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 knew

and 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.

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Enter Ginkgo, the third full-length from Benedict Kupstas’s Field Guides. Released via Whatever’s Clever, the record does not overtly address our collapsing climate or failing culture or any of the other threats before us, but instead faces up to this wider question of hope with the eponymous, extinction-surviving tree at its center. If what we have and have had can no longer be guaranteed, if the futures we imagined can be imagined no longer, then how do we work to adapt? How do we hold on to hope?

Lead single ‘Salmon Skin’ “draw[s] lines between seemingly unconnected things to trace the edges of feelings which might otherwise be too large or unwieldy to properly convey,” we wrote in a preview. The song is indicative of a record built from disparate details, like the chapter of a field guide for Kupstas’s universe, notes on its flora and fauna, its poetry and people, collected not as some lesson in preservation but rather possibility. This was my life then, Ginkgo says, just like Boo, Forever and This is Just a Place before it. What I’ve lost, what I have to lose.

To create such a thing is to position oneself in the strange, human moment that sits between the past and the future. To understand the present as the machinery which processes what was into what will be. We may not have total control over this machine, but there is at least some semblance of agency in understanding its function. To appreciate something’s impermanence is to see it as sacred. To be humble before it, suddenly willing to act and to move. “All that I have is yours for the taking,” Kupstas sings on ‘Margaret’, ostensibly singing to the titular character but just as likely singing to the future itself. “And all that we have is yours for the breaking.” Though the final repetition switches that last line to something more communal, suggesting some latent potentiality for those actively engaged.

And all that I have is yours for the taking
And all that we have is ours for the taking

There’s an inherently personal thread running through the album which illuminates these ideas. On its surface, Ginkgo is a break-up record, with references to Rumours or Shoot Out the Lights adding a degree of context. ‘Agios Sillas’ describes the futility of clinging to past versions of love and lovers, as though they were ghosts already gone. “Should I put some more wood on the fire,” Kupstas asks in the track’s refrain, “or should I snuff it out?” To live with hope is not to conquer the very possibility of something ending, but to live in a manner which allows such questions to be asked. To allow oneself to imagine a future in which the fire continues and another where it is quashed, then to live towards whichever feels most right.

Community is central to this. Field Guides has long been a solo project on paper but not nature, and Ginkgo is no different. The list of collaborators is too long to list, featuring the likes of Nico Hedley, Dan Knishkowy, Dave Scanlon and Cf Watkins among many others. In our increasingly atomised society, cooperation is so often a strictly work-based experience. Further to any final product or artistic intention, projects such as Field Guides feel like a reengagement with the power and utility of working together. Rediscovering hope not via emotion or intellectual reasoning, but through direct practice. You don’t need convincing in this model, the action is proof enough. Because what seemed impossible alone is suddenly impossible no longer. Get a group of people together and look what they might achieve.

Which is why, for me at least, 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.

We took the opportunity to speak with Kupstas about the new record to dig deeper into the ideas and intentions behind it, as well as the Field Guides project as a whole:

Hi Benedict, thanks so much for taking the time to chat, and congratulations on the new album. Does the experience of putting out records change with each one?

Thank you Jon and Liam! I appreciate what y’all do so much! There are definitely lots of facets that remain consistent from album to album: the same vacillations between mustering the necessary confidence to believe we’ve made something worth sharing and then losing all perspective and being unable to listen to this thing we’ve spent years living inside…that seems to recur every time. But this one feels different in a few ways. First off, I’ve been more involved than ever helping other folks release music via our collectively-run label, Whatever’s Clever, which has been a really valuable learning experience. And this album contains so many friends, more than twenty in all, so it feels even more like a sprawling family affair than the previous FG records. Shannon Fields and Nico Hedley helped me co-produce this one, which was huge. They’re both brilliant and I wouldn’t have been able to make this without them. I’m really grateful to feel less personal ownership of this music, to share parentage with all the folks involved.

I suppose we should start with the title. Was the album always going to be called Ginkgo? What’s the significance?

