page_title: Making a New World
section_title: Background and development
hierarchical_section_title: Making a New World / Background and development
caption_attribution_description: English: Field Music at The Water Rats, Kings Cross, London, UK. November, 2007.
context_page_description: Making a New World is the seventh studio album by English rock band Field Music. It was released through Memphis Industries on 10 January 2020. The songs were originally composed by David and Peter Brewis for a project commissioned by the Imperial War Museum. The album is about the after-effects of World War I and how they impacted the 100 years after the war's end. It is considered the band's first concept album.
  The starting point for the museum project was an image called "The End of the War", a visualisation of the vibrations from when gunfire ceased at the exact moment that the war ended. After conducting research, the Brewis brothers decided against writing songs broadly about World War I. They instead focused on individual stories inspired by technological, political, sociological, and cultural advancements over the course of the next century that directly or indirectly stemmed from the war.
context_section_description: Released through Field Music's label Memphis Industries, Making a New World is about the after-effects of World War I, and is considered the band's first concept album. The songs were originally composed from a project that Field Music prepared for the Imperial War Museum (IWM), which commissioned music as part of its Making a New World season commemorating the centenary of the end of the war and its effects on society afterwards. The program ultimately inspired the name of the album, as did the painting "We Are Making a New World" by war artist Paul Nash. The latter depicts the consequences of war without explicitly showing the conflict itself, which David said was consistent with the band's approach to the album's music. He said the title Making a New World also refers to the many ways in which the world was changed by World War I.
  The IWM originally planned to commission the Fall for the project, but when the group's founder Mark E. Smith died, they were forced to seek another band. Andy Martin, who had made music videos for Field Music in the past, was acquainted with officials from the museum and introduced them to the band. The Brewis brothers were not previously familiar with the IWM, and they were initially skeptical about the proposed commission, but became more comfortable with the project after visiting the IWM North branch and discussing it. Although David said Field Music wrote the songs "to order", he said "it didn't feel like hack work". The latter had previously produced works based upon World War I, including a collaboration with the band Warm Digits, and the Royal Northern Sinfonia on a score for Asunder (2016), a film directed by Esther Johnson about the war's effects on a small English town. However, David said his knowledge about World War I was limited to his high school studies and explained this by claiming that "the way you see things at high school: you pay a bit of attention, you find it interesting, but you don't think too deeply about it".
  In the spring of 2018, the IWM formally commissioned Field Music to create a commemorative sound and light show based upon a picture about munitions from a 1919 publication by the United States Department of War. The image, entitled "The End of the War", showed a visualisation of the vibrations caused by gunfire during the exact moment of 11 a.m. on 11 November 1918, the moment at which the armistice that ended the war went into effect. The image was created using a technique called sound ranging that used transducers to detect the vibrations, then displayed the distances between peaks with lines on a graph to show the location of enemy armaments. It illustrated one minute of harsh and intense noise, followed by near silence for the same amount of time. David described the image as "this tiny, incomplete fragment, not much more than a moment, but one which could be both the beginning and the ending of a huge story". The band also said this image was both the starting point for their songs and "the start of a new world". David stated that they imagined the lines from the image "continuing across the next hundred years, and we looked for stories which tied back to specific events from the war or the immediate aftermath".
  The Brewis brothers began conducting research in September 2018, a process David described as "amateurish", which mostly entailed searching the Internet for stories about the after-effects of World War I. Field Music originally considered creating a primarily instrumental piece; Peter said his initial vision was "something slightly improvised" that drew upon music from the time period of World War I, such as jazz and orchestral works during the Belle Époque, including Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (1913). However, the brothers' research ultimately inspired them to write songs with lyrics telling specific stories. David said their research led them to subjects that they "couldn't help but write songs about". The music was researched, composed, and prepared in a three-month span between September and December 2018, a faster process than 
caption: Peter Brewis, a member of the rock band Field Music, which also includes his brother David.
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