Field Music announce ‘Limits of Language’, their first album of new music for almost four years. Back in 2022, the touring cycle for the ‘Flat White Moon’ album ended with a sense of finality. For the first time since the Mercury-nominated ‘Plumb’ ten years earlier, Peter and David had no plan for what, if anything, would come next. However, after six years of continuation, they were clear that if Field Music was to carry on then it would have to be different, in both sound and scope.

Solo projects followed with 2023 seeing the arrival of David’s quietly-jazzy ‘Soft Struggles’, the playful of electronica of Peter’s ‘Blowdry Colossus’ alongside a limited-issue brass collaboration LP ‘Binding Time’ and the vault-raiding ‘John Monroe EP’, made with original Field Music keyboard player Andrew Moore.

It was these albums that provided fresh impetus for what was to become the new Field Music record. Whilst Peter amassed the instrumental compositions which become ‘Blowdry Colossus’, he was also tinkering with a batch of songs which would form the basis of ‘Limits of Language’, songs which mixed synthesised textures with off-the-cuff flickers of guitar and layers of disorientating found-sound percussion.

These fleshed-out demos included ‘The Waitress of St Louis’, an ode to the now-closed Sunderland café ’Louis’, which featured on the cover of their 2007 album ‘Tones of Town’, and to the Maggiore family who ran this cherished institution.

David’s songs came from a different angle but leant into the same sonic palette and shared the same sense of a past becoming granulated. Album opener, ‘Six Weeks, Nine Wells’ pits the hazy ecstasies of school summer holidays against the fear and foreboding of a child peeking through into an adult world.

‘Limits of Language’ sees Field Music continue with their astonishing, bloody-minded run of releases. A run which equates to an impressive twenty-one “Field Music Productions” in nineteen years as a band. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Field Music return with a hugely anticipated, and tremendously ambitious new album that is reminiscent of their earlier albums but with a renewed vigour, and bold sonic outlook. There are bright swathes of guitar and pummeling percussion, chugging industrial bass riffs and jagged 80's synthpop strokes. A hugely welcome, wonderfully conceived return.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Six Weeks, Nine Wells
2. The Guardian Of Sleep
3. The Limits Of Language
4. Sounds About Right
5. Absolutely Negative

Side B
1. Curfew In The Square
2. Turn The Hours Away
3. On The Other Side
4. The Waitress Of St Louis’
5. I Might Have Been Wrong
6. Between The Bridges

ON TUESDAY OCTOBER 15TH AT 6PM WE WILL BE WELCOMING PICCADILLY FAVES FIELD MUSIC TO THE SHOP FOR AN INTIMATE ACOUSTIC SET TO CELEBRATE THE RELEASE OF THEIR NEW ALBUM 'LIMITS OF LANGUAGE'.

ADMISSION IS BY TICKET ONLY SO PLEASE PICK ONE OF THE TICKET BUNDLE OPTIONS TO GAIN ENTRY. 

                     --------------------------------------------------------

About the album:
Field Music announce ‘Limits of Language’, their first album of new music for almost four years. Back in 2022, the touring cycle for the ‘Flat White Moon’ album ended with a sense of finality. For the first time since the Mercury-nominated ‘Plumb’ ten years earlier, Peter and David had no plan for what, if anything, would come next. However, after six years of continuation, they were clear that if Field Music was to carry on then it would have to be different, in both sound and scope.

Solo projects followed with 2023 seeing the arrival of David’s quietly-jazzy ‘Soft Struggles’, the playful of electronica of Peter’s ‘Blowdry Colossus’ alongside a limited-issue brass collaboration LP ‘Binding Time’ and the vault-raiding ‘John Monroe EP’, made with original Field Music keyboard player Andrew Moore.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Six Weeks, Nine Wells
2. The Guardian Of Sleep
3. The Limits Of Language
4. Sounds About Right
5. Absolutely Negative

Side B
1. Curfew In The Square
2. Turn The Hours Away
3. On The Other Side
4. The Waitress Of St Louis’
5. I Might Have Been Wrong
6. Between The Bridges

THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2024 EXCLUSIVE AND WILL BE AVAILABLE INSTORE ON SATURDAY APRIL 20TH ON A FIRST COME FIRST SERVED BASIS, LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

IF THERE ARE ANY REMAINING COPIES THEY WILL BE MADE AVAILABLE ONLINE AT 8PM ON MONDAY APRIL 22ND.

THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2022 EXCLUSIVE, LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

Reissued for the first time since its original release in 2012 and long since out of print, Plumb is one of Field Music's best works, an album that firmly cemented them as one of the UK's most creative and critically acclaimed bands. It was nominated for a Mercury Music Prize and received huge praise from the likes of MOJO, Q, UNCUT, The Guardian and more.

Plumb's 10 year anniversary edition is limited to 2,000 copies world wide and comes on clear, plum coloured vinyl for Record Store Day 2022. Plumb digs into the age-old dichotomy between what is reflective or nostalgic and the disorienting immediacy of the outside world. 

"We want to make people feel good about things that we feel terrible about." says David Brewis, who has co-led the band Field Music with his brother Peter since 2004. It's a statement which seems particularly fitting to their latest album, Flat White Moon released via Memphis Industries.

