The Field's New Groove

In Theory is a semi-regular column in which Andy Cush takes a close look at the compositional underpinnings of songs new and old in search of a deeper understanding of how and why they move us.

From Here We Go Sublime, Swedish-German producer/DJ Axel Willner’s 2007 debut as the Field, was one of those paradigm-shifting albums for me. It was the end of my senior year of high school, and I bought it at Kim’s Video—technically Mondo Kim’s, the St. Mark’s location—while visiting my brother at college in New York. Coming from the sleepy suburbs to the big city, following around a group of older kids who know better than me what was cool, buying from a shop whose legendary reputation preceded it even then: I was primed for something transformative, and I got it. From Here We Go Sublime is made mostly from pop-song samples and minimal drum machine, with each bit of singing or playing presented for just a fraction of a second at a time, looped and strung together with others like it into one long vapor trail, all set to a neverending four-on-the-floor kick drum pulse. As I rode up and down Manhattan on the 1 Train with the CD in my Discman that weekend, it sounded like the world opening up. When I hear it in the right mood, it still does. 

Willner made five more albums as the Field after that, all of them released via the Cologne minimal dance-music institution Kompakt. Much like Kompakt founder Wolfgang Voigt’s ambient-techno project Gas, the Field turned out to be a study in minor variations on a basic premise. The album covers are nearly identical, with hand-lettered titles on plain off-white or black backgrounds. A particular record might skew a little more euphoric or a little more introspective. Some are all Willner and his bevy of electronics, and some feature accents from live instrumentalists, though you wouldn’t necessarily know which ones are which without checking the credits. It was clear right away that Willner was more interested in finding the expressive range within a strict set of parameters than he was in upending anyone’s ideas of what his music could be. Even as a fan, it was easy to feel like he had reached the end of what he had to say with the Field by the time of 2018’s Infinite Moment, a sprawling album whose very title felt like a summing up of his ambitions for the project. 

No new music came for eight years until last week’s release of Now You Exist—for me, the most exciting Field record since the epiphany of the debut. It’s billed as an EP, but, at 41 minutes, it’s as long as plenty of other artists’ full albums. It comes on a new label, the Stockholm-based Studio Barnhus, whose aesthetic tends toward multicolored giddiness and a certain puckish DIY spirit, where Kompakt favors a more buttoned-up vibe. The cover art has changed accordingly, swapping the Field’s classic monochrome minimalism with a psychedelic blur of pinks and greens. Much of the writing about Now You Exist that’s been published since it dropped last Friday has used words like loose, relaxed, and casual to describe the music, all of which are true. It’s not that he’s abandoned the striving for transcendence that affected me so deeply as a teenager, but it’s like he’s now pursuing it via a rambling walk in the woods, stopping to check out a bug over here and a waterfall over there, rather than the rigorous meditation routines of his previous albums. His tracks, once marvels of streamlined linearity, are now full of detours and unexpected openings. 

Most of all, his approach to rhythm has changed. On The Field’s early work, the drums were deliberately spartan: kicks on all four beats, snare on two and four, a hi-hat or two in between, and that was it. I remember it being a punchline among real dance-music heads: this producer, ostensibly in the lineage of the club, reaping acclaim from Pitchfork-reading types while seeming to treat rhythm as an afterthought. (Of course, for those of us who love those records, the simplicity—the feeling they sometimes give of trying to evoke silence itself in sound—is the whole point.) On later records, Willner filled the grooves out, got a little funkier, but he never departed from techno’s four-on-the-floor as the basis. After his previous devotion to the downbeat, a tweak that might seem exceedingly minor in another artist’s oeuvre carries the force of religious conversion. It’s like Willner woke up in the middle of the night and scrawled in his journal: What if the bass drum went somewhere else? Where the beats once only pulsed, now they shuffle and sway. 

