Lightfields is my second full-length album, released independently in September 2010. You can listen to and buy it from here.

Lightfields is the sophomore artist album of UK-based electronic musician Adam Fielding, written and recorded from 2008-2010 and released in September 2010.

Building on his debut album Distant Activity, Adam weaves a delicate balance of incredible production prowess, live instrumentation and emotional songwriting, resulting in a remarkably accessible listen while boasting a startling amount of depth. From the driven, mangled beats of The Initiation through to the off-kilter synth-rock of The Same Mistakes, listeners are treated to a consistently organic record with more than a few surprises along the way.

Lightfields strikes a creative balance between artistic development, memorable songwriting and accessibility, resulting in an album that revels in cutting-edge production and artistic expression.

Following the completion of my university degree in 2009, I faced a bit of an uncertain future. I had long figured that I wanted to do something heavily entrenched in music with my life, but had no idea as to what the future held. This feeling of uncertainly was none-more-prevalent than the time immediately following my graduation, when I ended up living in a temporary house before moving into a new house a few weeks later. I was on my own, isolated in a house surrounded by my packed up possessions and a long way from my friends and family. Needless to say, I busied myself by working out a plan of action and by writing a lot of music. One of these pieces of music formed the original version of the title track from Lightfields, and the seeds for a follow-up album to Distant Activity were sewn.

One thing I absolutely wanted to avoid with this album was to create “Distant Activity Part 2″. I wanted to try out new ideas and sounds, and create something completely different in tone and style. As such, I decided early on to focus more on organic sounds and combine this with heavy sound manipulation, glitch-type effects and to go for a generally more emotional aesthetic. As I had always planned on this album being an independent release, I knew I had free reign to try out something totally different and that’s exactly what I did – I knew from the off that not everybody would appreciate this change in direction, but it was something I was desperate to try out.

The majority of the writing and production of the album occurred in late 2009 – mid 2010. Once again I was working in a bedroom studio, working with a greater set of tools this time and experimenting with a wider variety of sound sources. While Distant Activity was a more introspective record, Lightfields was always more of a representation of living for the now. While it shared some themes and ideas with it’s predecessor (such as the idea of finding beauty in the darkest places), it was a much more confrontational record which resulted in something that was a little more intense. It was also a change for me to include a few guest musicians on the record, such as the guitar work of Nathan Bradley & Josh Clark and the vocals of Elisa Etemad, with their performances adding an extra dimension to their relevant tracks. Fusing electronic sensibilities with a more rock-oriented aesthetic was the name of the game here, and I’m incredibly pleased with how it all turned out.

With my experience of releasing Distant Activity independently, I knew exactly what to expect this time around and, prior to its release, spent a great deal of time planning and preparing everything for a September 8th release in 2010 around my then part-time day-job. I once again relied on the services of Magnatune and CDBaby and everything went out without a hitch. While I had originally planned for this to be a digital-only release, my own preferences and fondness of physical media drove me to make another short-run of digipak-styled CDs.

Lightfields was released in September 2010. Like it’s predecessor before it, it was picked up and re-released digitally through Distinctive Records in late 2010.