Splashgirl - Field Day Rituals

2013 CD release.

With its fourth album, “Field Day Rituals”, the group is taking yet another giant step up and forward. The album is detail-rich, dramatic, full of atmosphere and massive, despite the sometimes viscous and reserved quality of the music. The players themselves describe the music on the album as “lighter and more optimistic than on the previous album”, although the soundscape remains so bass-heavy that the average kitchen radio will be under threat of extinction. Here Splashgirl refines its personal idiom, although
at the same time the influences of post-rock, classical music and, not least, jazz are even more apparent this time around.

The album was recorded in the course of two intense weeks at Avast Studio in Seattle, USA, together with engineer and producer Randall Dunn (Akron/Family, Black Mountain, Sun City Girls, Boris, Kinski, Sunn O))) and Earth). This recording marks the first time the trio has given a producer the authority to take decisions on behalf of the band. “He got us to play some of the music as though it were classical jazz, which we haven’t done for a long time. Randall also inspired us to take a favourable look at jazz again.”

Violist Eyvind Kang (Bill Frisell, Beck, John Zorn, Marc Ribot) plays on three tracks, and Timothy Mason’s subtle modular synths are a welcome surprise in several places on the album.