Field Reports from The Western Lands: Personal Thoughts

This album has been a long journey for me up to this point. It was begun, what seems a lifetime ago, in collaboration with the almighty Nimrod, and envisaged as a spiritual successor to ‘It’s Not Who You Know, It’s Whom You Know’, paying homage to the themes and tones of that now-legendary release, whilst attempting to delve further into those concepts, ideas and thoughts and to expand upon them.

I wanted to approach this album as if it were my first and last, very much in the same way that fbcfabric and I approached our debut together. It needed to be a complete and fully realised ‘snapshot’ of the western world as we were attempting to capture it. Nimrod worked as the consummate professional composer, providing the melodies, textures and tones to complement the moods and ideas of the lyrics themselves.

Together we created a certain palette from which to work from, so to speak. Taking cues from the pop and rock, hip hop and classical worlds, we sought to combine traditional songwriting techniques with more unorthodox methods of sound design, field recording, compositing and manipulation. The aim consistently being to generate a complete, fully-formed image with which we would mirror the complexities of the human experience in the west.

To ultimately realise the project the book was necessary to allow the listener access to the complete lyric transcriptions, giving them every chance to take in and analyse the layers of details for themselves. But also to introduce auxiliary ideas into the whole, which are not committed into the songs themselves, and also to imbue the experience with some of the incredible artwork of Mildew, who went above and beyond with his incredible portrayal of interpreted imagery from the lyric pages.

Finally, ‘There is a Tape Recorder Inside the Sun’, a thirty minute auxiliary drone piece on cassette tape to accompany the whole, and one which extrapolates ideas from the track with the same name on the album into an extended eclipse, a protracted nuclear flashbulb shimmering in a halo of atomic fire. A dream that coexists with the waking ‘reality’ of the album itself.

To have completed this creative journey with the invaluable assistance of Anette Records has enabled us to present our work in the most elaborate and considered way, to be able to release these works on the hallowed double-vinyl format, accompanied by book and cassette tape really is the perfect path to immortalising this illustrious creation which we have birthed within such turbulent times.

jamesreindeer

Croydon, South London, UK

April 2nd 2018

Field Reports from the Western Lands – The Album

 

After almost a decade in the making, Reindeer’s first official full-length solo debut, Field Reports from the Western Lands, arrives appropriately in the spring of 2018 as a testament to our current blazing backdrop of social and political catastrophe; Reindeer’s anguished vocals backed by Nimrod’s sonic landscape of breathtaking post-rock tones and loops beckon you home to neon-lit ruins—Reindeer himself leading you by the hand through sprouting black monoliths out from a cracked, dying world.

A conceptual sequel to the fbcfabric & reindeer It’s Not Who You Know, It’s Whom You Know, this 16-track limited edition double vinyl in 4 parts utilizes various ‘field recordings,’ from environmental sounds throughout his travels in Europe and North America to dialogue samples of President Truman and Robert Oppenheimer, taking you on an experiential journey through the fallen Western World of murky dreams and alluring weightlessness—no, this is not an album that’s going to offer you any definiteness; rather, it endeavours to move you through the cavernous entrails of your own confused feelings via hallucinogenic impressions, spectral mirages and tones, carrying you from track to track through the chemical skies and radioactive rubble.

Not to mention that this album also includes a hauntingly gorgeous lyric booklet with original drawings by Reymundo Perez III (AKA Mildew of Papervehicle), and a digital download code as well, the entire package reminiscent of Reindeer’s notoriously complex and involved hand-crafted ‘Fragments from the Field’ packages containing forged documents from a seemingly eternal, glitchy atomic field.

Like a dreamer awakening to find the horror of his prison cell, except the horror is that the bars are nowhere to be seen—just the harrowing knowing of their existence—so it is to be submerged into the shifting, pulsating aural landscapes of this corroding lyrical maze, but with Reindeer guiding us through, his voice a blooming light amongst the wreckage.

Available 30th March 2018, Anette Records No.13

EU Customers Pre-Order Here

NoAm/MX/RoW Customers Pre-Order Here

All the love

VI.VI.VII

fbcfabric & reindeer – It’s Not Who You Know, It’s Whom You Know – THE FINAL CUT

Might we gladly present, in conjunction with the almighty Mism Records: fbcfabric & reindeer – It’s Not Who You Know, It’s Who You Know- THE FINAL CUT; the definitive edition of the critically acclaimed indie rap classic.

Carefully reassembled from the original album sessions, this release is spread across three twelve-inch vinyl records, split into six movements, and contains 89 minutes of music, over twenty-three songs, presented complete for the first time.

A luxury edition to be sure, and contained in high quality black card sleeves within a hand-sewn outer fabric case, replete with embroidered name tag and high quality A5 doube-sided credits insert, with all the pertinent facts in the case.

