Field Medic - Fade Into The Dawn - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

All movement - and consequently, a lot of art - is a product of tension and . In 2017, when multi-instrumentalists Nina Cates and Zack James decided to begin writing songs together, it was an exercise to see whether they could collaborate and anyone would be interested in anything they came up with. Now, Robber Robber's debut album, Wild Guess, feels more like an exercise in tension and than an indie record. For all of it's nods to it's post-punk predecessors and the eclectic Burlington, VT music scene that fed into it, the album feels more like an attempt to translate imagery into sound, communicating all the shades of light and dark you could visualize - and it's better for that reason.Everything is driven by sheer curiosity and loose, if any, creative parameters, the band says. A person's twenties is guaranteed to be a tumultuous time in their life anyway, regardless of who they are or what they do, but the members of Robber Robber found themselves in a world that's maybe never been more chaotic or difficult to move through. It's a chaos that's evident in what they create, even if it's only the obstacle they're reacting to. In even their most polarizing musical moments, you get the sense that these are gut reactions being expressed, that truth is the grist of the overflow.

Field Medic is the lo-fi folk project of Kevin Patrick. His first on Run For Cover Records, Songs From the Sunroom, compiles material he's recorded and released over two years from a small sunroom in San Francisco which doubled as his bedroom. At eighteen, Patrick discovered the music of Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan, who changed his perspective on what a song could be and led to him developing his own style which he describes as Inchfreak folk/post country with an emphasis on finger style guitar and lyrics.Inch Patrick initially embraced lo-fi because he felt that his home recordings were a truer method of expressing what he was creating than anything he could do in a studio. Drawing inspiration from new wave and rap, Patrick pushed the boundaries of what a folk song could be, incorporating new elements in each subsequent from analogue drum machines to Casio keyboards to banjo. The immediacy of that recording process and the freedom of experimentation inherent within are central to Field Medic's character, extending through his music to his freestyle, improvised mixtapes and his poetry. The tracks on Songs From the Sunroom were recorded during a heightened creative period and released as an almost non-stop flurry of EPs, albums, and singles, all of which have been shared via Bandcamp since 2014. As Field Medic, Patrick has released every song he has ever recorded, a conscious decision summed up in his philosophy that Inchall expression is validInch. InchI don't believe in perfection, I learned that perfect wasn't realInch he explains, continuing InchTo me [the tracks on SFtS] aren't demos, they're the finished songs because no one was waiting on any other versions, so why would I?Inch

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.