One year ago yesterday, Fields of Industry dropped Two Dogs, A Television and held a release show in Ann Arbor the following evening in conjunction with FoI singer/songwriter Joshua Barton's birthday. Joshua turns another year older today and thanks the world for another successful year of staying alive with a solo record, Thanks, I Missed You, Too. Operating under his own name, Joshua allows himself to endulge in playful combinations of ambient sample assemblage, country gospel, new folk and the buzzy shoegaze sound that FoI has occasionally employed. In other words, Joshua gets to do all the stuff he's done before, but this time he does it all at once. Thanks... is an effort to reach an empathetic hand to Michigan with the hard-times resignation often employed by FoI, but here it's with a strangely up-key touch. Drawing upon recordings from 2005 to 2009, this was edited and compiled in 48 hours under the intense urge to get something done, an urge that Joshua hopes is contagious.
Fields of Industry self-released the 3-song EP Dogs back in 2005 in a minuscule batch of 50 copies. These songs were the first to include someone other than Joshua Barton in the recording process in any substantial way; that someone was Eric Gallippo.
It's taken a long time, but a release date for Two Dogs, A Television is finally set. The album will be digitally released May 20th by Cerberus Records via iTunes and other major digital outlets. The band is self-releasing the CD on Arts vs Entertainment. Copies of the disc are already available at shows. The album features art by Graham Mason.
In East Lansing, Michigan a select group of distinguished swim clubbers, culled from disparate regions of the nation, ushered in 2008 in the company of Fields of Industry, Goro, and, in their debut performance, The Make-Out Kings. Ripped from the boutique sensibility of an on-cam audio mic, this dirty sound is every lo-fi aficionado's dream. Experience it along with those that attended by downloading the audio here for free (with two special songs performed by FoI that night that we can't put on last.fm), and feel the Michigan winter basement swelter, smell the burning chest hair. Get it.
Fields of Industry is a Michigan band that plays minimal, affecting pop music while also dabbling in ambient, psychedelia, and burnout improvisation. Since 1999, they have performed and recorded songs by vocalist and guitarist Joshua Barton with a revolving lineup of bandmates. Champions of crawling tempos, FoI can vacillate between abysmal melancholy and mountainous blitzes of sound. The band also sneaks in the noisy disorientation of bands like Spacemen 3 and The Jesus and Mary Chain, but remains centered on the staid and pious (or anti-pious) minimalism of major influences like Low and the Velvet Underground.
