Back in June we wrote about Ginkgo, the latest album from Field Guides on Whatever’s Clever. It was a record which used the slow breakdown of a relationship to consider wider themes, from visions of the future and past to our inextricable links to the environments around us. How do we move from comfort to uncertainty without becoming fatally disheartened? And under such conditions, is it possible to maintain a space to appreciate the beauty of this world? Benedict Kupstas worked through these questions with a collaborative working style and his characteristic attention to natural detail. Songs steeped in the things worth living and fighting for. “Which is why,” we concluded in our review, “Ginkgo is a hopeful record. Even if it details the end of something. Even if it means acknowledging how nothing can ever last:
If one takes the time to notice and appreciate what is around them, Kupstas shows us, to document its details and textures, there’s great joy and beauty to be found. And moreover, there is possibility. Even in the end of things. Field Guides might not know how to save the world or salvage the things within it, but it allows us to see the situation anew. And if hopelessness derives not from terminal pessimism but a failure of the imagination, then surely this is what we must do? Hope is the most important thing, after all. We should never be without hope.
Centring on a critical juncture of a relationship and again stacked with imagery of flora and fauna, the latest Field Guides single ‘Esopus’ continues the themes of Ginkgo, even if its sound is something of a departure. Described as “too buoyant and direct” to find a home on the record, the track teases out a thread which occasionally runs beneath the surface of Kupstas’s work, as though finding a door in the background of the previous tracks and deciding to step through. Because with a retro jangle adjacent to the eighties C86 or Flying Nun releases, ‘Esopus’ charts a soundscape both dynamic and shimmering, the immediacy of the rhythm interacting with the nostalgic atmosphere to evoke the full complexity of any weighted moment. What results is a vignette charged with energy. A view of the present excited or agitated by the friction between the past and the future as they clash out of view.
At the botanical garden,
I was telling you
all the names that I knewand you were looking for a turn.
Tell me the Latin name
of the magnolia
‘Esopus’ is out now via Whatever’s Clever and available from the Field Guides Bandcamp page.