Mortality has a way of stripping away pretense. For David Bales, an experimental guitarist who now resides in the Philadelphia area, a brush with illness forced not just reflection but a total reinvention for him.
Convinced at one point that he had months, maybe a year left to live, he plunged into the guitar with a feverish urgency.
What emerged wasn’t panic or melodrama but a radical resetting of his craft: thirteen self-invented tunings, unpolished performances, and an absolute refusal to edit, overdub, or “fix” anything.
The result is Ringing Fields, a collection of fourteen instrumental pieces that are transmissions from the edge of living. Played on a mix of electrics, acoustics, a high-strung, and a 3/4 scale guitar, the record careens between jagged dissonance and fragile, fingerpicked beauty.
Sometimes the note choices feel deliberately unstable, but that’s precisely the point. Bales embraced imperfection as a truth-telling device.
He let fear, pain, anger, joy, and love coexist in the same phrase without smoothing the edges. There’s humor too: dark, absurdist streaks that keep the record from slipping into self-seriousness.
Bales speaks of channeling “influences and ancestors,” and you can hear echoes of punk’s confrontational spirit, the spiritual searching of outsider folk, and the fractured tunings of avant-garde guitarists, but all refracted through his own language.
The absence of overdubs lends the record a stark intimacy, like sitting in the room with him as he wrestles the instrument into new shapes.
Despite the shadow of illness, the album isn’t necessarily about death, and it’s certainly not morbid in any way. Bales’s playing suggests someone living squarely in uncertainty, yet refusing to stop creating.
As he’s learned his condition isn’t immediately terminal, the urgency hasn’t vanished but hardened into resolve.
While the album never dwells in morbidity, it does carry a spectral weight. The subtitle—“meditations, rituals, dances, and love songs”—frames the record as something closer to a folk rite than a conventional collection of tunes.
Listening feels like Bales has wandered through the bardo realms and returned with dispatches from the in-between.
Each piece is brief, more vignette than epic, which makes a track-by-track dissection beside the point. The record is best absorbed whole, as a sequence of fleeting visions that together sketch Bales’s story in wordless form.
Still, certain details demand attention: the guitar tone throughout, tender and resonant, balanced between melancholy and mystery.
Not every track lingers in shadow, though. “Jennifer,” clearly an ode to his wife, glows with bright, open chords and a quiet hope. It’s a song less about confronting mortality than about affirming love, the kind that tethers Bales to life and gives this starkly personal record its most luminous moments.
With Ringing Fields, Bales has built a document of survival, one where grief and joy occupy the same chord.
Bales modestly told me over email that he’s “just a nobody,” but that couldn’t be further from the point. The mission of this blog has always been to highlight real people making real music, and this record is as genuine as it gets.
Listeners who’ve connected with the work of experimental and primitive guitarists we’ve covered before, like Joseph Allred or Kevin Coleman, will find plenty to embrace here.
Mastered with a steady hand by Kevin McMahon at Marcata Recording, the album holds onto its messy vitality without losing coherence.
Gratitude runs thick in the liner notes—to his wife Jennifer, daughters Devyn and Taylor, friends, collaborators—all part of the constellation that made this record possible. And yes, even a nod to cancer, the unlikely midwife of this creative rebirth.
With Ringing Fields, Bales has built a document of survival where grief and joy occupy the same chord. He finds beauty in the off-notes, perseverance in the strange tunings, and love in the noise.
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