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On 22nd September, Daylight Saving Records will release Blowdry Colossus, the new solo album by Field Music’s Peter Brewis. The record is Peter’s first solo venture since 2008’s The Week That Was and follows collaborative albums with Paul Smith (on 2014’s
Frozen By Sight) and Sarah Hayes (on 2019’s You Tell Me). The album was recorded over the last year at the Field Music studio in Sunderland, and features contributions from Peter’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 lyrical avenues to explore, to mine under appreciated influences, to combine disparate musical strands. Blowdry Colossus makes this tendency more explicit than ever.
“I wanted to make something where the music was the focus.” says Peter, “With songs, the lyrics tend to carry the meaning: ‘This song is about...'. I wanted the music to be the meaning the melodies, harmonies, sounds, structures.” The mostly instrumental album takes cues from the knowing exotica of Yellow Magic Orchestra, the quizzical tunefulness of Thelonious Monk and the pastoral abstractions of Penguin Cafe Orchestra. It also has more than a touch of the hyperactive fizz of 8 bit game soundtracks. And like Kraftwerk’s records of the mid and late 70s, this is synthesizer music as art music rather than dance music. But where 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 a kind of playful chaos, heavy with rhythmic ingenuity.
Tracklist
1. Drumeoscene
2. Lemoncadabra
3. Blowdry Colossus
4. Second Hand Slow
5. Warm Wind
6. Generation Dial Up
7. Dog Bark Dark
8. Smith Made Up
9. Panda Tonic