New from Home Assembly Music: Fieldhead

Home Assembly Music has only released two albums to date — The Declining Winter’s Haunt The Upper Hallways and Northerner’s The Ridings — and both have been quite solid. And this November, they’ll be releasing their third album: They Shook Hands For Hours, the debut album from Fieldhead, aka The Declining Winter’s Paul Elam.

From Home Assembly’s website:

They Shook Hands For Hours… takes the minimalist, glitchy, low end rumble of Machinefabriek, Phillip Jeck and The Caretaker but contains arrangements that are concise, structured and almost pop orientated in their brevity. The dusty, grainy textures can be reminiscent of Khonnor’s textbook 2005 album Handwriting, but in this case the ambient cinematic drones of Stars of the Lid and Labradford replace the ghosts of lo-fi pop. It is no wonder that the artist divulges his number one influence as tape hiss, but in no way should it be taken that this is a minimalist or avant-garde work. The melodicisms are notable from the opening “This Train Is A Rainbow” with its Labradford style guitar twangs through to the echoes of Aphex Twin’s dusty loops on “I’m Fond Of Maps”. The warmth of “real” instruments is always audible, particularly violins which swoop and soar in the wide open landscapes of “He’d Found The Sea”, recalling Manchester acoustic-electro favourites The Boats.

Judge for yourself: you can listen to several tracks from They Shook Hands For Hours here.

And as has been the case with Home Assembly Music releases so far, initial copies of They Shook Hands For Hours will come with a bonus CD of remixes by Northerner, The Declining Winter, Pausal, Library Tapes, and Glissando, to name a few.

They Shook Hands For Hours will be released November 2, 2009.