The first two Field Guides album’s had titles that were references to beloved poets (Boo, Forever was borrowed from Richard Brautigan and This Is Just A Place is from a poem by A. R. Ammons). And originally I wanted to keep that streak going, so I spent a lot of time pouring through poetry to find a title that fit this collection of songs. Nico and I spent one memorable afternoon drinking whiskey and spreading volumes of Emily Dickinson and Anne Carson and so many other poets across his kitchen table, trading lines back and forth. 

I noticed early in the process of assembling these songs that there had been an unconscious shift in my writing from fauna to flora, and that trees made several appearances. As we were coming up short looking for the perfect poetic reference, my impulse shifted toward a blunt, single-word noun, a categorical label. I recalled an article about the hibakujumoku or “survivor trees” in Hiroshima, the trees (many of them ginkgo) that had somehow survived the atomic bomb in 1945. They’ve become symbols of resilience and endurance in the face of our most destructive tendencies. I got a bit obsessed with ginkgos after that. I read about how they had already survived a huge mass extinction during the Pleistocene and are considered a “living fossil,” a relic of a distant evolutionary moment. In New York, they’re largely known for an unpleasant odor when the female trees fruit in the spring, but I’ve always loved their scraggly branches and the way they carpet the sidewalks in unique, bright yellow leaves in the fall. The use of ginkgo biloba extract as a memory aid also felt apt given the album’s themes.

More and more, that seed of symbolism took root—I kept discovering new synchronicities—and at some point there was no longer any question that this thing would be called Ginkgo.

The very first words of the new record refer to the previous Field Guides release. “This is just a place / and you are just a song.” Could you talk a little on how you position this album in relation to This is Just a Place? Do you see it as a direct continuation? More of an evolution? A confrontation?

I’ve always loved art of any medium that develops its own self-reflexive, cross-referential, subtextual mythology. The way writers like David Mitchell or Anne Carson weave threads or revisit characters across different books, or the way songwriters like Dan Bejar or Phil Elverum return again and again to certain themes or motifs. I’m generally just a sucker for interpolation and quotation and love leaving breadcrumbs that someone might follow beyond a song’s lyrics. So, yeah, it was a very deliberate choice to begin this album with the title of the previous one, implying an ellipsis, picking up where we left off. (I enjoy the idea that, should a listener want to engage with the album more inquisitively, there are some fun little Easter eggs hidden about.) But I also love your idea of it being a confrontation with the prior work. This album was conceived and recorded during so much upheaval and loss, so it does feel like a break—naming a thing so that we can move on from it. “That was just a place, and now we find ourselves elsewhere.”

One of the most distinct layers is highly personal. There’s a sense of tension coursing beneath the record, a personal turmoil which surfaces from time to time (e.g. the line “Should I put some more wood on the fire / or should I snuff it out?”).  If it’s something you’re comfortable discussing, I’d be interested in hearing if this was in any way intentional. If we’re witnessing the breakdown of something, did you set out to map this process? Or did it unravel coincidentally and happen to change the direction of the record?

Oh, so you caught that. Yeah, lots of the songs were written during a protracted breakup (and breakdown), very much in dialogue with a romantic and creative partner during the dissolution of that relationship, which in retrospect was potentially a bit masochistic and unkind. I wasn’t consciously using the songs as a place to have those conversations, but it does feel that way a bit now. The idea of “mapping” feels especially apt because the songs do indeed chart a tumultuous personal trajectory that also happened to correspond with geographic dislocation. The final chapter of that relationship played out while traveling overseas, literally mapping the disintegration of that relationship to specific places. I think art is often a futile attempt to capture with some permanence certain ephemeral, fleeting feelings that we’re unable to process, that seem too big to grasp. But hopefully there’s something beautiful even within that futility or failure.

The idea of working to save something vs. recognising an end feels very much relevant in a wider context too. Running parallel to the personal threads of the album is something more universal. Your work often references the natural world for example, and therefore calls in all the wonder and dread associated with that as we fall further into the breakdown of our climate. Some degree of this is just a product of living in the world we do (all fiction is climate fiction, as Nishant Batsha argued in a recent essay), but I’m curious how conscious or intentional you are in addressing such themes.

