Field Music - Making A New World LP
Field Music’s new release is "Making a New World", a 19-song cycle about the after-effects of the First World War. But this is not an album about war and it is not, in any traditional sense, an album about remembrance. There are songs here about air traffic control and gender reassignment surgery. There are songs about Tiananmen Square and about ultrasound. There are even songs about Becontree Housing Estate and about sanitary towels.
The songs grew from a project for the Imperial War Museum and were first performed at their sites in Salford and London in January 2019. The starting point was an image from a 1919 publication on munitions by the US War Department, made using 'sound ranging', a technique that utilised an array of transducers to capture the vibrations of gunfire at the front. These vibrations were displayed on a graph, similar to a seismograph, where the distances between peaks on different lines could be used to pinpoint the location of enemy armaments. This particular image showed the minute leading up to 11am on 11th November 1918, and the minute immediately after. One minute of oppressive, juddering noise and one minute of near-silence.
“We imagined the lines from that image continuing across the next hundred years,” says the band’s David Brewis, “and we looked for stories which tied back to specific events from the war or the immediate aftermath.” If the original intention might have been to create a mostly instrumental piece, this research forced and inspired a different approach. These were stories itching to be told.
Tracklist:
1. Sound Ranging
2. Silence
3. Coffee or Wine
4. Best Kept Garden
5. I Thought You Were Something Else
6. Between Nations
7. A Change of Heir
8. Do You Read Me?
9. From a Dream, Into My Arms
10. Beyond That of Courtesy
11. A Shot to the Arm
12. A Common Language Pt 1
13. A Common Language Pt 2
14. Nikon Pt 1
15. Nikon Pt 2
16. If the Wind Blows Towards the Hospital
17. Only in a Man's World
18. Money is a Memory
19. An Independent State
About this product: this is Love Record Store '20 pressing on 180g translucent red vinyl, housed in a gatefold sleeve. Includes download code.