me an infinite number of times every second of every day for fifteen years. He also thinks that this cavity acted as a sound chamber reflecting the creaking of the ice flows back and forth within itself at all frequencies. He theorises that I was effectively slowed down to a near-death standstill by the cold but subjected to a period of infinitely bright self-reflection in a ball of white noise.
He cannot explain the sword that they found with me, and neither can I, so any ideas of how that got there would be warmly welcomed.
Once I had thawed, it was apparent that I was magically transformed. I could now play guitar and any other instrument that I might pick up. Not because I had gained more skill, but because I did not worry any more, had become adept at simply opening myself, and letting the raw music flow out through me, in an unprocessed state. The first instrument I picked up was Dagfin’s mandolin. I started to play and then to sing a song that I had heard someplace near the source of me when on my travels inside. It was quite obvious that something was going on because, whilst I improvised that melody and my voice arose from the depths inside of me, all the creatures of the forest gathered around the rude door of the hut and would not leave until morning.
Always a friendly and sociable type, as Three Johns fans will attest, I was more than pleased to learn of the interactive and inter-social advances in new technologies. Through this, I have been making new solo experimental work for you to listen to on this MySpace. This is to be listened to alongside the rebirth of The Three Johns (www.myspace.com/thethreejohns)
and the soon to be opened site of my other new adventure, The Suns of Potto.
I hope that you find all these things enjoyable. Isn’t it just so great to be alive?
However, I couldn’t help but notice that the world has gone to the dogs again whilst I was away but I am sure, together, we can soon sort that out that ball of greed with a teaspoonful of love for revelry, song and dance.
Good to be back, my friends, and I hope you gather round my rude cyberian hut to listen, when you are in the neighbourhood.
John Hyatt