Thank you for sharing that essay! I just read it and it’s terrifyingly on-point but also shows how art can—and, in my opinion, has a responsibility to—illuminate a path through all the appropriate anxieties of the Anthropocene. This is definitely what I spend a huge chunk of my time thinking about: how art and activism fit together and how we construct communities that are braced against climate (and cultural) collapse while leaving lots of room for joy and beauty. I again want to quote part of your question back to you: the blurry, liminal space between “working to save something” vs. “recognising an end” seems to be where we’re all spending more and more of our time, doesn’t it? Letting go of a failed relationship—or a stable, hospitable climate—without abandoning hope or conflating change with finality, without succumbing to fatalism, can be really tough. We tend to either cling or run. The writers Robert Macfarlane and Richard Powers have both talked about the way geology and trees can give us a glimpse of “deep time” and expand our ethics. If I can share a quote from Macfarlane’s book Underland:

For to think in deep time can be a means not of escaping our troubled present, but rather of re-imagining it; countermanding its quick greeds and furies with older, slower stories of making and unmaking. At its best, a deep time awareness might help us see ourselves as part of a web of gift, inheritance and legacy stretching over millions of years past and millions to come, bringing us to consider what we are leaving behind for the epochs and beings that will follow us. When viewed in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert.

Could we talk about hope directly? Hopelessness is so often treated as a flaw specific to unserious doomers or dangerous nihilists, but ‘hope’ as it is thrown around in the contemporary discourse can feel so wispy. A Donald Barthelme quote pops up at the end of the press release: “mixing bits of this and that from various areas of life to make something that did not exist before is an oddly hopeful endeavour.” Is the work of Field Guides hopeful? And what does such a thing mean to you?

Ha, I wrote the above before reading this question, but it’s very clear our thoughts are traveling the same road here! I loathe nihilism. I think it’s among the worst of our human tendencies. Hope is often seen as a lofty or, as you say, “wispy” orientation in the face of all we’re up against. But I’ve heard folks distinguish between hope and optimism. Optimism can be a passive stance, and at this point it feels pretty naïve. But hope should demand engagement; it comes along with the imperative to close the gap between the current reality and some hoped-for future. And I think this version of hope also requires humility, a shattering of solipsism and atomization. I certainly hope that my songs are hopeful. I hope they reach beyond any layers of self-indulgence and offer something comforting but new.

Finally, I’m interested in how you see Field Guides, now and moving forwards. On the one hand it feels a highly personal thing, but there’s always a wide array of guests who contribute too. Like a solo project which couldn’t exist without collaboration. Does it feel like a solo project, or something you now share with a wider community of artists?

I’m never quite sure what this project is: whether it’s a band or an amorphous solo thing… On this album, more than ever, it doesn’t really feel like either. I realize that I could feel more comfortable owning the voice at the center of this music, but I also love and feel immensely grateful that I get to share this thing with so many new and old friends who made it with me. It does feel like a community, like a big messy family. My buddy Ben Seretan had a great analogy for this record, describing it like “raising a barn together.” I wouldn’t ever want to try to raise a barn by myself.

Ginkgo is out now via Whatever’s Clever and you can get it now from the Field Guides Bandcamp page.

Photos by Dave Scanlon

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Following on from singles ‘Sun Self‘ and ‘Kristofferson/StarStuffs‘, DoomFolk StarterKit (the recording project of Portland’s David Swick) is back with a brand new song. Existing within a conflicted state familiar in our contemporary moment, ‘2Hands’ finds a narrator caught between a need to retreat and rest and the seemingly endless task of working in order to stay afloat. A challenge faced with Swick’s trademark brand of introspective sincerity.

Field Guides – Margaret

“Attempting to not just represent the world, but show it to us anew.” That’s how we described Ginkgo, the forthcoming album from Field Guides on Whatever’s Clever in our preview of lead single, ‘Salmon Skin‘. Latest track ‘Margaret’ takes its inspiration from the nineteenth century author and women’s rights activist Margaret Fuller, her transcendentalist belief in the possibility of change lingering over an otherwise melancholic scene of domestic conflict. “And all that we have is ours for the taking” goes the final line, amended slightly from those which come before it, shimmering if not with hope then some mysterious precursor. Check out the video by Caleb Bryant Miller, Rebecca El-Saleh and Kupstas himself below:

Ginkgo is out via Whatever’s Clever on the 26th June and you can pre-order it now.

