Tuesday, September 29, 2009
ATTN GRAMMY MEMBERS
Please consider "5/8" for Best New Age Album before sending in your ballots ~ find us in this year's entry list. Thx!
Sunday, July 26, 2009
iTunes
soon, FoF's debut sleep | study album as well as their new double-disk album, 5/8, will be available on iTunes. until then, check out their collaborative electronica release - age of anxiety - recorded in 2005 with fellow musician, raymond acevedo. simply click on the button link below:
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Monday, January 26, 2009
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Article featured in the San Antonio Current 10.22.08
"Out standing in their Fields"
Local musicians Fields of Forel keep their day jobs
by Jeremy Martin
The VW bus parks underneath I-35, and the members of Fields of Forel begin unloading their instruments. Though their equipment includes an electric guitar, a bass, and organ, and a heavy-looking upright piano, they're tuning up within five minutes. Minimalist post-rock soon swells to fill the dark overpass. Splashing runoff from an early evening rainstorm and the clicking tires overhead provide incidental percussion while Justin Parr snaps the photograph that's now sitting at the top of this page.
This is one of the major perks of writing about music: You can occasionally convince a cool band to stage an impromptu private concert underneath a highway while you and your wife sit on the trunk of your car.
One of the hardest parts of music journalism, on the other hand, is that you have to come up with a way to gracefully segue from this scene to an anecdote about a song the group recorded with a former member of Menudo — featuring a recording of pianist, Aurelio Laing, taking a piss.
Well ... we're waiting.
Forget it.
The guys in Fields of Forel, who estimate they've been playing together in some form for the past dozen or so years, weren't always into spontaneous public performance or live body-function sampling. They began as conventional musicians with regular aspirations that most likely never included playing under and overpass. Laing, in fact, played keyboard for Adrian y Destino, a Tejano band signed to Capitol Records. Ironically, it was the major label deal — what many young musicians dream of — that finally convinced him to drop out of the business of music.
"If we did this as a living, none of us could afford to feed ourselves," Laing said. In fact, many labels pay artists in advances against future record sales — often charging for production and promotional costs and requiring the musicians to pay back the difference if their album makes less money than expected. Getting a major label deal, in other words, can be worse than being unsigned. "[The label's] a loan company," he said.
This system (perhaps intentionally) also discourage experimentation, since taking risks can lead to bankruptcy for the musicians if the album doesn't sell well enough.
"Each level of success takes a little piece of your art," Laing said. "I never would have recorded a track where I urinated over the first half [on a major label]."
The track in question, 2005's "Intermission," by Age of Anxiety — a group also featuring Fields of Forel bassist, Nathan Slimane and guitarist, Enrique Palacios, with former Menudo member, Raymond Acevedo, on vocals — is a nearly indescribable art-prog freakfest marked by accordion, slide whistle and bizzaro sped-up vocal effects, with the unmistakable sound of liquid gold splashing into a toilet bowl, providing a white-noise backdrop not unlike the sound of runoff dripping from a highway overpass. (Segue accomplished, and for the record, Laing doesn't forget to flush). But the noisy, self-consciously avant-garde sound collage is hard to reconcile with the laid-back beauty of Forel's current, most ambient output, which Slimane said the band has achieved through continually stripping down their sound.
"It's a constant deconstruction," Slimane said. "We're progressively becoming more minimalistic."
Palacios added: "We're playing less notes, but making more noise."
What Forel and Anxiety have most in common is a heady, alien sound that, considering current music trends, will not be topping the charts or packing a conventional venue anytime soon.
So Laing decided to go to medical school, opting for the dreaded fall-back career to support himself, making the music he wants to in his off hours. He's currently a third-year medical resident at Christus Santa Rosa, and his day job seems to have informed his band's sound.
Fields of Forel takes its name from a region in the subthalamic brain, an obscure term Laing discovered in med school, and he says many of the band's songs are written using the Fibonacci sequence, a series of numbers important in both biology and math in which each number is determined by adding the sum of the previous two, as in 1,1,2,3,5,8, ad infinitium. As the numbers in the series increase, Laing said, the ratio of consecutive numbers approaches phi, a non-repeating, non-terminating decimal (1.6180339) that many dub the Golden Section because of its supposed recurrence in the proportions found in nature, architecture, and even the stock market. For this reason, Laing said, many of the band's songs are composed in 5/8 time. Because of the prevalence of 4/4 time in pop music, Laing said, people tend to hear Fields of Forel's music in progression of 10, mentally reconciling it to the standard timing, making it sound at once familiar and strange.
Whether Fibonacci has anything to do with it, immediately familiar and strange is an apt description for their debut album, Sleep | Study, a hard to classify work of quiet art augmenting the four piece's ebb and flow with trombone, xylophone, choral arrangements and field recordings of children playing, for a complete, sophisticated album that sounds, at times, almost like Steve Reich conducting Radiohead.
Though the day jobs of the band's other members don't have the same obvious impact on the music, their busy professional lives dictate the band's gig schedule (or more often, the lack thereof).
Slimane, who spends office hours as a civil and criminal trial attorney explains: "We've all got enough experience in music to know that we aren't going to make money doing this."
