Peter Brewis (field music)

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. 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.

The record is also heavy with sonic mutation. A piano is fed through a ring-modulator until it resembles a flute. A flute combines with an old casio and becomes a ghostly, tuneful breath. Synth drum loops morph into arpeggios of bubbles, or are remade as overdriven hiccups. And, of course, there’s the eponymous hero of the title track: a hairdryer fugue gradually giving way to a squelching, off-balance take on Zeppelin-esque riff rock.