Fronjentress – Moon

Consisting of a rotating band of musicians based in Portland, Fronjentress unites artists who share an interest in the styles and themes of country music. “Classic country for contemporary times” is how the project describes its output, utilising traditional instruments and tropes to create something rooted within the present moment. Out this week on Perpetual Doom, latest album Baby Got Problems displays not only the aching melancholy of classic country music but also its wit and wry humour, as demonstrated on lead single, ‘Moon’. “If they told us that the moon / could be our new home pretty soon,” it begins:

Well, I’d pack a single bag
and go drifting
because this world has gotten strange
I surely won’t miss the rain
from my lonely paradise up in space

Baby’s Got Problems will be released on 14th May via Perpetual Doom. Order it now via Bandcamp.

Old Moon – Eastern Skies

Old Moon is the project of Tom Weir from Lyme, New Hampshire, who next month is releasing a brand new album titled Cities of the Plain via à La Carte Records and Love Chain Tapes. New single ‘Eastern Skies’ introduces Old Moon’s style, opening as an electrified folk song stark and expansive enough to live up to the McCarthy reference of the album’s title, but soon evolves into gothic shoegaze clamour. Weir’s vocals emerge from this with a brooding intensity, as though suspended within the sound, or else conjuring the heavy, sparkling tone itself.

Otracami – Pipe Scream

The project of Brooklyn-based songwriter Camila Ortiz, Otracami pitches itself between open coastal landscapes and gloomy bedrooms, working to unveil the mystery within both worlds. Latest single ‘Pipe Scream’ evokes the building pressure of an interrupted flow, its spacious, dreamy sound belying the desperation beneath the surface. There might not be a crashing crescendo within the track itself, but the promise of release is ever-present, even if the dam holds for now.

pipe scream
until it’s not
water pools behind my eyes
until i let it fall

Photokem – Future Minister

Consisting of Nana Acheampong (vocals), Leah Blom (violin), Nico Fennell (instrumentals/production), Jack Kelly (instrumentals) and Evan Ryckebusch (cello/bass), Photokem is an Austin-based outfit formed in 2021 after the group read Acheampong’s writing in the University of Texas’ BlackPrint publication. None of them had recorded music before, and Acheampong had never sang in public, which makes the richness and detail of debut EP Luffon Bright all the more impressive. ‘Future Minister’ introduces the style, its arrangement moving from quiet folk and emo-inflected rock to vivid orchestral swells, all tied together by Acheampong’s conversational yet striking delivery.

Shrill Pill – Still Alive

Northampton, MA’s Shrill Pill introduced their new EP Sparky on Hand Over Foot Records with the plucky and raucous ‘Loud and True’, though the latest single shows a different side to the band. ‘Still Alive’ offers an altogether more restrained sound, its quiet folk sensibilities creating a space reflective and warm, but within this subdued mood the lyrics still hold a feistiness. “War stories and war trophies are not the same at all,” goes one verse. “One you win and one you tell your friend you love but never call / Memory is better than an elegy / Keep me in your thoughts but please don’t talk to me.”

Troy Everett – ripples / outcast

The music of Maryland-born, D.C.-based artist Troy Everett encompasses a whole range of genres. From orchestral strings and electronic beats to more metal-adjacent screaming, his work lifts elements from across the stylistic gamut to bring to life his reflective and vulnerable themes. New double single ripples / outcast is the perfect example of this range, the first a mournful classical composition, the latter a stark and confessional pop song which slots alongside the work of artists like G. Brenner. “I feel like an outcast in my own mind,” Everett sings as the song builds around him, frenzied beats and lush classical arrangements coalescing into something urgent and poignant.

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The result is a collection of songs which rewards close and repeated listens, born in one man’s vision and realised within a community of collaboration. A record of turmoil, fear and unease that seeks wonder not via some great transcendence but rather what already lies near. The people and places, the environments right there beneath our feet. Kupstas identifies as “the feeling of being unmoored from the familiar” as one central to Ginkgo, but this does not indicate a remove or escape from the everyday. Rather, it takes inspiration from Barthelme in its commitment to the ordinary. A refusal to accept ordinary as ordinary at all. Attempting to not just represent the world, but show it to us anew.

