Fields, Scott - Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame
SKU
NA-CD-029
"Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame is Scott Fields first “proper” solo CD. Although Drawings, from 2008, was also solo, it was more of an electric sound collage (for a multi-media installation at the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein) than a pure musical excursion. Either way, BiWDiF is certainly Fields’ first acoustic solo CD. The compositions are based on nine Charles Bukowski poems. As with most of his music, here Fields mixes composed material and improvisation.
Fields’ performs on a flat-top, steel-string guitar using a, more-or-less, classical-guitar technique. Because steel strings are as hard as steel, they quickly wear down fingernails. That’s why most flattop guitarists play with plectrums, fingerpicks (which fit over each finger), or the fleshy pads of their fingers. But genetic good fortune and decades of clean living have left Fields with unusually strong, talon-like fingernails that he keeps polished to a razor’s edge. This allows him to drawn a wide spectrum of colors from his Scott Fields model Ark New Era guitar.
The first five tracks, a suite called “burning in water,” are in a tuning that is common in folk and classical guitar music. The highest five strings are tuned as usual and the 6th string is lowed a whole stop to D.
The final four tracks, the suite “drowning in flame,” use a quarter-tone tuning that Fields believes he invented. Octaves are divided into 24 quarter-steps instead of the 12 half-steps that the frets on a guitar usually allow. The 1st, 3rd, and 5th strings are reduced by a quartertone. Because adjacent strings are a quartertone apart, it’s possible to play “normal” pitches and their quartertone equivalents by alternating between strings. “Notating these quartertone pieces is incredibly time consuming,” Fields says. “I have to write in a fingering for every single note. And when playing this stuff, I have to follow the fingering. Spontaneously playing a F# on the B string and was marked for the E string would result in an F# that was a quartertone sharp.”"
- LabelNew Atlantis
- UPC616892322443