The Field's New Groove
How the surprisingly emotional use of an unusual time signature powers the ambient-techno god’s best track in years.
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 knew 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.
Get access to everything we do at Hearing Things—including weekly album and song recommendations along with our ever-growing archive of interviews and reports—with a free 30-day trial!