Lead single ‘Salmon Skin’ serves as an entry point for this endeavour. A song full of the layered allusions and synchronicities which mark the record, drawing lines between seemingly unconnected things to trace the edges of feelings which might otherwise be too large or unwieldy to properly convey. “‘[The track] was mostly written while I was in Lebanon a few years ago, volunteering with an NGO in the Bekaa Valley,” Kupstas explains:

It was an intense time. I was corresponding with Alena Spanger (longtime collaborator), who was in California at the time, getting lost in coves. I was spending my breaks sitting in a sort of grotto on the grounds of a very old monastery, where a mangey feral cat would sit on my lap. The geographical and psychic displacements felt a bit surreal. And I found some sort of parallel correspondence between salmon and spiders. I had been in the process of moving to Switzerland, but feeling extremely conflicted about the prospect, and lots of things were unraveling, dizzying forks in the road. That’s what that song grew out of.

‘Salmon Skin’ also comes with a video directed by Tyler Rai and Kupstas himself, filmed by Sarah Lass and edited by Nina Vroemen. Check it out below:

Gingko is out on the 24th June via Whatever’s Clever and you can pre-order it now from Bandcamp.

Photo by Dave Scanlon

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In this way, the bowerbird could be said to be an atypical organism. One benefiting from or at least making the best of man’s encroachment on the natural world, the ongoing disaster we’ve conducted for years and seem hell-bent on continuing. The environment might be corrupted, yes, but how else would their materials be so durable and permanent? So ever-replenishing? Where else would they get so many brilliant colours?

Not that they have a choice in the matter. The entire land could be choked in plastic, the seas acidic and roiling, the skies preternaturally dark with ash and dying embers, and still the bowerbird would go about its business. Scavenging and arranging and waiting for a mate that might never come. After all, to build a bower is to be a bowerbird. To be a bowerbird is to build a bower.

Benedict Kupstas, the lead figure of Brooklyn’s Field Guides, feels a certain alignment between the actions of the bowerbird and his own artistic practice. “The creative urge feels like such a deep-rooted, primal impulse, as if art is a conduit to a more natural state,” Kupstas explains. “I think making songs (or writing stories or painting or dancing) is an only slightly more sophisticated version of [the bowerbird’s bowers].”

The decidedly bowerbirdian artwork of the latest Field Guides album This Is Just A Place, out on Brooklyn label Whatever’s Clever, is therefore no coincidence. This is a record indebted to nature, the songs tied by a thread of unashamed awe, a kind of delighted disbelief that we find ourselves alive and surrounded by a myriad of other lifeforms. This extends from Kupstas’s lyrics to the use of found sounds and nature recordings, the latter forming a kind of sonic basecoat on many of the tracks that grounds them in the ecosystem from which they arose.

If a bowerbird’s bower is a survey of a given moment, an archive of the present materials collected and arranged, then This Is Just A Place could be said to be Kupstas’s own bower. The record is scavenged from far and wide, Kupstas setting out into life and bringing back small parts with which to represent it. There are field recordings from the Sapsucker Woods in Ithaca, New York, Costa Rica’s Corcovado National Park and Italy’s Parco Nationale delle Cinque Terre, as well as literary quotes and references from the likes of Julio Cortázar, Lorrie Moore, Vladimir Nabokov and A. R. Ammons. Take ‘(field crickets & melodica)’, a song that lives up to its title with melodica wheezing gently over a thick thatch of stridulating crickets. The track plucks the essence of the dark of night in all its tactile texture, serving not to recreate some flat, nostalgic facsimile but rather preserve the very night itself.

Such a method of documentation is explored in Valeria Luiselli’s latest novel, The Lost Children Archive, an author Kupstas claims as an influence. Luiselli’s archivist narrator thumbs through Sally Man’s Immediate Family and finds herself taken by “the constant tension in those pictures, a tension between the document and fabrication, between capturing a unique fleeting instant and staging an instant.” There’s something about the photographs, she realises, that eschews the normal relationship one forms with the past. “In [Mann’s] pictures there isn’t nostalgia for the fleeting moment, captured by chance with a camera. Rather, there’s a confession: this moment captured is not a moment stumbled upon and preserved but a moment stolen, plucked from the continuum of experience in order to be preserved.”

