Name: Making a New World
Brand: Field Music

Bonus disc

Bonus disc: No

Catalogue number

MI0569CD

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Colour

Colour details

Discogs ID

Discs

Download code

Download code: No

Rough Trade Exclusive

Rough Trade Exclusive: No

Extended format

Extended format: No

Format detail

Format Music GB

Limited edition

Release date

2020-01-10

Signed copies

Signed copies: No

Supplier GB

PIAS

Tax rate GB

UPC / Barcode

5056340100349

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1 / CD / Extended format: No / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No

MI0569LPX

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Transparent Red

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[r14629351]

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Download code: Yes

Extended format: Yes

180 Gram Vinyl housed in Gatefold Sleeve.

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056340100363

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1 / Extended format: Yes / LP / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No / red

Artist

Field Music

Genre GB

Indie Pop / Shoegaze

Label GB

Memphis Industries

Albums of the Year 2020

Field Music’s new release is Making A New World, a 19 tracksong 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, madeusing “sound ranging”, a technique that utilised an array oftransducers 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,” saysthe band’s David Brewis, “and we looked for stories which tiedback to specific events from the war or the immediateaftermath.” 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 aprofoundly altered world (Coffee or Wine). Later we hear asong 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.

Making a New World

Music GB