AdFi is a side project of Adam Fielding, focussing primarily on using 80s/early 90s-type sounds.

The AdFi album is a collection of music compiled from three EPs, each produced & released under a variety of anonymous guises between 2012 – 2013.

A couple of years ago, I was – as I often am – writing an awful lot of music for various people and purposes, and found myself wanting an outlet that I could work on between projects. A fun project, solely for the purpose of acting as an additional creative outlet. No expectations or pressures. After settling on a very particular palette of sounds with which to work with, I ended up writing an EP and continued working on my more “serious” projects. This was back in 2012 – before I started writing tunes for Pieces, which served as a more open creative melting-pot of sorts.

After leaving this EP for a while, I thought it’d be a fun experiment to release it anonymously. I didn’t want this project to become associated directly with me, so I kept it completely separate from my regular work and released it under the name “AdFi” – hardly a particularly cunning pseudonym, but without referencing it myself I figured it would go by mostly un-noticed. I figured that having it connected to me in any way would take a lot of the fun away from working on it, and would force myself to impose expectations on any future material (should I choose to write any). I got a pretty nice little response from this first EP, and found myself re-visiting this idea over the next year and a half.

As an aside: interestingly, once I had decided to release AdFi, I noticed someone had made a fan-video of one of the tracks from the first EP, Mondial. I thought that was pretty neat!

Over the life of this project I ended up releasing a total of three EPs. For the second and third EPs I dropped the “AdFi” name and went with something else as, at the time, I was thinking of using the AdFi name for yet another project. That didn’t pan out, hence my decision to go back to the original AdFi name for this album release. Are you still with me? Good.

Even after the completion of these three EPs I had no intention of having this particular set of music associated directly with me, and I left it open to allow me to continue writing more music. After about a year or so of not writing any new AdFi material, I decided the time was right to compile the three EPs into one single album’s worth of music and finally associate it with my own name. I certainly wouldn’t say that the project is “dead” or anything that drastic, but I felt as though AdFi had come to a logical conclusion and this seemed like a rather nice way of wrapping things up.

While trying to get people to listen to the AdFi EPs I must admit that I put out some rather pretentious descriptions of the music, and played on the whole anonymity angle a bit more than I probably should have. This project was always intended to act as a fun creative outlet, and enabled me to channel some of the ideas and feelings that have inspired me over the years into short creative bursts. I would never wish to impose a definite “this is what the album is supposed to represent”-vibe, but the sounds themselves certainly gave me a pretty heavy nostalgic hit. They reminded me not so much of the 80s – although there certainly was a sense and awareness of that (I’m a little too young to really get all genuinely nostalgic about the 80s!) – but of the early to mid-90s (and possibly even a little later), back when I was listening almost exclusively to VGM and tracker tunes which, interestingly, tended to make use of samples not dis-similar to the palette of sounds I chose for AdFi. A lot of the seemingly obscure song titles reference very particular distant memories for me, though obviously the whole thing is very much open to interpretation if you so fancy.

AdFi was particularly interesting for me because I’m so used to working on projects quite openly. AdFi was the total opposite of that – a part of me did feel that I was being a little deceitful to everyone interested in my music, which was certainly never my intention. Being able to finally release this material and associate it with my own name is actually a huge relief to me.

AdFi taught me a lot about the importance of having a creative outlet open for experimentation and personal creativity, and – due to the nature of it never intending to be properly released – I think it’s a surprisingly personal album. While it might not necessarily be for everyone, I hope that some of you get a kick out of it, in much the same way as this year’s Neffle releases.

The AdFi album is available right now, for free, from Bandcamp. You can download it in the format of your choice here.

Merry Christmas/holidays/religious or non-religious celebration/occasion of your choosing!