Tremolo Fields - red birds on a branch [EP]

“Tremolo Fields combines folk sensibilities with rock and electronic styles to weave its evocative sounds.” – Various Small Flames

“a scintillating electronic pop jewel” – Portland Press Herald

Tremolo Fields is the musical identity of David Rogers, a songwriter and multidisciplinary artist based in Portland, Maine. The four songs on Tremolo Fields’ new EP, titled red birds on a branch, have been burning into focus in Rogers for ages. To the listener, each feels like a picture, a physical one that you hold in your hand, playing tricks with the light.

Over 13 minutes, these songs hum with a distant electricity, a vocabulary redolent of a filmmaker or a novelist. They are replete with the stuff of memory and familiar gestures—stick and poke tattoos, never-ending rooftop conversations, long-kept documents once passed by hand. For Rogers, one imagines, each of these objects and scenes of desire contains its own particular story. Through Tremolo Fields, they become instances of collectively felt memory, a long-exposed frame.

Yet Rogers is a songwriter. Once, he was among the searching rock fans of the 1990s, cutting his teeth on basement shows in Iowa City and driving long roads with friends on small tours with their upstart guitar-based bands before the millennium and its various American crashes. He blinked, and he was a professor on the outskirts of Minnesota’s Twin Cities. Much later, in the great reshuffling of spring 2020, he was reunited with an old guitar. The first Tremolo Fields record, a lovely and wobbly LP titled still as can be, came a year later, the product of a mutual songwriting pact with an old friend, trusting each other into old habits.

Now, all the timelines have lined up, and Tremolo Fields is ascendant. With a proof of concept behind him, red birds on a branch marks a new day in Rogers’s ongoing project. This new EP was produced by John Ross, the frontman and songwriter of NYC indie rock band Wild Pink, whose resourceful guidance and instrumentation anchor these songs to posts across generations of yearning rock music. Along with echoes of other influences like Jeremy Enigk and The Breeders, The Knife and Fever Ray, you can hear echoes of Wild Pink’s postmodernist Americana, their fascination with late twentieth century FM radio and its comforting contours and wistful timbres. As a result, the songs have a familiar kind of musculature, built over a beating heart of Rogers and his sites of memory and desire. With each listen, you can feel them breathe, ache, stretch, and quietly make sense of the past, fleshing out Rogers’s story from snapshots to living scenes.

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