He departs furthest from his old techno orthodoxy on “Another Day”—not coincidentally, the clear highlight of Now You Exist and one of the best tracks in the whole discography. As its beat fades in, it sounds at first like woozy post-Dilla instrumental hip-hop. And it’s not not that, but the means by which Willner achieves that now-familiar off-kilter effect are unusual. Dilla’s great rhythmic innovations were in the ways he stretched and warped 4/4 time. For the purposes of this column, we can think of 4/4 as meaning the music is grouped into little segments (we call them “measures,” or “bars”) of four beats each. Throw on a Dilla instrumental—say, “Workinonit”—and start counting to four along with the music. As in most hip-hop, and electronic dance music, you’ll start to hear patterns that repeat with every four counts, or eight, or two. What Dilla did differently from anyone else before him involved the micro-arrangement of musical events within that basic four-beat structure. What we think of as the second or third or fourth or even first beat may come a little later or earlier than we expect it to: the temporal distance between the beats contracts and expands. But there are generally four of them.

“Another Day” is not in 4/4; it’s in 7/8. I’m going to try to keep my explanation of what that means as simple as possible. The 7 is the easy part: instead of organizing the music into groups of four beats, we’re using groups of seven. The 8 is a little more complicated. Basically, it means that each beat in this new rhythmic framework is really more like half a beat of 4/4. So we have seven half-beats. One reason you might use an unusual meter like seven in a style like techno, with 4/4 written into its DNA, would be to make something that sounds weird on purpose. You could emphasize the music’s asymmetrical aspect, compose in all jagged edges, challenge your listener to keep up. That’s not really what Willner is doing here. “Another Day” isn’t willfully difficult; it’s downright dreamy. Part of that is the gauzy samples and synth sounds Wilner is using and the straightforwardly pleasing chords he plays with them. But just as important is the particular way he arranges his set of seven half-beats. 

Try counting along to “Another Day” like you did with “Workinonit.” You count one, two, three, just fine, but then you get to four, and it’s like one comes back before you have a chance to finish the word. That’s because Willner is basically organizing the seven half-beats of his time signature into 3.5 whole ones. The drum pattern does exactly what you would expect it to do in 4/4: kicks on one and sometimes three, snares on two and four. It’s just missing that little half a beat at the end of each bar. It sounds like a sample that’s been cropped ever-so-slightly too short, or like a record skipping in such a way that you’re almost getting a perfect loop, but it’s close enough that you can still nod your head to it. It’s another route to the same sort of effect that we now so closely associate with Dilla, where the groove is just a tiny bit off, but the off-ness is what makes it sound so good. That Willner got to this effect of looseness through precision time-signature engineering and not, like, feel, just goes to show that Swedish habits die hard.

Willner’s use of 7/8 also dovetails the ethos of his music in ways that are less concrete, but equally fun to think about. First, it echoes his work’s pervasive yearning. In this case, there’s literally something missing that the music is trying to recapture: that final half-beat, and the sense of completeness that it could bring to the groove. There’s also a feeling particular to meters in seven, especially when you’re looping the same material over and over again, of the last beat of one measure overlapping with the first beat of the next. The key example for me is the famous bass line to Pink Floyd’s “Money.” If you asked me to sing a single repetition of it, I might instinctually add the first note of the next repetition, as if it were the conclusion of the one I was singing. It’s almost like an aural illusion: endings and beginnings start to seem like the same thing, just pivot points in an endless cycle. Somewhere midway through the eight-minute stretch of “Another Day,” the hypnotic effect takes hold for me. Willner has found a new way to grasp at infinity. 

Structurally, “Another Day” begins like most other tracks by the Field. That is to say, it starts out beautiful and wistful and gradually becomes even more beautiful and wistful as it goes on. Then something different happens: it fades out, almost completely, like it’s going to end, and when it comes back, there’s someone singing. Maybe a sample, maybe a live performer, it’s hard to say. Voices generally only appear in Willner’s music as tiny chopped up fragments, but now we hear whole phrases: “What should I tell them when they ask me?/What should I tell them, what should I do?” The emotional effect, for a longtime listener, is powerful. And I may be stretching here, but I don’t think it’s unrelated to the 7/8 time signature. It’s like the form is enacting a single measure on a grand scale, except at the end, Willner finds the missing beat: this element of plain humanity that’s never before appeared in his music. I’m not claiming to know whether he had any of this in mind when he was putting the music together. But I do think the holism of “Another Day”—the sense that it’s just right, for some reason, that all the pieces fit together as they’re supposed to, despite its meandering—would not be as pronounced if he’d stuck to trusty old 4/4.