Fieldhead – A Correction

It’s very much the sort of thing you’d hear with a Tim Hecker release, warm, electronic devotionals set up as soundscapes. But the comparison shouldn’t be seen as casting aspersions on what is a very fine bit of work. Love it.

It’s very much the sort of thing you’d hear with a Tim Hecker release, warm, electronic devotionals set up as soundscapes. But the comparison shouldn’t be seen as casting aspersions on what is a very fine bit of work. Love it.

http://www.fieldheadmusic.com www.gizehrecords.com/gzh39.html

Now this is a belter. An aural salvo in honour of his new Canadian home, Fieldhead’s A Correction is a really, really enjoyable LP, one that you can easily get caught up in for days on end. Despite all the clever electronics and subtle changes of pace and texture there’s a very appealing fogginess about this release; it’s cosy, in a nice way, wrapped up in itself and concerned with only its immediate surroundings. As I suppose, it should be.

It’s not a record that looks to challenge you: the warm toned, melodic samples in opener A Correction are a joy and soothing in the extreme. The track plods on through some misty landscape, shuddering to a halt courtesy of some increasingly fractured samples. 812 Keefer is another woozy elegiac piece, shimmering and faltering before the scraps are blown away into the air. Neon Ugly is more introspective, driven by a muted set of bleeps and blurts. This starts as one of the more open eyed pieces on here, seemingly sound-tracking a fast expanse of frozen landscape. Very soon a wobbly melody starts to take hold and we’re back into the phased out bliss-scapes of the opening tracks.

What else? Well, Stolen sounds like a pissed chamber orchestra, playing while watching the day slip by outside the window (and for some reason reminding me of bits of Klaus Schultze’s Some Velvet Phasing) whilst You Can Leave Now is a jumble of reedy toots and foggy blurts before sounding like some frozen music box being slowly coaxed back into life. Harris starts like the sort of music you hear in the background of a medium wave broadcast – the thing that drives you mad when you’re trying to listen to a football match or something. It quickly mutates into a plodding, somnolent melody of sorts. Fram is a mournful wail that seems to exist on various planes at once: or maybe it’s an aural description of intense cold: you get the feeling that there’s a fire crackling in the background, keeping the ice off the window frames. Last up is the bleep-driven meditation known as Northern Canada which also starts to feel like some chamber orchestra woozily warming up.

It’s very much the sort of thing you’d hear with a Tim Hecker release, warm, electronic devotionals set up as soundscapes. But the comparison shouldn’t be seen as me casting aspersions on what is a very fine bit of work. Love it.