The distinction Luiselli describes is that between an archive and a memorial, and her point is as applicable to the songs of Field Guides as it is to Sally Mann. A memorial, a simulacrum of the lost, is a collection of exceptional objects to be viewed with wistful longing, its presence only serving to highlight what is absent now and forever. But an archive cheats time, snatching objects from the moment in order to bring them forward, as though in removing something from the present it can be saved from a slow slide into the past.

Importantly, the information accumulated in an archive is not weighted or ranked. A personal story weaves through This is Just a Place, one of a relationship failing and passing on, but this is not held above the world in which it unfolds. Indeed, in so much art the environment feels created in order to accentuate the human experience—the metaphorically-ripe rainstorms and heatwaves, the summer sunset and winter’s night—as though surroundings are transient and fleeting projections of a character’s abiding interior. In bedding the personal so intrinsically within the wider environment of nature and history, Kupstas reverses this relationship. The environment is the enduring image, a backdrop across which various cycles of life and love pass. And there’s nothing exceptional about the human contingent of these patterns. Shaking sand from a loved one’s hair is placed next to terns diving into the surf, wasps landing to lick sweat from arms. Longing joins lavender plants, heartbreak next to cat scratches, cut grass and cotton limbs and the crepuscular cricket’s chirp. Not, to borrow Luiselli’s words, nostalgia for the fleeting moment but a representation of the whole tapestry of life.

This Is Just a Place can serve as the reminder of this fact, an archive of life that brings the entire world into view. For beyond our own heads lies something vast and beautiful and strange, something that can assuage our own suffering if only we stop and let it. Something that we’re losing day upon day. In this way, Field Guides elucidate the dangerous paradox of our time. We can be saved from our own self-importance through a reconnection with the natural world, but that very self-importance is pushing nature to the brink. And when the illness threatens the cure the prognosis is bleak. “To be honest, I’m usually not very optimistic about the future, given current trends,” Kapstas admits. “But I also loathe defeatism and nihilism when I hear it from others […] But we have to find ways to get galvanized and keep fighting.” This Is Just a Place is Field Guides fighting to remind us what we stand to lose, to preserve and persevere in the face of such dread, to carry on living. After all, to preserve and persevere is to be a human. To be a human is to carry on living.

This is Just a Place is out now on Whatever’s Clever Records and you can get it from the Field Guides Bandcamp page.

First and second photo by Catalina Kulczar, third by Yuko Ulrich, album art by Julia Huete

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This is Just a Place is will be released on Seretan’s Whatever’s Clever label this September, and his story is indicative of the Field Guides sound. They work in an organic style in which beauty and tragedy are tightly wound, the sure passing of time infusing things with a strange feeling, a simultaneous sadness and joy. The concluding image of the bird speaks to something deeper within their music too, the kindness and care of the act as its head rests against the man’s chest. Even in surrender to the reality of things, small acts of compassion can be found.

Though Field Guides has had a revolving cast of collaborators over the years, the project has always orbited around the central presence of Benedict Kupstas. This is Just a Place sees Field Guides reemerge with a new cast of talent. Taylor Bergren-Chrisman (upright bass, electric bass, piano, Hammond organ) Timothy Simmonds (electric guitar, 12-string acoustic guitar, percussion) Booker Stardrum (drum kit, percussion, bag of chips), and a wider cast of guests (including Alena Spanger, Fred Thomas, D. James Goodwin, Jamie Reeder, Angela Morris and more) join Kupstas and elevate his music and writing into something grand.

Lead single ‘Guessing at Animals’ sets the tone. With its narrator moving through the aftermath of heartbreak and slowly becoming enmeshed with someone else, the track might appear to be a regular breakup/new love tale, though to break the song into such terms is to deny its effervescent and idiosyncratic humanity. Images that might come off twee in the hands of others (playing tic-tac-toe on the back of a crush’s hand as your subway stop approaches, walking home alone and dreaming of what might be), feel playful and poignant, and mark This is Just a Place as an album to watch as we move into autumn.

Photo by Ivy Meissner, album art by Julia Huete 

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