"Displaced Field Recordings is chiefly an album of amorphous guitar meditations, nicked off-course by subtle undercurrents. More wistful than desperate, the displacement referenced in the title is most of all that of nostalgia, unfinished histories. The album is modeled as an archive of old recordings: Songs are often incomplete; they can begin in the middle, and cut off suddenly. Sometimes we only get the a few chords, perhaps a sung note or two, before the tape sputters out. Like freak folkers Cocorosie and Devendra Banhart, singer Lindsay Dobbin often speeds up her voice to reproduce the high, crackling brightness of early gramophone recordings. Emphasizing the found music concept, the album even includes a cover of the “Blue Moon of Kentucky†mixed in with the originals. The visible mechanics of recordings are especially crucial here. Sounds are intentionally muffled or obscured by a high volume of white noise; the vocals in particular often seem to be wrapped in cotton batting. The recording seems to belong to an era in which time-stopping technology was unfamiliar, full of malevolent potential, as cameras were for Victorians who thought they could capture ghosts invisible to the human eye. “Faces on the River Side†features snippets of voice crackling in and out over the song, each long enough for us to catch its tone of ethereal dread but not long enough to make out what it’s saying. “It Creeps†is a sonic trek through an ancient, dilapidated house; creaking footsteps and the running monologue of the frightened explorer, layered over synth lines that hum under the floorboards with the not-quite-silence of abandoned places. Then, gradually, the background starts to take over: First you hear the tape turn and crackle inside the recorder, then the white noise becomes louder and louder, obscuring and finally obliterating Dobbin’s voice, as if the house had simply risen up and reclaimed its ambiguous silence." - Sarah Feldman, PopMatters.com
