Field

The Field is the brainchild of Swedish producer Axel Willner who debuted with the singles Things Keep Fallin' Down (2005) and Sun & Ice (2006).

From Here We Go Sublime (Kompakt, 2007) was a milestone for bliss-oriented samples-heavy minimal techno music. The beats are as un-inventive as it gets, but that only shifts the emphasis to the melodies and to the way they are constructed and deconstructed. The hypnotic, trance-inducing effect is akin to Robert Miles' decade-old Children, once processed through the digital revolution. The similarity is more evident in the pieces that tamper with the traditional role of melody, whether playing hide and seek with the listener (the tune that appears and disappears in A Paw In My Face) or thumbing his nose at her (the swirling motif of Silent).
The melody is completely dissolved in the dense, reverberating filigree of The Deal, the most haunting track here. The processing and reprocessing evokes the methods of post-rock in Mobilia.
There is basically only one piece in which Willner simply bombards the listener with heavy beats: Good Things End.
When it works the music is almost melodramatic despite the fact that it is "micro" and not "macro" in nature (attention to details, minimum effort, narrow frequency range). However, Willner can also be upbeat (the ascending and descending ripples and bobbling texture of The Little Heart Beats So Fast) and even ecstatic (the floating clusters and expanding vibrations of Sun And Ice). It straddles the electronic equivalent of shoegazing and dream-pop.
The danger, of course, is that the artist may be tempted to rely more on the loops than on his own inspiration...

Yesterday And Today (Anti, 2009) is a mixed bag, that collates together six lengthy pieces of various depth. The driving eleven-minute Leave It, that sounds like Abba without the hooks, is typical of the lightweight mood here. The aimless The More That I Do generates pathos by repeating samples of the Cocteau Twins' vocalist Elizabeth Fraser. The ten-minute Yesterday & Today, a collaboration with the Battles' drummer John Stanier, is actually the one that gets closer to the pure hedonistic spirit of Giorgio Moroder's disco-music. I Have The Moon You Have The Internet, a crescendo of syncopated melodic fragments, is rather uneventful, and Everybody's Got To Learn Sometime is just a lame cover of a lame Korgis song. Hence the winner is easily the throbbing 16-minute prog-electronic suite Sequenced that escalates and accelerates and then settles down in a comfortable Kraftwerk-ian locomotive beat.

Looping State of Mind (Kompakt, 2011) adds more movement and more instruments (Kicki Halmos on vocals, Jan Philipp Janzen on synthesizer, Dan Enqvist on bass, guitar and keyboards, and Jasper Skarin on drums and vibraphone) to the ethereal Field soundscape. The trademark techno crescendo still populates It's Up There (basically a series of variations on the dogma of techno wrapped in cosmic hums), Is This Power (slightly out of tune loop, syncopated motorik beat, fluctuating sugary drones, Giorgio Moroder-esque sequencers) and the more trivial, metronomic Arpeggiated Love; but the polyrhythmic and minimalist feast of Looping State of Mind and the pan-ethnic shuffle Burned Out (almost a digital-age remix of vintage Talking Heads' techno-funk and of Brian Eno's discreet music) are carved from a different, thicker and gluey substance; not to mention the naked soul-jazz piano ballad Then It's White that sounds like a remix of Robert Wyatt and the trippy monotonous litany Sweet Slow Baby.

The Field also recorded as Loops Of Your Heart the album And Never Ending Nights (Magazine, 2012), containing the cinematic ten-minute Broken Bow and the contemplative eleven-minute Cries.