Perennial Static — Nine Fields
The fields are real, or the names are — they sit on a tithe map for a parish two counties over, and somebody in the band has plainly spent an afternoon with it.
Whether that counts as research or as an alibi for having no titles is a question the record declines to answer.
Instrumental records have a persuasion problem. Without words there is nothing to disagree with, and a record you cannot disagree with tends to become a record you do not think about — which is why so much of this ends up as background, and why "atmospheric" has quietly become a way of saying "it was on".
Nine Fields solves this by being specific. Each of these pieces has a shape you could describe to someone: `Long Acre` is a single figure repeated for six minutes while everything around it is removed, one element at a time, until the figure is alone and sounds completely different. `Kiln Piece` does the opposite and takes four minutes to do it. `Glebe` is the only one that could be called pretty and it is placed seventh, which is exactly right, because by then you have earned it.