Limited to just 100 copies worldwide, the album is immediately destined to be a collector’s item, and is exclusively available direct from Mism Records themselves.  The release date is 9th October and the the pre-order is live.

6|6|7

news reports from the BRGHTN bunker: fragments from the field – out now

‘ . . . ‘Fragments from the Field’ was a project that began with me finding myself in exile from my adopted hometown of Connewitz, Leipzig, Germany under extreme conditions… I was suddenly on a night flight back to the UK, and made my way swiftly to the safe haven of Brighton on the south coast, where I was gladly able to install myself in the bunker of my close associate Paul Drury. My first duty was to procure myself a typewriter to work with, and thus the ‘Fragments from the Field’ were born… in an effort to generate new material, to document this turmoil, and also to keep my thoughts occupied with something creative during this time of great distress . . . ‘

Fragments from the Field is a collection of ‘found’ manuscripts on assorted papers from the atomic field… each one entirely hand-crafted and entirely unique, all forming a series of fifteen C4 envelopes… Each piece includes:

3x Fragments from the Field prose poems in an envelope
3x Auxiliary Elements in an envelope
2x ‘Paper Scrap’ Notes
1x Architectural Blackout
1x Nineteen Eighty-four Blackout
2x ‘Prepared’ Nineteen Eighty-Four Pages
1x Civil Defense Handbook Blackout
1x Photograph from the Zone
1x Atomic Detonation Sketch
1x Emergency Seed Packet
1x Download Code for Compiled Digital Materials

*Digiital Download Code include PDF files collecting the entire ‘Fragments from the Field’ Series in a collection of books:

Fragments from the Field (45 pages)
Architectural Blackouts (30 pages)
Civil Defense Blackouts (28 pages)
Nineteen Eighty-Four Blackouts (33 pages)
Paper Scrap Notes I (14 pages)
Paper Scrap Notes II (16 pages)
Photographs from the Zone (8 pages)
Auxiliary Fragments (4 pages)

Strictly limited to 15 copies worldwide… and now available from my own bandcamp page… please do be sure to investigate… all the love…

6|6|7

news reports from the BRGHTN bunker : fragments from the field – coming soon

…a clicking, whirring and tapping coming in over the field radio… a clattering of metal keys and the sound of the low drone of aerial surveillance… field reports from the western lands… fragments from the field coming soon…

…collecting together field notes from the bleak steppe, along with found items, and other curiosities… soon to be made available via jamesreindeer.bandcamp.com …the transmission begins to fall away and come apart…

6|6|7

news reports from the CNNWTZ safehouse : photographic evidence of video production

…a flickering white noise creeping across the screen… whirring and clicking of the film projectors… digital transmission breaks up over a satellite link… reports coming in of video production activities in PLGWTZ in the last days…

…codename ‘description of a struggle’, coordinated by the almighty Arvid Wünsch and facilitated by the legendary Eaia, bankrolled by the magnificent Anette Records… moving-frame-evidence coming this spring…

6|6|7

news reports from the CNNWTZ safehouse : photographic evidence of the finished master

. . . a flickering series of blurry images in the late of the evening . . . cement dust settling gently on a frozen breeze . . . frozen waves trapped in ice lining the banks of the silent lake . . .

. . . ‘field reports from the western lands’, the album, is officially now in a finished master state . . . sixteen pieces gathered into four movements, totalling almost an hour of new materials . . . [transmission fades] . . .

6|6|7

news reports from the CNNWTZ safehouse: final stem exports

. . . a hissing and buzzing through the tubes and valves . . . after eight long years of production, i am currently exporting the stems to the final song for my ‘new album’ . . . to be handed to the only person i would ever trust to mix my work, the masterful Christoph Lofi . . . and how i have to hail my long-suffering brother Nimrod Saarpreme, co-conspirator on this epic journey . . . not to mention the almighty Strizi and Anette Records . . . the end of an era, and the beginning of a new epoch . . . transmission continues shortly . . .

6|6|7

news reports from the CNNWTZ safehouse – central hotel eden manuscript glimpse

. . . a flickering light in the long distance, the roaring din of the freight train carriage . . . slow news on a stolen breeze . . .

. . . central hotel eden, a manuscript . . . coming soon via the VI.VI.VII printing press . . . stay tuned . . .

6|6|7

black monolith rituals from the old world

gathered together with my 667 guild brother, artist lucien shapiro, and expert film-maker arvid wuensch, this last week saw the performance of a very special ritual here in the depths of the old world.

img_4309

for now, might i share a few images from the locales of the sun-down segment of the invokation, but hint that further still-image evidence will be forthcoming within the coming weeks.

img_4308

how i will also reveal that a short-film and music video will result from this communion, in association with anette records, and shall be unveiled at a time when all things are in their correct place… stay tuned for more information…

6|6|7