Field Guides

"Field Guides began in 2012 as the solo recording project of Brooklyn singer/songwriter Benedict Kupstas. Thoughtful and eccentric, his music has an experimental nature to it, blending warm, jangling indie pop with a pastiche of field recordings from his various travels. His first release under the Field Guides name was a two-song single on his Bandcamp page called There Is Always Someone Waiting Somewhere Else. Over the next two years, the project began to grow into a band as Kupstas recruited various musicians from the local Brooklyn scene to join him. The rotating lineup includes current and former members of acts like Helado Negro, Cloud Becomes Your Hand, Landlady, and Future Wife, among others. Their debut record was recorded over several years in Brooklyn and mixed in upstate New York by veteran engineer D. James Goodwin (Devo, Kaki King, Leverage Models). Named after a Richard Brautigan poem, Boo, Forever was released in November 2014."—Timothy Monger, All Music

"Field Guides began as a solo project of Benedict Kupstas, who seems as confident writing millennial country duets like “Peggy Asked A Question & The Answer Is ‘Yes’ & ‘Let’s Keep Dancing’” and jangly summer pop songs like “Lisa Loeb Probably Never Pierced Her Ears” as he does on languid creepers like “I Wish All Our Hands”. His songwriting is haunted with literary and musical references from Richard Brautigan and the Velvet Underground to Grace Krilanovich and Peggy Lee. As the songs developed, they accreted bits of found sound to themselves, crickets and bird noises, and, just as organically, the band added members of Helado Negro, Tarantula, Cloud Becomes Your Hand, Tiny Hazard, Eula, and The Ben Seretan Group."—Bob Proehl

"Like a book, Field Guides' debut album, Boo, Forever, is less a compendium of segregated tracks than it is a confluence, a narrative in sound. And like a book, Boo, Forever was written over the course of a decade. Initially a solo project helmed by Brooklyn writer and musician Benedict Kupstas, Field Guides grew to include a rotating lineup of a dozen or so musicians—and the band’s considerable family tree has come to include current or former members of Helado Negro, Cloud Becomes Your Hand, Landlady, Tiny Hazard, Future Wife, and Tigue. Together, they achieve a profound sort of alchemy, in which disparate traditions, impulses, and interests coalesce into and intricate yet robust whole. Put more plainly: Boo, Forever is an album best listened to in its entirety every time, not because each track fails to stand on its own, but because—as a listener—you'd rather know what has come before, what comes next, and how the whole thing is woven together. Again, like a book."—Nate Brown