Mojo's hosts Recordings' release party
Published April 21, 2006
The members of The Foundry Field Recordings aren't like the rock stars from television and feature films.
They sit around a coffee table cluttered with old magazines and nonchalantly sip beer as rain sporadically beats upon the roof. The Columbia natives seem ordinary enough at first, but there is a passion for music that lurks beneath the surface.
"From my end of it, I really enjoy playing music and listening to music," frontman Billy Schuh said. "It kind of creeps in and sort of controls you."
As of tonight, The Foundry Field Recordings, composed of Schuh, Becky Baxter, Benjamin Hook and Daniel Stegall, will have released their first major LP under the Emergency Umbrella record label. The group is holding a record release party at 8:30 tonight at Mojo's.
"We started this band as a recording project to make a full-length album," Hook said. "And it pretty much took us three and a half years."
Band members also hold down other jobs. One member works an in elementary school classroom, another is a member of the forestry department. Each member has his or her own life, but music is always important.
The new album, Prompts/Miscues, reflects The Foundry Field Recordings' vision of a post-apocalyptic world and never strays far from that subject. It attempts to create a memory of our own world from a perspective of an individual looking back, to allow us to understand the importance of what we have.
"I think we're headed down a very dark road ... It's all kind of embedded in the songs and that sort of thing," Schuh said.
Despite the predominance of the apocalyptic theme, the band adamantly denied it produced a concept album.
"We wanted the whole album to be cohesive from beginning to end ... The entirety of the world's society is wiped out by some apocalyptic event," Schuh said. "(It's) not a literal story through the album, just kind of suggestions."
With the introduction of this new album, The Foundry Field Recordings might be on its way to something far better than its members could have imagined.
"I think we've got some longevity potential," Baxter said.
