Words by Jake Henneman//Illustration by Ryan Flynn
“Longitude -92°19.8’, latitude 38°57.1’”. According to my good friend Google Earth, the static voices which echo the aforementioned coordinate locations at the beginning of Foundry Field Recordings latest “Prompts/Miscues” lands our cursor directly over the band’s hometown of Columbia, Missouri. It is hollow speech—white noise echoing out above our heads, over the radio waves of whoever should snatch it up on a headset here on the ground. “Battle Brigades, Pt. 1” picks up as the voices fade out and begins our travel. It is a noise piece with building guitar and percussion crescendos until it abruptly comes to an end at its peak. The first song is like the lift-off of what we can expect the next 10 songs to be, and that is guitar-driven rock with an ever-present spacey noise rock element that serves as the backbone you can always feel, if not always consciously hear.

“Prompts” is nothing we haven’t heard before. It is stuff that has been pioneered a decade ago with the Flaming Lips (see “Clouds Taste Metallic”) and Grandaddy (albeit more straightforward). The FFR play down-to-earth cosmic rock. There are great spatial soundscapes that come out of nowhere and bounce around your skull as though it is as empty as the sky above. Lead vocalist Billy Schuh’s voice, as well as the backing vocals, are rarely without reverb and echo. And yet, the riffs are warmly and gently strummed, and the harder stuff isn’t pretentious, nor is it all too unfamiliar.

It is all about using the sound and space cooperatively, making the sound as big as it can be made. The FFR have the unique ability to fill the space they create with ambient, yet loud, guitar washes and string arrangements. There is a hollow and empty feeling looming around many of the songs, as well as their subject matter, which surround the guitar work in every direction. Songs like “Circuits on Board” and “Clones Were Made For Them But Not For Us” deal with isolation symptoms in our growingly mechanical world. The subject matter sounds rather daunting, but here it is executed well because it is not dwelled too much upon, and it is not negatively preached.

Subject and soundscapes mesh very well together, and of course there is the occasional warmth that shines through and makes this, overall, an optimistic album. The closer, “Untitled” is another noise piece that aims at a sense of disillusionment. A hovering and haunting guitar wash looms as someone enters an empty room and surfs the channels an old television or radio, with all the channels discussing important matters like the stock market and politics. But the person in the room flips about until he comes to a sunny acoustic song. It epitomizes the album in many ways. There are bad things always looming, and sometimes it feels as though isolation has gotten the better of you, but if you keep turning the knobs you’re bound to find something a bit sunnier.

“Prompts” is as much a spatial rock album as it is guitar rock. It is empty, and yet still finds itself filling the space it creates rather lushly. Wherever that static voice in the opening 10 seconds is coming from, spewing out its coordinates over the vast oceans or above our cities and towns, we know there is always someone listening. We know important information is being logged. However hollow the soundscapes can be, there is always human emotion pulsing throughout the record. Although The FFR aren’t doing anything groundbreakingly new, they are doing what they set out to accomplish, with confidence. Space stretches infinitely around us, but it is important to remember the things we give a shit about are always mere miles away.

The Foundry Field Recordings