From felte, the label founded by Ghostly label manager Jeff Owens, comes Nite Fields. Of their debut album, felte writes: Home is a difficult place to pinpoint for Australian-based band Nite Fields. While their coming together took place in Melbourne, all four members originally hail from Brisbane. A humid and notoriously conservative city, the band is currently split between that city and Sydney. Like the chorus on “Come Down” that makes the downward trajectory sound ornate and beautiful, the debut LP, Depersonalisation, from Nite Fields is sparse and cold yet inviting and intimate at the same time. Depersonalisation was conceived and completed over a four-year period in all three distinct cities. Recordings were completed almost entirely by the band members in over twenty locations including garages, bedrooms, borrowed studios, stairwells and a restaurant dining room after hours. Lead singer and songwriter Danny Venzin is opinionated, passionate, and uncompromising, whether releasing works on his own label Lost Race or maintaining his diligent focus on a unified (though not narrow-minded) Nite Fields aesthetic, regardless of what music is currently in fashion. His band mates Chris Campion, Liza Harvey and Michael Whitney consist of deeply immersed players in a tight-nit local D.I.Y. scene Though Nite Fields’ early works were completed with the staunch D.I.Y. ethic that runs through the band, Depersonalisation is the first time the band have turned almost all of the mixing duties over to somebody else. That somebody was Australian iconoclast Nigel Lee-Yang of cult band HTRK, who’s known for his distinctive musical vision. Having approached the band after hearing their self-released “Vacation” single, which was recently re-released by Los Angeles label felte, Nigel set about mixing the album in his Sydney home studio over a labor-intensive nine-month period between mid 2013 and early 2014. The results are rich with characterful sounds. Deftly crafted and sonically diverse, within the nine tracks you’ll find noisy percussion, jangly guitars, potent bass and hypnotic synthesizers, all polished with Yang’s signature electronic sheen. Poetic and personal, you need only to listen to the record's lyrics and atmosphere to understand where the title Depersonalisation comes from. Recurring themes include disassociation of reality and dissipation of love, with Venzin’s understated and at times unsettling vocal delivery almost as hard to forget as the album’s unique mood.
