Furrows

Furrows’ Peter Wagner is a classically trained guitarist, instrumentalist, and songwriter, who captures a familiar late-20s malaise in sharp technicolor, and through a sonic palette that blends psych-folk, krautrock, ambient music, and a woozy, lo-fi take on chamber-pop. Fisher King, his latest collection of songs, and first full-length, tracks Wagner’s move to Baltimore (where the album was written) and back again to New York (where the album was recorded and where he has lived, on and off, though often off, for about a decade). It is a richly orchestrated album, which documents the feeling of being adrift by turns intimate and widescreen. Its reprise, if it has one, is placelessness. There are no names and few narrative anchors. Instead Fisher King gives us visions: shadowy and partial, some pointing ahead, or overhead, others to the past, to love lost—a “balloon so high its rupture won’t be seen”, a “sinking field”, a “valley of smothered dreams”, an empty car, empty skies. “Beyond the edges of our sight”, as Wagner sings on “Mirrors”, is Fisher King’s fixation.