Gazing with bleary eyes at a clear morning sky, laying on dewey grass as the sun rises and caps off an all-night odyssey. Stumbling out of a club flush with jack & ginger and joy and sprinting with abandon to the beach where your feet hit the sand and you kick off your sandals and wade into the ocean water until the waves nip at the backs of your knees. Catching your breath as sweat trickles down your forehead, heart beating to the 4/4 rhythm – a collective intake of air as the crowd dancing in the warehouse becomes one organ of potential energy waiting for the dj to unleash the beat. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich. What other moments in time can I draw that capture the feelings that The Field evokes? After first hearing From Here We Go Sublime, The Field’s debut album, it’s hard to imagine that one man created this blissful, sonic landscape.
The Field is simply the moniker for Swedish-born – and longtime Stockholm resident – Axel Willner. With the title From Here We Go Sublime, Willner subconsciously commits a daring gambit. He seeks to deconstruct sublimity, with all its British romantic and philosophic baggage, and reapply it to the aesthetics of music. It’s fortunate that Willner seems up to the task. Album track “Everyday” is a powerful example of both The Field’s aesthetic and Sublime’s critical resume.
the field – everyday
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It appears as number one on the music aggregators site Metacritic’s Best [Albums] of 2007 list; Jess Harvell awards it with a vaunted 9.0 rating on indie music news and review website Pitchfork; and Jacob Wright of Resident Advisor resorts to pictures in order to describe an album even he is at a loss of words for.
The crossover success into the normally firmly-entrenched indie community is no accident. Electronic music heads, of course, have plenty to rejoice about when throwing on a Field record – glittering synths that wash over you, euphoric melodies with nods to ambient and trance, a pulsating but spare 4/4 rhythm, and ethereal, looped vocal samples deconstructed and rebuilt as to be indecipherable from their origin. But there is something so primal about Willner’s musical explorations that indie and electronic audiences alike can’t help but experience and celebrate. He understands that singular moment in pop music – the climactic rush the entire song has been building up to and that you listen to and wish could go on forever. Well, the songs of The Field take that moment of pop bliss, cut away all the wasted buildup, and loop this melodic climax for seven minutes straight. And strangely (but not surprisingly) … I haven’t gotten sick of it yet.
Earlier this month, Willner just released Yesterday & Today, his sophomore effort under The Field moniker. It doesn’t disappoint. Below, I’ve provided the first single off the album, “The More That I Do.” The album as a whole has a more organic feel, which is not surprising as Willner enlisted the aid of Battles’ drummer John Stanier for title track “Yesterday & Today.” But in “The More That I Do,” The Field’s musical formulas are in full effect. Simple but pounding percussion with a high-hat hiss, and synth washes that seem to glitter and sparkle around your very consciousness like a thousand lightning bugs winking in and out around you. Try and catch the almost inaudible, edge-of-your-perception steel drums in the latter half of the track before they cut in fully to finish off the song. And see if you can trace the origin of the chopped, sliced, and diced vocal sample loop; it’s The Cocteau Twins’ “Lorelei.” Amazing.
