WITH FORGOTTEN FIELDS

London, 2026​

During this interview, I swap seats with another artist and ask the questions I wish I were asked. Today, I meet South African artist and musician Forgotten Fields aka Richie Sauls following the re-release of the album Forgotten Fields.

Richie, tell us about yourself.

I am a graphic designer with delusions of being an artist. I am originally from the Overberg region of the Western Cape in South Africa. That is where I grew up, and where I eventually returned as an adult. It honestly called to me. The landscape is open, largely agricultural countryside and yet somehow untamed. You cannot help but fall in love with it. And that is probably me in a nutshell: a romantic, still yearning for it even though I have now lived in the south of the Netherlands for four years.

Before we dig into Forgotten Fields, the release, tell us about Forgotten Fields, the project.

As a project, I would say it is where all my creative energy tries to find expression through words and soundscapes. I am drawn to creating atmosphere and trying to express a particular emotional landscape. I am especially interested in themes of homecoming and yearning for home. After many years of working in the city, I was craving the countryside where I grew up. I moved back around 2006 and immediately fell in love with it again. That was kind of the catalyst for the theme of Forgotten Fields. But actually, the project started not because of that. I was sitting at the kitchen table when “Container Ships” by Loscil was playing. I had an epiphany, like, “Oh my god, I want to do something like this.” There was this mechanical, looping beauty about that track, totally at odds with my rural obsession, but I recognised something in it. So I did not immediately make a connection between music, rural beauty and emotion as I did later on. I turned instead to my fascination with airships as a theme, which came from yet another track, “Airships” by VNV Nation. The whole aesthetic of the first album was inspired by the black-and-white images and footage you get of airships. There was such a promising thing in the air with airships, metaphorically and literally. That is how I felt creatively at the time, and the Airship album grew out of that. It is a concept album. It starts with the airship in a hangar, then it takes flight and eventually comes to its destination. The tracks describe that journey in music, and looking back, it is that idea of this ship taking you home that struck a chord in me.

Now tell us about the release itself.

Well, the release grew out of the seeds planted by Airship and then what came after, which was The Zephyr and the Swallow. That EP had two long-form tracks, and it was basically a vignette, albeit a rather long one, of a swallow flying over a field while a zephyr blew. It is all very wistful and ethereal. It was based on a couplet I wrote: “Over the field the zephyr blew; into the sky the swallow flew.” I wanted to bring together melody, poetry and imagery, just everything that captivated me at the time. There was definitely something wistful and almost, well, worshipful, in me that I wanted to express. So I turned to vocals, woodwinds and drone textures as a language for the loops. That EP was very nature-based, emotion-based, and it was kind of my first venture into what I see as my actual subject: the natural world and my sense of wonder for it. Anyway, that is how poetry was introduced into the project, and I wanted to experiment with that a little more. I wrote another poem titled “Forgotten Fields”. The poem basically expanded on the lines from the EP. It describes a boy chasing a swallow flying over a field. Later in life, he revisits that memory and realises where he belongs: among those fields, chasing a swallow. So the Forgotten Fields album is essentially the EP concept in album form.

How does your work in poetry influences your work in music?

It is thanks to The Zephyr and the Swallow. It was a seminal work for me. I wrote the couplet for it and it kind of set the direction for Forgotten Fields thematically, stylistically and technically. I have my mother to thank for my love of poetry, and I have a particular soft spot for South African poets like Marais and Van der Heever. They have a melodic style, and they are able to convey powerful emotions through that particular intimacy and directness of Afrikaans and the imagery of the South African landscape. I also have a deep admiration for poets with a strong sense of musicality, like Heine, Carême and Keats. So my goal has been to try to combine words and music without necessarily needing it to be a song.

Tell us more about your creative process, particularly when it comes to composing and producing music.

As far as my creative process goes, it is not fixed. Sometimes it starts with a mental picture that Is really vivid and that I want to express. Other times it begins with a melody. I put it down digitally, then play with it. The point for me is not the tool or the gear or whatever. I created Airship with GarageBand because that was all I had at the time. I am interested in emotion. Sometimes emotions are rambling and messy, and I want to keep that alive in the music. So, mostly I will work digitally and build layers of loops, one informing the other, until there is a conversation happening between them. I do not always create all the elements, though. If there is a texture I cannot create myself, I will turn to other artists who can take the digital sketch and bring that to life with their particular instrument. I like blending the synthetic with the organic. It is an interesting palette to work with musically.

Forgotten Fields is one of three projects released under this pseudonym — how do the releases relate and connect with each other?

Right. Yes, I started with Airship in 2016, then The Zephyr and the Swallow in 2017, and then Forgotten Fields later that same year. It is hard to believe it has been a decade, because it honestly feels like yesterday I was sitting at that kitchen table. The connection for me is that idea of home. The airship is flying its passengers home, the swallow is flying to its flock, the boy, now a man, recalls a blissful scene from childhood and realises where he truly belongs. I am trying to answer the question, “Where do I belong?” At the time, the answer for me was the Overberg countryside. The landscape, the fauna and the flora were constant sources of inspiration. I would spend hours drinking it all in, taking photographs, composing verses.

So after Forgotten Fields what’s next?

Well, after the release of the Forgotten Fields album, I basically fell in love with the idea of poetry and started composing poems about the countryside, the landscape, the fauna, the flora, recollections from childhood growing up there. Those poems are largely finished. I want to edit them and then create a small printed anthology. A significant change for me was that I got married and ended up leaving South Africa for the Netherlands. That was a huge interruption for me because I essentially removed myself from my source of inspiration, and I did not realise the impact that would have on me creatively.  So the poems have been in the works for quite a while, it is safe to say. But my idea is to do some pieces of music inspired by the poems. Basically, a kind of extension of the Forgotten Fields album concept, but instead of one poem, many poems. Also, if I can find any musicians interested in the poetry, I would love to do collaborations. The poems are quite simple in form and melodic in character. They could work very easily as choral pieces or lieder, so that is an avenue I would like to explore too.

Thanks very much Richie. A last one for the road — one book, one album, one film —, tell us about your latest cultural findings?

To be honest, I have not been engaging much with new books, albums or films. But I can share ones that have had a huge impact on me creatively. As far as a book goes, my anthology of William Wordsworth’s poems comes immediately to mind. His love for the natural world is unmistakable and I find it very compelling. For an album, it has to be Loscil’s Sketches from New Brighton. It is so embedded in his surroundings, and I admire that sense of place he is able to create purely synthetically. As for film, it is actually a stop-motion television series based on Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. It probably appeals to the same part of me that responds so strongly to the Overberg: that sense of a world or a landscape you cannot simply pass through. You have to immerse yourself in it.

Drawing on Forgotten Fields’ words, Forgotten Fields emerges as a meditation on homecoming and belonging; a wistful journey through memory, landscape and the natural world, where poetry and sound converge to create a world that feels both distant and intimately familiar. Read my review of Forgotten Fields.