Frank Baugh has been beguiling me with his warm and wobbly soundscapes for a couple of years now, but this is his first "proper" album.  I wasn't quite sure what to expect, as I have only heard a fraction of his vast catalog of limited-edition tapes and CD-Rs, making it very difficult to follow his chronological evolution. Also, I was secretly hoping that he was holding back some truly staggering material for his auspicious vinyl debut. After hearing it, I don’t think Fields and String eclipses his past work, takes things to another level, or delivers any major surprises, but it certainly reaffirms what myself and Frank's small-but-devoted following already knew: he makes some uniquely beautiful music.
Describing Sparkling Wide Pressure's sound is not an easy undertaking, as Baugh's work superficially has a lot in common structurally with ambient and drone music, but his objectives are far more ambitious.Frank's work seems intent on making a strong emotional connection, evoking adjectives like "bittersweet," and "nostalgia-soaked" while remaining steadfastly subtle and sublime and eschewing almost everything conventionally song-like.When he is at his best, Baugh's collages capture the feel of half-remembered memories and the innocence of youth, teasingly obscured by flickers, tape decay, and hiss.In fact, one of Frank's common sound sources makes the prefect metaphor for the entire Sparking Wide Pressure aesthetic: forgotten, time-ravaged home videos.
"Clear Pathway" begins the four-song album with a murky drone burbling with a chorus of awesomely mangled, wrong-speed voices.It is definitely a very striking piece, especially once the slow, off-kilter beat kicks in, but Baugh's somewhat invasive guitar playing ruins the spell a little bit for me.It isn't that he is a bad or unimaginative guitarist, but the mere fact that there is a "riff" transforms the piece from something mesmerizingly warped and hallucinatory into a very deranged jam. The side closes with longer, slightly more structured "Jeremy Moves," which bolsters an '80s film soundtrack-sounding synth bed with whimsical flurries of chimes, before slowly escalating in weirdness with slow motion train noises, snatches of voices, and strangled guitar ruin. It ultimately ends up being the best song on the album, as its somewhat unpromising opening motif is quickly (and permanently) buried beneath an avalanche of rhythmic, melancholy mindfuckery that unfolds until the very end.
The second side opens with the jangling, aggressively lo-fi guitar of "Summoning," which calls to mind a slightly more tuneful Jandek.As with most Sparkling Wide Pressure songs, however, the song gradually and seamlessly drifts into something else. In this case, something that sounds like a damaged tape of some synthesizer-based krautrock.Thankfully, it shifts gears yet again and gets noticeably better, morphing into rumbling washes of warm sounds and a haze of tortured flutes and echoes that fragilely holds together for the rest of the song's duration.The album's final piece, "Completely Inside," is also its most brief, clocking in at a mere five minutes.At first, it seems like relatively standard-issue Sparkling Wide Pressure, shimmering and quavering disorientingly beneath a shambling guitar solo.Unexpectly, however, its final minute drifts into a brilliant outro that resembles Popol Vuh's beautiful and haunting Aguirre: The Wrath of God theme.It is both exasperating and endearing that Baugh can just toss out something absolutely perfect with no warning like that, then end the song without elaborating any further.Of course, that unpredictability is what keeps me eternally curious about each new release, as I never know quite when (or if) inspiration will strike.
I am a little sad to say that Fields and String is not Frank Baugh's masterpiece, but it is a likable, unique, and solid album strewn with many excellent passages anyway.I definitely had unfairly high expectations, as I have been occasionally floored by his work in the past and expect each new effort to be better than the last.It doesn’t work like that and I have probably heard so many Sparkling Wide Pressure tapes that their impact is hopelessly and permanently blunted for me now.Regardless, this is probably a fine introduction for anyone unfamiliar with Baugh's work (particularly the second half of "Jeremy Moves").Also, it is a bit more widely available and high-profile than anything else he has done, so it will definitely be his most popular album by default.That suits me perfectly fine. I suspect that whichever Sparkling Wide Pressure album a person hears first is destined to be their favorite.
Samples:
(This is a vinyl-only release, so no mp3 samples are available.The entire album can currently be streamed here though.)
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