Expected release 22/09/23
Drumeoscene
Lemoncadabra
Blowdry Colossus
Second Hand Slow
Warm Wind
Generation Dial Up
Dog Bark Dark
Smith Made Up
Panda Tonic
Daylight Saving Records release ‘Blowdry Colossus’, the new solo album by FieldMusic’s Peter Brewis. The record is Peter’s first solo venture since 2008’s ‘The WeekThat Was’ and follows collaborative albums with Paul Smith (on 2014’s ‘Frozen BySight’) and Sarah Hayes (on 2019’s ‘You Tell Me’). The album was recorded over thelast year at the Field Music studio in Sunderland, and features contributions fromPeter’s brother David, Sarah Hayes and Peter’s son, Alexander. Peter’s work with Field Music, and across all the parallel projects he’s undertaken,has always been characterised by curiosity; an urge to find new musical and lyricalavenues to explore, to mine under-appreciated influences, to combine disparatemusical strands. ‘Blowdry Colossus’ makes this tendency more explicit than ever. “I wanted to make something where the music was the focus.” says Peter,“Withsongs, the lyrics tend to carry the meaning: ‘This song is about...’. I wanted the musicto be the meaning - the melodies, harmonies, sounds, structures.” The mostly instrumental album takes cues from the knowing exotica of Yellow MagicOrchestra, the quizzical tunefulness of Thelonious Monk and the pastoralabstractions of Penguin Cafe Orchestra. It also has more than a touch of thehyperactive fizz of 8-bit game soundtracks. And like Kraftwerk’s records of the midand late-70s, this is synthesizer music as art music rather than dance music. Butwhere Kraftwerk took the melodic purity of Schubert and gave it a chilly formality, on‘Blowdry Colossus’, Peter takes the same elevation of melody and plunges it into akind of playful chaos, heavy with rhythmic ingenuity. The record is also heavy with sonic mutation. A piano is fed through a ring-modulatoruntil it resembles a flute. A flute combines with an old Casio and becomes a ghostly,tuneful breath. Synth drum loops morph into arpeggios of bubbles or are remade asoverdriven hiccups. And, of course, there’s the eponymous hero of the title track: ahairdryer fugue gradually giving way to a squelching, off-balance take on Zeppelinesque riff rock. The only lyrics on the album appear on ‘Dog Bark Dark’, a surreal wild-dog chase.“Ithought I’d have one actual song on here, for something different!” says Peter,“I wasthinking of YMO, Quincy Jones, early 90s dance and Captain Beefheart. And theguitar solo was meant to be the discarded bits from Steve Miller’s ‘Abracadabra’. “Throughout the album, it feels like we’ve been diligently following the steps of theKLF’s seminal ‘The Manual’, but once we were sitting in the studio, drinking tea andtinkering with the sequencer, we decided to give up on having a Number One hit andkeep playing purely for the joy. Hence, the foray into New Jack Swing on ‘GenerationDial Up’ or the Eno-esque interlude of ‘Warm Wind’.” Available to independent retailers as a signed LP.