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On October 11th, Field Music will release Limits of Language, their first album of new music for almost four years. For Peter and David Brewis, the Sunderland brothers who have led the band since their debut in 2005, those years have been characterised by re-evaluation, reimagining and recuperation.
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 and several albums 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.
“We came to the conclusion that we should just start making, pursuing whatever we were most excited about at that moment,” says David, “and if that music felt like it should be part of a Field Music record, then we would go with that. And if not, well, we’ll make other records.
So they did, with 2023 seeing the arrival of David’s quietly-jazzy Soft Struggles, the playful of electronica of Peter’s Blowdry Colossus and the limited-issue brass collaboration LP Binding Time. While Peter amassed the instrumental compositions for his solo album, 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. “We didn’t want to use the synths just as a nostalgic thumbprint. I hope that the approach was more Eno-esque than that. Exploring the capabilities of the machines.” explains Peter.
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 and first single, 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. Any nostalgia here is undercut by anxiety and any desire is shot through with dread.
With Limits of Language Field Music continue with their astonishing, bloody-minded run of releases. In 2025, Peter and David will be able to look back on twenty years of the band, and a catalogue of twenty-one “Field Music Productions”, and that should be its own reward.
“I think we’ve always been quite pure in our intentions as artists. We’ve never altered what we do for the sake of making money or chasing what other people like.” says David, “And there’s not really any reward for doing that beyond getting to make the music you want to make. But what if after all that you can’t even make the music?”