Sporadic sessions for the album began in late 2019 at the pair's studio in Sunderland, slotted between rehearsals and touring. The initial recordings pushed a looser performance aspect to the fore, inspired by some of their very first musical loves; Free, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin and The Beatles; old tapes and LPs pilfered from their parents' shelves. But a balance between performance and construction has always been an essential part of Field Music.

By March 2020, recording had already begun for most of the album's tracks and, with touring for Making A New World winding down, Peter and David were ready to plough on and finish the record.

The playfulness that’s evident in much of Flat White Moon's music became a way to offset the darkness and the sadness of many of the lyrics. Much of the album is plainly about loss and grief, and also about the guilt and isolation which comes with that.

Those personal upheavals are apparent on songs like Out of the Frame, where the loss of a loved one is felt more deeply because they can't be found in photographs and compounded by the suspicion that you caused their absence, or on When You Last Heard From a Linda, which details the confusion of being unable to penetrate a best friend's loneliness in the darkest of circumstances.

Some songs are more impressionistic. Orion From The Streets combines Studio Ghibli, a documentary about Cary Grant and an excess of wine to become a hallucinogenic treatise on memory and guilt.. Others, such as Not When You're In Love, are more descriptive. Here, the narrator guides us through slide- projected scenes, questioning the ideas and semantics of 'love' as well the reliability of his own memory. For the most part, the album has fewer explicitly political themes than previous records, though there is No Pressure, about a political class who feel no obligation to take responsibility if they can finagle a narrative instead. And there's I'm The One Who Wants To Be With You which skirts its way around toxic masculinity through teenage renditions of soft-rock balladry.

On Flat White Moon Field Music take on the challenge of representing negative emotions in a way that doesn't dilute or obscure them but which can still uplift. The result is a generous record of bounteous musical ideas, in many ways Field Music's most immediately gratifying to date.

STAFF COMMENTS

Laura says: I'm a bit late to the Field Music party, I have to admit. Always quite liked them when I heard them, but never really got into them properly, despite people telling me I should (yes Marc Riley, you were right!)
But I thought the last album 'Making A New World' was amazing and this one is equally as good.
Flat White Moon is full of intricate, multi-layered songs. They're arty and clever (but not in an annoying smart-arse way) and they know how to write a pop song too!

TRACK LISTING

1. Orion From The Street
2. Do Me A Favour
3. Not When You're In Love
4. Out Of The Frame
5. When You Last Heard From Linda
6. No Pressure
7. In This City
8. I'm The One Who Wants To Be With You
9. Meant To Be
10. Invisible Days
11. The Curtained Room
12. You Get Better

Field Music’s new release is “Making A New World”, a 19 track 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.

The songs are in a kind of chronological order, starting with the end of the war itself; the uncertainty of heading home in a profoundly altered world (“Coffee or Wine”). Later we hear a song about the work of Dr Harold Gillies (the shimmering ballad, “A Change of Heir”), whose pioneering work on skin grafts for injured servicemen led him, in the 1940s, to perform some of the very first gender reassignment surgeries. We see how the horrors of the war led to the Dada movement and how that artistic reaction was echoed in the extreme performance art of the 60s and 70s (the mathematical head-spin of “A Shot To The Arm”). And then in the funk stomp of Money Is A Memory, we picture an office worker in the German Treasury preparing documents for the final instalment on reparation debts - a payment made in 2010, 91 years after the Treaty of Versailles was signed. A defining, blood-spattered element of 20th century history becomes a humdrum administrative task in a 21st century bureaucracy.

TRACK LISTING

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

The two years since Commontime have been strange and turbulent. If you thought the world made some kind of sense, you may have questioned yourself a few times in the past two years. And that questioning, that erosion of faith - in people, in institutions, in shared experience - runs through every song on the new Field Music album.

But there's no gloom here. For Peter and David Brewis, playing together in their small riverside studio has been a joyful exorcism. Open Here is the last in a run of five albums made at the studio, an unprepossessing unit on a light industrial estate in Sunderland. Whilst the brothers weren't quite tracking while the wrecking balls came, the eviction notice received in early 2017 gave them a sense of urgency in the recording of Open Here.

There probably won't be many other rock records this year, or any year, which feature quite so much flute and flugelhorn (alongside the saxophones, string quartet and junk box percussion). But somehow or other, it comes together. Over thirteen years and six albums, Field Music have managed to carve a niche where all of these sounds can find a place; a place where pop music can be as voracious as it wants to be.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Oh Field music, will your jagged chords and thumping, percussive oddness never grow weary? Apparently not, because here we have another outing that hasn't been off the shop stereo since we got the promo a few weeks back. We're all still enamoured here, and you will be too.

TRACK LISTING

Time In Joy
Count It Up
Front Of House
Share A Pillow
Open Here
Goodbye To The Country
Checking On A Message
No King No Princess
Cameraman
Daylight Saving
Find A Way To Keep Me

'Commontime' is the first album of new songs from North East siblings Peter and David Brewis since 'Plumb' in 2012 and their fifth album 'proper' since their debut in 2005. After four years threading a way through one extra-curricular project after another, the space that Field Music vacated still appears to be empty and Field Music-shaped. No one else really does what Field Music do; the interweaving vocals, the rhythmic gear changes, the slightly off-chords, but with the sensibility that keeps them within touching distance of pop music.

