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In The Studio: Field Music

Emma Swann packs her bags for sunny Sunderland to check in with the brothers Brewis.

Posted 20th October 2011, 11:43am in Features, by Emma Swann
In The Studio: Field Music

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Field Music moved in to their studio, an industrial lock-up on the banks of the river Wear back in December 2010, “just as the really cold weather started.”

“We had a couple of joiners in to build the two rooms, because it was just a shell,” David Brewis, one half of the band’s core brother duo, tells us. “There was no heating, but they didn’t seem to mind; they didn’t seem to notice. They must be insane.

“We had our own space before,”he explains, “but we were in a building which was used by other people, so we always felt limited. There was a gas fitting training company based downstairs.”

It was also a shared studio. “It meant you couldn’t leave things out,” David continues. “You have to be respectful to each other. When you want to come in and just fiddle around, that’s a bit inconvenient - you have to spend forty minutes setting up.”

Their new home features two rooms. “We play live in the big room, then sit in here and pretend we’re producers. We’ve tried very hard not to succumb to lusting after electronic items. When we eventually found a microphone that made the guitar sound good, it was like a revelation. We’d been searching for years - rather than say, ‘let’s buy ten microphones and see what happens.’ We’ve got loads of instruments, though - this is getting on to twenty years of collecting them.”

Unsurprisingly, the studio has influenced the way the band work. “The biggest change has been convenience”, explains David. “We can have all of the keyboards set up all of the time.”

Peter, the other Brewis, continues. “Hence why there’s more keyboards on this album, more synths. We’ve been able to do a lot of very spontaneous things, where we come in and just play straight away. I think it’s even more of a collage than the last album.”

“We intended for it to be more of a collage,” agrees David. “We’re a little bit less inclined to resort to normal band ways of doing things. Maybe the last Field Music record was mostly a basic 'band' sound: drums, bass, and guitar. But at the moment I don’t feel like I’ve got enough perspective on what we’ve been recording. It probably sounds exactly the same, and I just don’t know. We think it’s this synthy mess.”

As well as the room making them work differently, they’ve also benefited from technology’s advance, explains Peter. “We used to just use two laptops, so would first record in the studio on a laptop, then mess around at home. This time we've made little demos at home, and because we use the same program, we put the demos on that, strip away all the things that don't sound very good - which quite often is 100% [laughs] of the song - and re-construct it. Which is a little more like the approach we had for the other things we did prior to the last album. I did a thing called The Week That Was, David did a thing called School Of Language."

They've nearly finished the fourth album, "it's just tweaks and recording the strings," says David, showing us a list of what's yet to be done - a list which appears to include the strange word 'atmosphericerising'. "That isn't gonna happen until September. It's all tiny things now, like replacing a timpani with a better sounding timpani, or a couple of backing vocals."

Taken from the Autumn 2011 issue of DIY, available now. For more details click here.
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