Biography

Fiel Garvie is one of the United Kingdom's most enigmatic and innovative pop music ensembles. After a previous collaboration in the acclaimed quartet Passing Clouds in the early 1990s (Protect Your Paper Ears EP, Creation's Happy Reel EP), Anne Reekie and Adam Green formed Fiel Garvie in 1996, along with Greg MacDermott and Jude Bugden. MacDermott had previously played with Jane Pow! in the 1990s (and currently also plays with the Japanese-pop / art-punk outfit Hyper Kinako). Keyboardist Emma Corlett rounded out the quintet in 2002. During the past ten years the quintet has released five singles, an EP, and three full-length albums.

(L) Anne (R) Emma at O-Nest, Tokyo 2006

Fiel Garvie recorded their third album, Caught Laughing, throughout 2004 and 2005. The nine songs were mixed in Scotland in early 2006 by Geoff Allan (Camera Obscura, Teenage Fanclub, Belle & Sebastian, Mogwai). The album is released in various parts of the world in 2006 by Ghost Records in Italy (April 2006), Elm Records (Japan, July) and Words On Music (US, UK, Spain, France and Germany in August/September).

The album begins with the lullaby "Special Rate," whose string arrangements and whispered vocals by Anne Reekie pronounce the band as an exquisite practitioner of baroque chamber pop. Reekie's voice often cited by critics for her poignant, unconventional delivery is likewise not simply a lyrical conduit, but also a gateway to an enchanting, unfamiliar world of sound.

(L) Adam (R) Jude at O-Nest, Tokyo 2006

"The Palace Lights," the album's first single, is a deceptively jaunty tale of seaside suicide, set to an insistent keyboard figure and borne along with the sweetest melody, designed to inveigle itself into your consciousness and stay there with a limpet-like sticking power. Mid-tempo songs like "Estimate" and "Daylight" gracefully march alongside American Analog Set and Yo La Tengo, while "Air Song," the album's epic centrepiece, pulsates and loops in a manner that conjures up the work of Stereolab.

"Dreaming is good because it outlasts us all," Reekie closes the album's second track "Estimate," and the passage is an apt account of the impressions left by this record. In Caught Laughing Fiel Garvie create an enduring, hallucinogenic microcosmos inhabited by exotic, spherical keys, bashful peals of becalming guitars, subterranean basslines, and columns of percussion that announce themselves in sporadic, yet potent, intervals.

Caught Laughing launches Fiel Garvie into their second decade of delivering idiosyncratic pop music, and unqualifiedly continues their tradition of fearlessly flying their flag of independence.

(L) Greg at O-Nest, Tokyo (R) Emma and Anne

Fiel Garvie made their North American, Spanish, French and German debut with the arrestingly beautiful Leave Me Out Of This, released by Words On Music in 2003. The eleven-song album included compositions written as early as 1997 (e.g. the live favourite "Old Friend"). All Music Guide drew favourable comparisons to Drugstore and Mazzy Star and called it a "quite gem of an album," while Pop Matters revelled in its "adventurous, seductive, enveloping sound that holds you in its thrall for 45 entrancing minutes."

Fiel Garvie has performed with a variety of acts including Camera Obscura, Magoo, Belly, Black Box Recorder, Muse, Deus, and The Telescopes.