Leverage Models
"Interim Deliverable" CASS/DIG
Hometapes 042
www.home-tapes.com
Something In Construction
www.somethinginconstruction.com
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Hand-made by Shannon Fields, 2011, at Harrington Road
Mixed by D. James Goodwin at The Isokon, Woodstock, NY.
Additional musicians:
D. James Goodwin: percussion, bass guitar (1, 4)
Jeff Gretz: rototoms (1)
Jon Natchez: saxophones (1, 2, 3)
Matt Lavelle: cuica (4)
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Leverage Models came to me as it’s likely appearing to you: as a surprise. Like a phone call in the middle of the night, these five songs, called 'Interim Deliverable', injected a new narrative into my life and into my understanding of their creator, Shannon Fields. Mixed up in each others’ worlds since connecting around the fire of his band Stars Like Fleas (and releasing their last album 'The Ken Burns Effect' in 2008), we know each other well — but only as well as we know ourselves. Professional makers, collectors, worriers, and talkers, we spun on our separate coasts, trying to plan a future of releasing music together while that future just kept on its own schedule.
As “Tonight When I Burn” tumbled out of the speakers for the first time, I was frozen. It was like seeing someone again after twenty years. Or maybe it was that realization that my life is long enough to already hold a space of twenty years. I was both emotionally rocked and cerebrally piqued, flooded with something akin to nostalgia mixed with the very-here-and-very-now…
…mixed with Roto-Toms.
…mixed with Saxophone (with a capital “S”).
…mixed with synthesizers and vocals you can (try to) sing along to.
Commanding the instruments and techniques he defines, respects, and plays with as “discarded materials”, Shannon’s skill as a composer has taken on a new color — one crafted from a blend of experience, change, experimentation, chaos, friendship, and the gift of time and silence.
The busiest year in Shannon Fields’ music career was also the one that saw him move away from New York City over a decade after arriving there on the long and littered road from his Missouri birthplace. Detached from any archetypal notion of home, Shannon made his own version in Brooklyn — among his wife, a slew of collaborators, a pile of gear, and a scene with a wide embrace for the bold and increasingly fearless musical and conceptual interplay that is Shannon’s native language.
Bound for upstate New York, where his wife would train horses and his desk job would disappear, Shannon maintained a striking to-do list of activities that say a lot about who he is: he curated a month (around 50 individual shows) at John Zorn’s music venue, The Stone; Stars Like Fleas played the Rooftop Films festival, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Museum, MoMA, and toured North America and Europe, playing the Pompidou Centre in Paris; he recorded and toured with Roberto Carlos Lange’s Helado Negro; he toured with The Silent League; he performed with Rhys Chatham at Lincoln Center; he was composer in residence at Issue Project Room; he was composer in residence at the Harold Arts centre in Chesterhill, OH; he created music for a few commercial campaigns; he began producing for other artists; and so on.
Yet between the lines of this resumé, indicative of a bent toward collaboration, organization, and even to the wrangling in between, was an exploding need to create, alone. Shannon writes, “My only rules were that I would shut my conscious impulses out as much as possible (my impulse to interrogate and analyze every gesture, ponder what imagined audience every sound was for, worry about what outlet would be used to release the music) and just make. Whenever I was home (a few days here, a week there) I spent every day from 9-to-5 in my studio, working hard at the job of emptying my head. I never remembered what I had done while I was on the road making more ‘serious’ music, so it was kind of exciting to come home after a month or two and listen to the growing body of…whatever it was.”
And 'Interim Deliverable' was born, its genesis tale one of wild transition. What began as a reaction has evolved into a realization, incubated in an attic bedroom with Shannon’s mies en place of instruments and devices, supplemented by the skilled hands of Jon Natchez, Matt Lavelle, Jeff Gretz, and D. James Goodwin. Shannon’s own timeline is mid-earthquake: what would have taken years is taking months, sometimes mere days. While you listen to the new track, somewhere far away, another one is being born. That’s country living.
-Sara Padgett Heathcott, Hometapes
