sepulcher_fields was born from an unexpected chain of events. In 1998 I was in my junior year of high school and had been writing weird stories for nearly 5 years, and was very interested in getting into making movies. In the 90s there seemed to be an explosion of indie films and I was certain I could be the next big director. The problem was I lived in small town Wilton, Maine, and had no money, and no idea where to begin.
Then a friend told me about a job opening for scoring a movie for a local indie film. I knew nothing about making music; that was my brother’s area of expertise. While I had dabbled with remixing songs, I had no idea how to score a film, but was convinced this could get my foot in the door of the movie industry; the first step toward turning my own stories into movies. So I begged my parents for a keyboard for Christmas that year, and after getting one I immediately began working on the music. I basically tried to emulate Trent Reznor, Richard D James, Graeme Revell, and Elliot Goldenthal. I failed miserably, of course, but quickly wrote a handful of instrumental songs and recorded them using a cheap mono channel karaoke machine.
I toyed with a few names, such as “CoR”, which stood for “Comics on Rampage”, a short story I was working on at the time, “Gristle”, which was a nod to the Trent Reznor remix of Megadeth’s “Symphony of Destruction”, and “NINfestation”, which of course was another nod to Trent Reznor. I eventually decided on “sepulchre_fields”, which was a reference to another story I was working on at the time.
I threw together a cover & insert, and sent the cassette tape off for review….
And…
I never heard back.
But the process of writing the music was so fun and cathartic, I continued writing and fine tuning my music.
now, nearly 21 years later, I still do not consider myself a “Musician”, I feel like that title should be reserved for those who actually know what they’re doing; those who are aware of how what they’re writing is going to sound. Me, I just throw a bunch of musical notes on the screen and build around that.
As of 2017, I had written and compiled 5 “Albums” worth of music that I felt were worthy of releasing for all to hear. Though they were never released before, the albums were:
- “without_words”
- “mélange”
- “divide”
- “soundtrack_to_a_life_dreamt_of_death”
- “the_odds”
In March, 2019, “Collected in Remembrance” will be released digitally. This will be a 26 track double CD which will contain music from “without_words”, “mélange”, and “soundtrack_to_a_life_dreamt_of_death”. Also in March, “Divide” will be released digitally, with “the_odds” being released digitally in April. In addition, with the decision made to finally release these, a new surge of inspiration and ambition has flooded me, and I have been working on a new album, “gone_to_fade”, which will also be released in April of 2019.
~Travis Robbins; sepulchre_fields 2/10/19.