Blithe Field : Warm Blood

<img src="http://www.qromag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/blithefieldwarmblood.jpg" alt="Blithe Field : Warm Blood" /><br /> <i>Warm Blood</i> is an album that functions like collective nostalgia, something vaguely familiar that you've never heard before. ...
Blithe Field : Warm Blood
7.6 Messy Life/Pulpe Mort
2012 

Blithe Field : Warm Blood Blithe Field is 19-year-old Spencer Radcliffe.  The Ohio-based producer has just released his third full length, Warm Blood, on the fledgling French label, Poulpe Mort, and on his own imprint, Messy Life Records.  Spencer is a ‘producer’ in the way that he isn’t performing a majority of these compositions, but instead arranging a massive amount of field recordings and manipulating audio down to a single note, crafting hazy, disjointed tracks that have more to do with abstract memories at times than music.  Taking cues from cultural remixers like DJ Shadow and Greg Gillis, Blithe Field combines those sensibilities into an album that functions like collective nostalgia, something vaguely familiar that you’ve never heard before.

It’s also connected to the Beats and William Burroughs’ cut up style poetry, literally cutting apart newspaper sentences and paragraphs, rearranging them with surprising, unexpected results.  "In the Moonlight", the second track on Warm Blood, is similarly torn from a traditional cowboy hit or a forgotten R&B seven inch, the title repeated over and over by a forlorn soul singer.  At first the listener is waiting for the rest of the thought while gradually the phrase is chopped up into smaller and smaller pieces, down to just the ‘m’ in moonlight running up and down a tonal scale, any meaning the phrase once had becoming irrelevant.  Blithe Field is more interested in what the feel of this sample inherently contains when stripped of any context.  He’s pointing out the way it was created, lifting the curtain into his process, that there’s no unknown technical wizardry, just the surprise in juxtaposed elements.  In "Perry St. 1", a Boards of Canada-style atmospheric track, softly struck bells played back on a tape are slowed down randomly by manipulating the winding reel.  His particular form of combination seems to depend on the more organic ways these clips can work, a lot like Tunng and their glitchy broken sounding electronics and live acoustic guitar melody.  The opposition of the two styles is meant to be jarring, and he straddles that line between man and machine in "Live in Chicago", which plays what we imagine to be a friends random voicemail, attempting to connect, talking about working at Whole Foods.  Blithe Field takes this intimate, personal message and combines it with live chopped up drum rhythms and an ancient Casio synth for a truly epic sad homage to this everyday moment.  "Quincey" takes a blues recording as fodder for his audio experimentalism.  Instead of working in the hip-hop tradition of creating a new piece out of that single breakbeat, he strips it down and embraces the deliberate accidents of editing, treating the melody as a raw soundwave.  There’s far more at work in the categorization and arranging of his choices than just what obviously ‘sounds good’.  "Perry St. 2" takes a hatchet job directly into childhood memory, like that cover photo, a close snapshot of a young girl, oblivious to trend and self consciousness.  It can sound obsessed, latching on to a particular phrase like one enlightening moment of a child singing his A, B, C’s, that becomes the perfect accompaniment to a booming bass line rhythm.  He seems to be playing with ideas about taste and how these insanely brief clips can somehow refer to all too familiar shared cultural moments. 

Warm Blood is another intriguing attempt in a long line of artists rearranging fragmented pieces of the mundane through hip-hop appropriation and The Beats cut up techniques.  Everything is up for grabs and Blithe Field is after the genius in these otherwise typical moments.  The album won’t answer any questions about how these overlooked moments are somehow important; it’s just one particular way of decoding them.

MP3 Stream: "In the Moonlight"

{audio}/mp3/files/Blithe Field – In the Moonlight.mp3{/audio}

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