FIELD OF FEAR - "ASHES"
Field of Fear is a deep-listening experimental project by Bay Area artist Drew Zercoe. Ashes is the project’s latest release. While past releases dealt with the existential dread of living in a collapsing universe, Ashes is an immediate and bracing album that meditates on the very real apocalyptic fires right outside of Zercoe’s home in San Francisco while also building the album from the ground up using fragmentary pieces of the fire’s destructive swath.
To achieve this sound Field of Fear composed these four compositions by processing pixel data from photographs taken of the aftermath of this tragedy and converting that data into frequencies. Those frequencies were then shaped into these unhinged drones, low-end destroying roar, crackling electronics, washes of harsh noise and melodic phrasings that mirror the unpredictable jump of a greedy fire during each track’s eight minute plus run time.
The sounds in Ashes are all-consuming. While there is great depth and shape to these sounds - when everything hits at once it feels like all other sound has been sucked into this ever-present maw. I’d compare it some of the best (and noisiest) work of Ben Frost or Barn Owl.
This consumption of everything is perhaps the album’s greatest strength but also it’s deepest lament. The spreading and smearing ash as a ritual of grief has long been documented. In the Old Testament, Lamentations pays particular attention to the imagery of covering one’s body with ash. Perhaps there is something about becoming one with left-over carbon of your home, friends and land that ties you to them in an unambiguous way. During that time, in most of North America the sun was partially covered by the ash of this burning land and our lungs breathed it in. Destruction becoming ingested at a cellular level.
Ashes is not just a reflection on or lament of this incident. The muscular, hard-edged drones from Field of Fear also embody this devastation. There are moments in this album that sound like the roar of several forest fires happening around you at once. A disorienting rush of a deep low-end rattle being consumed by distortion-filled ambient passages are replete through this album. There is a heavy maximalist presence here of amplifier worship of SunnO))) filtered through the broken eardrum, drone-heavy melodicism of Rafael Anton Irisarri’s similarly themed Solastagia. Bass lines are felt more than they are heard.
If you’ve never lived through or near one of these devastating fires, do yourself a favor and put this on. It will cause a deeply unsettling reflection on what we stand to lose if we don’t change.
