Idyl

Before Alex Dupree adopted the Idyl moniker, he led an Austin chamber-folk collective - Alex Dupree and the Trapdoor Band. In 2009, the Trapdoor Band began recording their fourth album, tentatively titled Idyl, but something wasn’t right. “I kept coming back to that name,” Alex said. “It seemed so big...idol, idle, ideal, idyll. It held all of these musical ideas that I was still working through.” Turns out he wasn’t preparing new album, he was starting a new band.

Equal parts Laurie Anderson and Neil Young, Alex’s new songs explore the country that he has worked in, camped on, and toured across. And to get to the bottom of them, he knew he had to go all in. This meant leaving his home in Austin and moving to northern New Mexico with a handful of unfinished Trapdoor Band mixes. It meant hearing the songs fresh in a different landscape, stitching together new sounds, collecting field recordings, remixing drum samples, overdubbing guitars, singing over alternate takes: reshaping what would later become Elements of the Field.

It also meant that Idyl was no longer the title of an album; it was a stage name to be inhabited. “The Trapdoor Band was best when it was about spontaneous emotion and the spectacle of big groups on stage,” Alex remembers. “But I felt I needed a new name to do something leaner and more focused.”

The final product, Elements of the Field, is lush and ragged, world-weary yet ecstatic. In the droning blues of “Amends (No More Lies)” or the sprawling, anthemic “Unconscious Reversal of History into Nature,” Alex sings like a mystical, Astral Weeks-era Van Morrison who knows just enough about synth pop, musique concrète, and hip hop to transcend folk. It is a document of personal transformation, and the work of artist stepping into maturity.