All this is present again but things are different this time. Where 'Plumb' was an album of vignettes and segues, 'Commontime' edges towards what people might call “proper songs”. Field Music have never shown off their unashamed love of choruses quite like they do on this record. Lyrically, Peter and David continue to mine that inexhaustible seam wondering how on earth we ended up here, in this situation, as these people. Over fourteen songs, conversations are replayed and friendships are left to drift. And all the while, that thing you were trying to remember has changed while your head was turned.

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: The Brewis brothers return with more perfectly realised funky, melodic, math-pop (and not forgetting 70's rock!?) nuggets. It's an incredible blend that's just built for repeated listens. Possibly their best yet.

TRACK LISTING

The Noisy Days Are Over
Disappointed
But Not For You
I'm Glad
Don’t You Want To Know
What's Wrong?
How Should I Know If You've Changed?
Trouble At The Lights
They Want You To Remember
It's A Good Thing
The Morning Is Waiting
Same Name
Stay Awake

‘Music for Drifters’ is a recording of a newly composed, cinematic score for John Grierson's landmark 1929 film ‘Drifters’ on the UK's herring fishing industry, widely regarded as the first British narrative documentary.

The composition was originally commissioned for a live performance and screening of ‘Drifters’ at 2013's Berwick Film Festival and Field Music (featuring Peter and David Brewis plus original keyboardist Andy Moore) will be performing the score again at screenings of the film across April and May.

Silver colour vinyl, silver board gatefold sleeve.

Limited to 750 copies.

Field Music (a.k.a. Sunderland siblings Peter and David Brewis) release their hugely anticipated fourth album, 'Plumb', through Memphis Industries.

With 15 tracks crammed into 35 minutes, 'Plumb' remodels the modular, fragmented style of the first two Field Music albums; only now shot through with the surreal abstractions of 20th century film music from Bernstein to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate factory and with the off-beam funk and pristine synth-rock developed on the brothers' School of Language and The Week That Was albums.

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: Amazing album! A bit mathy and proggy but the difference with Field Music is it's always poppy! This record sounds like one enormous song with a thousand different parts, all perfectly slotted together like a crazy musical jigsaw. Unbelievable!

TRACK LISTING

1. Start The Day Right
2. It’s Okay To Change
3. Sorry Again, Mate
4. A New Town
5. Choosing Sides
6. A Prelude To Pilgrim Street
7. Guillotine
8. Who’ll Pay The Bills?
9. So Long Then
10. Is This The Picture?
11. From Hide And Seek To Heartache
12. How Many More Times?
13. Ce Soir
14. Just Like Everyone Else
15. (I Keep Thinking About) A New Thing

Following a self-imposed three year hiatus Sunderland's Field Music return with a new 20 track double album. Powered, as ever, by brothers and co-front men Peter and David Brewis, "Field Music (Measure)" is a gloriously rich LP that entwines the brother's renewed love of the rock music cannon with a rediscovery of some of pop's overlooked adventurers.
From the dissonant funk of "Let's Write A Book" (a call to arms for the perpetually apologetic), the mutated blues of "Each Time Is A New Time" (a riposte to misplaced faith in repetition), the chopping and splashing pop of "Them That Do Nothing" (perhaps about a valiant willingness to make mistakes), the multilayered riffery of "The Rest Is Noise" or the epic found-sound song cycle that starts with "See You Later" "Field Music (Measure)" is the sound of one of the UK's finest bands in supreme and confident control.

TRACK LISTING

1. In The Mirror
2. Them That Do Nothing
3. Each Time Is A New Time
4. Measure
5. Effortlessly
6. Clear Water
7. Lights Up
8. All You'd Ever Need To Say
9. Let's Write A Book
10. You And I
11. The Rest Is Noise
12. Curves Of The Needle
13. Choosing Numbers
14. The Wheels Are In Place
15. First Come The Wish
16. Precious Plans
17. See You Later
18. Something Familiar
19. Share The Words
20. It's About Time

The second album from Sunderland's Field Music, and it's an absolute beaut! It's a prog/pop meltdown with lush Beach Boys' harmonies being constantly scuppered by the maddest arrangements and crazy/cool detours. Some of the playing is of the highest order but there's nothing pompous here, it's a completely playful record. The only band who come close are XTC. Now that's a recommendation for you!

The band are Peter Brewis, David Brewis and Andy Moore – together they are godfathers of the Sunderland scene having produced The Futureheads first single, and set up the mysterious 8 Studio where the Golden Virgins, Maximo Park and The Futureheads recorded their first material. Theirs is a very different musical path though, weaving a distinctly English route, their psyche tinged pop songs with falsetto vocals, piano, viola and violin in the mix create an intriguing sound - a bit Syd Barrett, a bit Sgt. Pepper, a bit XTC with a bit of Robert Wyatt thrown in for good measure.