According to recording engineer Wayne Moss, singer/songwriter/genius Mickey Newbury “had a houseboat, and he liked to go out in the middle of a rainstorm and put the boat in a circle and listen to it rain, going around in a circle in the middle of the lake where he wouldn’t run into anything.”

That vision — of Newbury alone on his houseboat, drifting around and around on a Tennessee lake during a downpour — is a good one for Fielding Daws’ latest, the beguiling Yesterday’s Weather. As its 12 tracks (each one named after a meteorological pioneer) unspool, you’ll hear lonesome whistles, distant thunder, tinkling wind chimes, gently plucked acoustic guitar, celestial choirs, all chopped and stretched and looped into strange and sweet shapes. But the primary ingredient is rain. Newbury called his most famous LP Looks Like Rain. Yesterday’s Weather, a companion album of sorts, feels like rain.

Feelings can be deceiving, of course. The natural slowly reveals itself to be downright unnatural here, layers upon layers upon layers, blurry copies of other copies. Yesterday’s Weather may come on like an album of field recordings, but it’s not that. Instead, it is entirely drawn from a well-loved vinyl copy of Looks Like Rain (whose interstitial nature sounds were themselves drawn from a Mystic Moods Orchestra album), as well as digitally compressed YouTube rips of Newbury’s masterpiece and glitches from sketchy imports into an ancient bootleg copy of Logic Pro X. The result is a collection that embraces the illusory and transformative qualities of sound, the way it plays tricks on your subconscious. “Yesterday moves like a dream through my mind,” Newbury sang. Yesterday’s Weather will do the same.

-T Wilcox 

chrome real-time dubbed cassette and spiral bound printed booklet, housed in a norelco box
edition of 30

all sounds designed and arranged by Fielding Daws
art and visual design by Sonnenzimmer
mastered by Matt Ibarra