Onto Entertainment/ADA will release Fences debut album on September 28. The band is the moniker of 27 year-old Christopher Mansfield, a self proclaimed f*ck up, who uses it to perform and record under. The Seattle-based artist's first full length was produced by Sara Quin of Tegan and Sara fame and shares a kindred down-trodden spirit to the music of Elliott Smith and Townes Van Zandt.
Mansfield's musical life started in Boston where he spent his late teens studying music at the prestigious Berkelee School of Music. His girlfriend of the time was studying the plays of August Wilson and suggested that Mansfield name his band after the famed playwright's most beloved play, Fences.
A few years later he moved to Seattle recording songs that would come to together as the self released "Ultimate Puke" EP. The collection was raw yet achingly beautiful, and soon he began to attract a fan base throughout the Pacific Northwest, opening shows for St. Vincent and Mark Kozelek and playing festivals like The Bumbershoot Music and Arts Festival, The Capitol Hill Block Party and Sasquatch. Tomorrow (Thursday, June 3), Fences is playing SAM (Seattle Art Museum) to celebrate the opening of the Kurt Cobain/Andy Warhol exhibit.
"Ultimate Puke" ended up in the hands of a young producer who passed it onto Sara Quin. A producer in her own right, she immediately took to the music and sent Mansfield a message, beginning a long correspondence and friendship. After a year of writing back and forth, Quin asked Mansfield the question he had been hoping for: "Do you have a passport?" Within weeks, Mansfield was at Quin's studio in Victoria, B.C., for a ten-day stint, clocking 12 hour days while recording 13 songs. Ten of those songs would become the full-length debut, Fences.