They work, then, and get together to play when their schedules allow. And none of them have chosen the stereotypical musician-friendly jobs — record store clerk, events promoter, welfare recipient, etc. Instead, Palacios is a sales rep, and organist, Daniel Arrañega, is a college student majoring in biological anthropology and moonlighting at a sporting-goods store. None of these occupations allows for much rehearsal time, and scheduling gigs in advance is often impractical, so the band gets together a few times each month, often loading up the bus and heading for a public space to park and set up. Thought the band has played "real" gigs, their booking options are fairly limited, Palacios said.
"You can't play this kind of music at a club," he said. "They're not going to get it."
In an outdoor public place, though, where the audience can come and go as they choose, Slimane said, the band quickly discovers who's enjoying the show.
"We have an audience of transients," he said. "They come by, and stop if they enjoy it. If not, they move on. It's amazing the variety of people who do get it."
A few of those who pause, Laing said, are simply responding to the DIY aesthetic of a band creating its own gig on the side of the road.
"Some people are just impressed that we're crazy enough to have a piano out in the street," he said. "And," he adds laughing, "some people just like the bus."
Regardless of whether people stop to listen, Laing said, the band keeps playing.
"If we're rusty, it's a practice," Laing said. "If people show up, it's a concert."
Article featured in the San Antonio Current • Mixx Tape Traxx • 8.27.08
"iii" begins as the type of track you'd like to build a summer home in. There's plenty of space there among the squeaky-fingered classical guitar, the subtle accordion, the aaahing choir and moaning wind. The ambience lends the track a distinct sense of place, enough psychological real estate to open a subdivision in your cerebral cortex. Piano takes over around the five-minute mark, descending like a long delayed act of God, but never lowering the property value.
Review written by Stormy Lopez
Saying it's a good CD is an obvious understatement. It's more than that. Like a series of positive energy distinctly placed in melodic sequences.
Review written by Maria Humphrey
The album was not what I expected. I played the album after work and the music tranported me to another time, another mood, another place. At once, my focus changed from problems at work to the sound of the music. It simply grabbed me. I listened, focused, relaxed and enjoyed the album. I play it at home on a good stereo to bring out the best that the musicians provide. Fields of Forel seems timeless.
Review by Bob Cochran, WPMG Radio
Fields of Forel blends Enoeque ambient sounds with Windham Hill-style New Age, then throws in Folk, Gamelan and other World Music influences. The result is a CD full of music that provides a sensual background the everyday activities such as cooking, cleaning or baiting hippopotamus traps. Unlike much of the music in its genre, it also makes for an engaging listening experience as well.
Review from Tom Alexander - Alexander Productions [world/fusion jazz musician]
Perhaps next to smell, sound can be the most intense of memory triggers. Not just hearing a pop song from your youth, but tones, or a wash of sonic clusters can remind you of a specific incident, time or place. In the other half of my life, the half away from my radio work, I create soundtracks for the mind. I hear others who do the same thing. I can be transported almost instantly to a place or time by just hearing a well placed line of notes or rhythms. All of it somehow familiar. All of it somehow connected to my own life someway.
Fields of Forel is different. I seem to be living in a sound world I'm unfamiliar with. It's not an unpleasant place. Instead, it's a brave new world. It's born from a musical culture that is a true fusion. This instrumental CD is not a jaw-dropping clinic of jazz musicians playing impossibly intricate lines together at breakneck speed. What's happening here is new. It's about sound itself and how it can affect the soul and the intellect. And I suspect its creation was just as exacting and demanding as anything the jazz clinicians could hope to offer.
Fields of Forel might best be described as "Fields of For Tell" because Aurelio Laing III, Enrique Palacios and Nathan Slimane sound like prophets to me. They're allowing us a brief glimpse into a new music that might be a soundtrack to a 21st or 22nd century life. Big. Small. Challenging. Bright. Dark. Real. And most definitely interesting.
Review from Lucid Forge (Canada) by Phillippa Scowcroft 5.25.07
This album took me by complete surprise. Normally, I'm not into New Age-y instrumental stuff, but I really like Fields of Forel's self-titled release. Apparently, their name refers to a "receptive subconscious area of the brain," so maybe my appreciation for this album is the result of subliminal messaging. I did feel like I should be in the presence of my massage therapist at times; the incorporation of rain, birds, slow, repetitive guitar and some whooshing, spaceship-like sounds could have pushed Fields of Forel over the edge, from chill to cheesy — but somehow Aurelio Laing III, Enrique Palacios and Nathan Slimane make it work. I'm not sure this is the kind of album that could quickly become a favourite, nor will it be something that anyone but alternative-healing practitioners will listen to religiously. I do think Forel's sound will fit perfectly with the right mood, though, or maybe help you settle into that mood; the verdict's still out as to whether we fit our music to ourselves, or vice versa. Usually these albums where one song drifts into another bother me; call me old-fashioned, but I like a song that's got a distinct start and finish. But as with other things I usually dislike about this sort of album, Fields of Forel convinced me to look beyond the melting of one track into another. Instead, I'm left loving the intermingling of wind chimes, piano, and the sound of children playing. Their publicist calls them an Ambient/New Age indie band — I would have dismissed the indie bit until I heard a hint of Broken Social Scene in the sixth track. Give Fields of Forel a listen; you may never know it, but the subconscious areas of your brain will thank you.
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