Sing High! Sing Low!​ ​is the second album from ​The Silver Field​, a sound world of Coral Rose and friends, released ​12th June 2020 ​on ​Crossness Records​, a new record label based in Thamesmead, South East London.

Its nine exploratory tracks combine to form an aural postcard - a collection of snapshots following the path of a journey. The story picks up where debut album ​Rooms​ (O Genesis Recordings, 2019) left off, with a decisive stepping out into the world, and follows Rose’s next steps, with one eye still trained on that starting point.

First to be shared from ​Sing High! Sing Low!​ ​is the colossal and hypnotic ​'Hearth Bite'​. Lyrically, ‘Hearth Bite’ speaks of internal conflict and deconstruction, piecing apart the different ways people can understand themselves and relate to one another, as well as how these ties can be gendered. Rose: “In the sung sections, I’m trying to understand what it means to love, be loved, and to love yourself in these different configurations. The spoken word sections​ ​deal with a journey, a decision and a process of moving forward. The combination of the two creates a song that, to me at least, is about leaving behind the past and moving forward with a new understanding and shift in perspective – like the weight has rearranged itself from out of the sky to solid ground under your feet.”

Showcasing Rose’s diverse influences and melodic know-how, ‘Salt Light’ covers both the internal and external grounds of that journey. Rose: “I wrote this lyric and melody walking home from my studio while living back in the small Derbyshire town where I grew up. The recordings on this album span a good five years, but that’s the place where it really came together. My walk home took me past my old school, out through the fields, and up a big hill. Since I knew this area so well, I found that I could easily walk at night with no light, and it felt really magical and restorative – ‘taking in fear, laying down love, as I walk.’”

A familiar part of Rose’s song craft, many of the tracks on ​Sing High! Sing Low!​ are formed around tape loops. These loops often go back to ​The Silver Field’s​ inception, drawn from the same collection of source material as ​Rooms​. What sets these songs apart from their predecessors is a striking new sense of extroversion, an exploratory propulsion, charting new musical territory while holding tight to the homemade idiosyncrasies of her previous work. Rose’s vocals stand front and centre, her sonic tapestries unfurled to their fullest, her storytelling more vibrantly human than ever before.

Sing High! Sing Low!​ ​is available on LP, CD & DL via ​Bandcamp.

THE SILVER FIELD, aka Coral Rose, has announced details of her debut album, Rooms, out on Tim Burgess’ O Genesis Recordings.

Rooms was recorded in Coral Rose’s bedroom and on the album instruments such as the double bass, cello, guitar, mandolin, harmonium and a bagpipe chanter form loops and layers, her father’s old SPX-90 drenching the rich sounds in delays and reverbs. Rooms is the perfect introduction to the sound world of Coral Rose and friends: the EVI (electronic valve instrument, a breath controlled analogue synth) is introduced on the opening track, ‘Afire’, via Cathy Lucas (Vanishing Twin), and Kiran Bhatt (Red River Dialect) drums on ‘Rain’. ‘Rain’, described by The Quietus as “a delicate and pleasing creature” earlier this year, has already had support from BBC 6Music’s Mary Ann Hobbs.

Rooms follows recent releases on O Genesis by Daniel O’Sullivan (VELD) and Richard Youngs (Belief), and like O’Sullivan and Youngs, whose albums are very much tied to a place – the home, whether through themes or creation – in this case, The Silver Field’s Rooms is focused on leaving a home behind, both physically and emotionally.

The home that Coral Rose feels she's leaving behind on Rooms is an old sense of self – encountering herself as an adult and more specifically, a human being. She explains, “This plays out through the metaphor of leaving a house behind – a house of the stuff that builds up around you as you grow up – leaving that behind to make your own decisions about how to live. The last track, ‘Rooms’, is just a little snippet but to me it’s a moment of looking back, seeing it all in a new light with a different perspective from outside, seeing all the feelings and meanings that were once so all-encompassing as something different – as just part of the landscape.”

This kind of liberation often comes with a sense of loss and this is felt keenly on ‘Rosebud’, a collaged piece, which she explains “is like a moment of everything falling apart or burning down, those screeches to me sound like beams breaking”. Elsewhere on the album, Coral Rose’s imagery depicts a dreamlike world, the album takes inspiration from both Rose’s own dreams, and the underwater landscape of waking dreams.

The artwork, created by Coral Rose, shows the artist’s connection with the landscape around her and on the cover, a particular home that she inhabited. Painted in North Wales, the front cover painting shows the artist’s view through a window, looking outwards to the rain and light while the inside sleeve artworks are polaroid photographs – multiple exposures of the setting sun through clouds.

Analogue processes flow throughout the album – several tracks on the album have a tape loop forming the spine of the song, and, explains Coral Rose, “the unpredictability of using a loop of tape rather than dragging something about on screen means sometimes something some little part of it becomes this perfect loop that I never would have heard if I was trying to compose something from the recordings myself.” The reel-to-reel player was found at a car boot sale: “the guy gave it me for £1 – it was the last change I had on me – because I got talking to him about Daphne Oram. It wasn’t in great shape and I kind of nursed it back to life. It had extra character because of that though, I think, a lot of the songs on the album aren’t in concert pitch because it tended to speed things up or slow things down, and often added strange sounds into the mix like the bass wobble in ‘Gost’.”

LP / CD / TAPE / DL available from Bandcamp