Field of Fear: Ashes (self-released, 2021)

November 27, 2021 at 4:35 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Field of Fear: Ashes

Drew Zercoe’s new album sort of functions like the audio equivalent of a natural horror film. The music was composed by processing pixel data from photographs of over 80,000 acres of land burned during the CZU Lightning Complex fires in California in 2020, and concerting the data into frequencies. The first track, “Fallen Branch”, starts out quiet and gradually becomes engulfed in flames halfway through its 10-minute duration. “Broken Trunk” is more of an immediate storm, starting out with black clouds of terror and becoming electrified in an instant, but there’s a pause where it all goes dark and still before bursting back once again. “Año Nuevo” is more of a vast, rotating drone that ends up scorching a huge amount of ground in its 11 minutes. “Bone Trees” is the longest and most astonishing track here, with a trace of a rhythm throbbing away and funereal drones bleeding underneath. It fades down to just rustling wind for the last minute or so, and you’re too shaken with fear to begin to question what’s just happened and how much has been lost.

Leave a Comment »

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

The Answer Is In The Beat