School Of Language

“Genius, aghh… I think anybody that relies on it and thinks, ‘yeah I’m just a genius’… Well anybody who says that about themselves is obviously a complete cockhead anyway. But also what a stupid thing to rely on? What if you’re wrong?”

As David Brewis utters these words, I’m glad I didn’t call him a genius… because I was going to. Having become utterly immersed in Tones of Town, Brewis’ last record as part of Field Music and equally fascinated by Sea From Shore, his first as School of Language, the plan was to go in Paul Kimmage-style and hit him with the opener, “I think you’re a genius sir, what do you think of that?” Mercifully, I bottled it.

“For me to say thinking about it would spoil it would be pretentious. I’m not daft, I understand enough to know what I don’t understand and I’m aware of lots of the complexities. But I realise that that framework is there. Context can’t be written off…. So magic, genius, maybe those things exist and I’m too cynical. Who knows? I wouldn’t want to rely on it though. I’m a scientist, I don’t believe in magic.”

It’s quite something listening to David Brewis talk about his craft because it makes you remember that songwriting is exactly that. It’s bloody hard work, or at least it is for the most creative musicians tirelessly aiming to challenge themselves. From his first band The New Tellers, through Field Music and on now to School of Language, the Sunderland man’s music has embodied this philosophy. And as he admits, that learning curve can be traced right through.

“If you were to break music down into some mix of rhythm, harmony, melody and then the sonic picture, the timbre, then on the first record (Field Music’s self-titled debut) we found a new way for us to do rhythm or at least a way make it interesting and not to rely on clichés.”

“But then you start to get carried away with anything that’s harmonically different. We were quite conscious on Tones of Town to do things that were harmonically closer to what we get excited about. We’d try to work out what’s going on, learn abut it, become familiar with it so that when we come up with our own ideas, it naturally incorporates these things.”

Elaborating on this raison d’etre, David gives the example of the Duke Ellington book that sits above brother and Field Music alumnus Peter’s piano and that “he just sits there playing chords, going wow.” With the results of Peter’s extra curricular activities as The Week That Was arriving in August, School of Language has already set the bar unnervingly high, stepping up the musical evolution once more on the constantly compelling Sea From Shore.

“Seeing as we’d worked on rhythm and harmony, I’ve been working on melody that can still be very very tuneful but convey ambiguities and sourness, “ David says of Sea From Shore’s eleven intricately woven songs, noting the melodic rationale as a concoction equal parts Wagner and Thelonious Monk.

“I like the idea that you can take it on a superficial level and say, yeah that’s a groovy tune but as you get more into it you think that groovy tune is really strange. I’ve been dancing to this but actually it changes rhythm all the time.”

This week School of Language set out on a three week tour to make people dance around the States with a line-up completed by Tortoise’s Doug McCombs on bass and Ryan Rapsys of Euphone on drums. “Yeah, Doug McCombs is going to play bass for me,” David says shaking his head, “but this is the kind of thing that just happens when you’re involved with Thrill Jockey (SOL’s powerhouse US indie home), they say “we know a load of great bass players….”

The expanded School of Language live experience will be looser, David says and won’t suffer the restrictions he felt hurt Field Music’s live shows when they “went overboard in trying to recreate the records.” It begs the question then, will Field Music soon simply become a chapter in the School of Language story?

“I certainly can’t see us doing a Field Music album in the very near future, I think we’ve all got more things that we want to try out before that. I definitely want to write more songs as soon as I can so I think I’ll try and do another School of Language record.

“The three of us will be doing stuff together but it just won’t have Field Music on the cover for a while. If I don’t think of Field Music as a band then we’ve been making music together since 1994 and we just can’t escape each other so anything we do is in the context of the three of us. When it comes down to it, the musicians I most want to play with are those two. But what’s next? I’ve got no idea. More songs, more ideas, crazier ideas.”

The crazier and less ingenious the better.