Into the Loop of Luxury

Punk? Listening to the Field’s gaseous, blissful techno, you
wouldn’t think that the scruffy, angst-ridden style of rock that
ramalama-ed into being over 30 years ago would have anything to do with
this Swedish producer’s lush, trance-inducing output. But the Field
(aka Stockholm’s Axel Willner) started making music at age 13, inspired
by punk acts like the Ramones and the Misfits. Now he’s recording for
ANTI- in America (Kompakt Records still distributes the Field’s
releases in the rest of the world), the label run by Brett Gurewitz of
punk lifers Bad Religion. So Willner’s come full circle in a way.

If that background doesn’t hew to typical electronic-musician
biography, then neither does the Field’s rise to becoming the techno
artist with perhaps the highest recognition factor by rock-centric blog
readers. (Never underestimate the boost that a rave Pitchfork review
can give an artist, as it did when the Field’s 2007 debut full-length,
From Here We Go Sublime, received a 9.0 rating from the
site.)

How did this happen? The ingredients in the Field’s releases don’t
exactly radiate commercial gold. Influenced by shoegaze immortals
Seefeel and My Bloody Valentine, dream-pop glossolaliacs the Cocteau
Twins (whose vocalist Liz Fraser is sampled in the Field’s “The More
That I Do”), and Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas project, Willner atomizes vocal
snippets into phonemes and rhythmic accents. Through their cumulative
power, they coalesce into an immersive sound stream that swirls around
and augments the subliminal
4/4 beats and keyboards and strings
that Willner generates with a program called Buzz. The result, as
Willner observes, places his music somewhere between “the dance floor
and the living room.”

The Field’s sound is rich yet fairly simple and straightforward. It
relies heavily on minimal techno’s staunch, muted 4/4 pulse and an
agglomeration of tweaked textures, but it’s not so much anthemic dance
music as it is a soundtrack for drifting—mentally and physically.
Whereas much techno bangs you into movement, the Field forges sonic
cloud nines from wisps of treated and repeated human voice, swaddling
you into contemplation, lulling and lifting you into pleasant reveries,
and at their most propulsive, as they are on about half of the new
album Yesterday and Today, nudging you into gentle swaying and
shuffling. Listening to “Sun & Ice” (huge, glitchy error and all)
or his contributions to Kompakt’s Pop Ambient comps, you may
experience a snow-blinded vertigo. At their best, the Field’s songs
impact you like the mellowest, most gradual hit of E imaginable.

Of course, the line that separates mesmerizing from monotonous is
slim. Discerning between the two is what separates electronic-music
stars from mediocrities, and the Field succeeds more often than not.
Sometimes it seems as if Willner’s songs are too overwhelmingly
pleasurable, as he keeps pouring on the bliss for 10 to 15 minutes at a
time, like some kind of reverse sadist.

Willner laughs and explains, “Well, that’s how I like the music that
I listen to myself. But I agree, it’s a thin line and sometimes I take
it too far. I like to push the limits, but then I do love repetitive
stuff, so if you don’t, the Field will be shit.”

Still, much of the Field’s charm and what probably lures in the
indie rockers is his distinctive way with vocal loops. He engineers a
transportive stuttering and ululating that allows the Field to allude
to emotional states without seeming overly blatant or literal. The
listener can easily project memories and meanings onto these pieces or
simply get lost in the aural ambrosia. (The one exception on
Yesterday and Today is the cover of the
Korgis’s 1980 hit
“Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime,” a lush, vaporous ballad akin to
10cc’s “I’m Not in Love,” featuring Victor Tarré’s vocals.)

Between Sublime and Yesterday and Today, Willner’s
creative process changed, a transformation that also has prompted him
to enlist a band on this tour.

“The preproduction is still the same: me making loops by myself, but
the recording and arranging is very different this time,” Willner says.
“When I was touring From Here We Go Sublime, I got weary of
standing there with a laptop and some effects. I didn’t feel free to do
what I wanted. I asked some of my friends to play with me, and it felt
much better to leave the computer behind and use a sampler instead.
Everything now is much more free in a jam-style way. The shows vary
depending on our mood. It’s more open.”

Willner’s yearning for more live instrumentation led to his
collaboration with Battles’ phenomenal drummer John Stanier on
“Yesterday and Today,” the new disc’s standout. When Stanier enters,
the track achieves an earthy funkiness previously unheard on Field
recordings. The keyboards and guitars smear and drone psychedelically,
and it feels as if we’ve entered a memorable Krautrock groove to rival
Can’s. Speaking of Germans, “Sequenced” darkly arpeggiates like
late-’70s Tangerine Dream gone kosmische disko, but with less
bratwurst in its system.

Who says it’s not punk to end an album with a 15-minute synth jam?