Named in honor of his “crippling storm anxiety,” Brett Fieldcamp’s “guitar and loop-y kind of experimental stuff” project Meteorology had a gig booked before he had any songs to play.
Seeing a social media post seeking experimental musicians for a new showcase, Fieldcamp took the opportunity to launch a project he’d been planning but hadn’t really started.
“I might have been the first person to respond,” Fieldcamp said. “I was like, ‘Well I haven’t actually done any of it yet, but I’ve been working on an experimental solo project.’ … Then I said, ‘Oh shit. I guess I better actually, like, develop some music of some kind.’”
Fieldcamp celebrates the release of Meteorology’s debut album Every Last Monday on Saturday, April 12 at Mycelium Gallery. The show will be the latest in Mycelium Gallery’s Dark Mode concert series pairing live music with projection art and colorful lighting.
Fieldcamp, who previously played in Saturn and The Echowire, had a vision for his new solo project: short, poly-rhythmic songs with vocals. “Start Where You Are,” the first Meteorology track, is a 16-minute instrumental track featuring guitar, keyboard and electronic samples.
“I have a pedal board that’s made out of four electronic kick drum triggers, and those all run to a Roland sample pad that I have loaded up with either synth chords and stuff that I’ve recorded off my synth or just bass notes,” Fieldcamp said. “I went through with my bass guitar and recorded individual notes and loaded up the sampling pad with that so I can assign bass notes from a bass guitar to the pedals and play bass with my feet while I’m playing guitar. But then I also pull a lot of beats and percussive stuff from GarageBand. I just sit around and play with GarageBand on my phone until I land on a cool beat.”
Every Last Monday is named in honor of Mental Mondaze, the experimental showcase where Fieldcamp first played “Start Where You Are” and other tracks from the album. The showcase, hosted by Make Oklahoma Weirder founder Jarvix, is now Weirder Wednesday at Opolis in Norman. Fieldcamp said he originally recorded the songs on Meteorology’s debut in order to learn them for these showcases.
“I never really intended, originally, for these to be released,” Fieldcamp said. “Part of writing for me is always recording because something can sound fine when I play it or it can sound cool in my head, but I have to have it recorded so that I can listen back. Especially with these pieces, as they got longer and longer and started ballooning and becoming these big, epic things, I needed to record them so that I could listen back and commit them to memory.”
Meteorology’s longest track to date, “Competitive Martyrdom” might also be the most popular. Clocking in at more than 26 minutes, the song combines Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s epic post-rock with David Gilmour’s ringing guitar solos.
“I haven’t had anything like a hit, obviously, and it’s hard for anything that’s a half-hour instrument experimental track to be, but that’s the one that I’ve had the biggest response from,” Fieldcamp said. “That piece was essentially me trying to be as experimental as I could, and for me, that’s usually about rerouting my pedals. … I sat down, and I started just experimenting with plugging different things in to different things and plugging them in strangely until eventually I landed on this thing that was just texture, just this weird wash of texture to start it. …
“There’s a lot going on in that track, but that whole thing, for 27 minutes, is one single live take. … Every single thing in that entire track you hear is me by myself playing one guitar in one take, and to me, that was experimental. I was able to figure out how to layer the guitars and how to create the texture and how to make sounds that I had never made before. The big kind of climax at the end is this weird finger-tapping thing where I’m finger-tapping on the guitar in beat to the delay that’s repeating it so the whole thing ends up sounding like a synthesizer. It sounds like the score to Blade Runner, but it’s all guitar and it’s all just me playing it.”
Experimental boundaries
Every Last Monday also includes “Where the Walls Are Thin” and “A Bird With Six Wings.”
“I like phrases that have rhythm to them,” Fieldcamp said. “’A Bird with Six Wings’ is in actually meter; there’s Shakespearian meter, I think, to that. … I’m feeding one delay into an entirely different separate delay so it kind of has this weird flapping, building quality to it.”
Fieldcamp is still not sure how experimental his music really is.
“I’ve always had this weird complex about playing these experimental showcases because, even doing 27-minute-long solo guitar wackiness, I’ve never felt like I was experimental enough to stand up to what these other artists are doing,” Fieldcamp said.
To him, fellow Weirder Wednesday alum Chazlen Rook is truly pushing the boundaries of music.
“She once brought a hotplate and a bunch of ingredients and she made a pot of chili on stage,” Fieldcamp said. “She miked everything … and I don’t know if she ran it through effect pedals, but then she served chili to the audience. That, to me, is genuinely experimental music.”
Fieldcamp is continually pushing the boundaries of what his own music can be. He plans to play the entire album live for the first time at the release show.
“Not only have I never performed all four of them together, I’ve never performed any two together,” Fieldcamp said. “So that’s a new experiment for me because I’m not even a hundred percent sure how to do it yet. In between pieces, I’m going to have to be rerouting my whole pedal board.”
Following the album tracks, Fieldcamp will play some newer songs that are closer to the vision he originally had for Meteorology: songs with “vocals and energy.”
“It’s a weird transition between half-hour instrumental experimental stuff to all the sudden going, ‘Hey, but I also have these songs, and they’ve got guitar solos and they’re fun,” Fieldcamp said. “Everywhere that I go tends to be the opposite of what I’ve been doing. … I get bored. I get restless, I guess. After a while, it finally dawned on me that Meteorology is anything that I want it to be. If it’s me, that’s what it is.’”
This article appears in Alcoholmanac 2025.