The Human Field

Manny Fewer was born under a bad sign in the dingy, disease-ridden cargo hold of a trade ship that was smuggling his family into the United States. The Fewers had left their Communist homeland to escape the persecution brought on by the radical anarchist beliefs held by Manny’s parents. A woman in the cargo hold identified herself, through broken English, as a midwife. Upon delivering Manny, she cried “El Diablo! El Diablo!” and threw herself overboard.
Manny attended a small, one room school building in New Orleans, working as a busboy in the evenings to support his eleven younger siblings, nine of whom are disabled. At age thirteen, fate brought Miles Hermann into the dusky dive where Manny worked. A withered, elderly jazz musician, Miles gave Manny his tenor saxophone, and died in his sleep that night. Manny taught himself to play and by age fifteen was performing in Col. Milford’s Dixieland review, a troupe of mostly elderly street musicians that had once featured Miles Hermann himself.
The night before Col. Milford was murdered by a man he had cuckolded in 1948, the eccentric bandleader kicked Manny out of the band “for his own good,” telling the boy “You don’t want to give your soul to the same sirens that took ours.” As Col. Milford’s body was, unbeknownst to Manny, being dumped in a reservoir, Manny was knocking on the front door of the New Orleans Jesuit school where he would receive most of his education.
Meanwhile, in the ghettos of Detroit, The Man Called Podium was getting in and out of scrapes with the law. A petty thief, con-artist, hustler and notorious agitator, Podium had just barely managed to finish high school with no criminal record. He enrolled in Wayne State University to study art, where he took his love of hip-hop to the next level by becoming an amateur producer. A short stint with the Ypzilanti Playaz left a bad taste in his mouth after the group developed a fierce rivalry with fellow Detroit performers Insane Clown Posse. After a savage beating at the hands of ICP-idolizing juggalos, Podium decided to lay low and relocated to his tragically deceased group’s namesake; Ypsilanti.
In dusty Upland, Indiana, Michael was studying literature at Taylor University. The product of a quiet, Quaker upbringing, he was a loner, a misfit and only a halfway decent guitarist. Disliked by most of his peers, Michael inhabited the closest thing to a subculture that such a small school can have. Through his association with Rhiannon Leifheit, the Midwest’s Edie Sedgwick, Michael attended a series of happenings; the Goth Knitting Club, Elevator Dance Parties and the infamous Handy Andy Riots of Ought-Four. At one of these happeneings, a sing-along at the gravesite of James Dean that was attended by the complete population of a local mental health institution, he struck up a conversaton with Manny, who had come to Taylor to study elementary education. Manny and Michael bonded over their love of music and a mutual distaste for the barren Indiana wasteland around them. Manny exposed Michael to jazz, soul and Afrobeat, and Michael exposed Manny to ambient music, Steve Reich, and Scott Walker. Tired of the confines of cornfields, the two decided to transfer to Eastern Michigan to start their sophmore year.
Podium had enrolled in the art program at Eastern Michigan University and had already made local headlines with his “viral guerilla propaganda”; a series of art projects that were equal parts protest, hoax and vandalism. He had begun dropping Jungle science on a series of home-made and self-released drum’n’bass CDRs and had taught himself to program a Roland TR-909 with one hand. Through a friend of a friend of a friend, one of Podium’s sides found itself in the hands of the scraggly musician who would become an integral part of Podium’s future; Manny Fewer.
On a fateful November 1st, Podium was on his way to the library when he heard the sounds of strange, discordant music emanating from a campus parking garage. Manny and Michael had organized what would be the first of many Spontaneous Music Bonanzas. Podium fit right in and it was immediately clear that the three of them were on the exact same musical wavelength. They began playing music together and named themselves The Human Field after Podium had a vision of a field of potential Buddhas growing from "the soil of Jah."
Discography:
A Starting Point… (2006)
Blessed are the Barren (2007)