The Field Excels In Sublime Moments

originally published October 3, 2007

A couple years back, Chuck Klosterman wrote an essay in praise of The Good Part, the fleeting moment that totally makes a song - the ripping guitar solo, cathartic bellow, or acrobatic drum break for which we'll halt conversations and take up air-instruments. I love Good Parts as much as the next guy, but I've also grown wary of them; waiting for them can be agonizing, so much so that in some cases the payoff barely exceeds the investment. And they end, giving way to Predictable Parts, Awkward Parts, Boring Parts and Bad Parts.

Even the sweetest Good Parts in the most awesome songs depend on difference and deferral. They remind us of lack - they're Good Parts because the rest of the song isn't as good - and our limited capacity to process pleasure, our need to pace ourselves to prevent burnout. Triumphant or righteous as it might be, The Good Part always, always, always leaves a sickly-sweet aftertaste, imparts knowledge of our finitude. So much for pop giving the middle finger to mortality.

But Axel Willner doesn't care about any of that. Or maybe he cares too much, lives perpetually transfixed by The Good Part's yin/yang nature and wants us to think long and hard about it, too. At any rate, this up-and-coming Swedish musician, who records under the moniker The Field, dropped a record consisting entirely of Good Parts this past spring.

Pick and Choose

From Here We Go Sublime, The Field's first full-length, sounds at first like much of the music on which Kompakt, the hip German record label that released it, has made a name for itself. From Here We Go Sublime brims with vibrant beats, pulsing with elastic bass rhythms that could charm both ravers and fist-pumpers. Songs are highly melodic - no militant drum-machine splats, no grainy bleeps and bloops jackknifing droning synths - and immaculately tidy, which means that the home-listening crowd also digs The Field. And Willner's love of repetition and Philip Glass-like crests and troughs enables the record to function as ambient music, too. A little bit trance, a little bit pop, a little bit minimal techno, From Here We Go Sublime is the kind of song-cycle that stands firmly outside the mainstream while still eliciting praise from folks who wouldn't normally touch a piece of electronic music; it's like a more sociable '00s update of the '90s "intelligent dance music" movement.

But the album's trans-generic appeal rests not in Willner's ability to successfully replicate the Kompakt formula, but in his unique approach to songcraft. See, this music rejects the investment-payoff principle, grooving at a fever pitch from beginning to end. Songs don't climax, but instead ride one wave of jouissance into the next. To put it plainly, Willner samples a brief snippet of another song's Good Part - or Good Millisecond, to be more precise - and works it for, well, as long as he sees fit.

Which isn't to say his music's stagnant, or too much of a good thing. Once Willner's found his milli-sample, he inverts it, double-loops it, shifts its pitch, monkeys with its tempo, and assembles the results into a melodic helix. Like Steve Reich's minimalist compositions, The Field's music presents motion without progress, a sequence of events without genuine narrative. Willner's source material - dynamic intervals and chord changes - fits his songwriting perfectly: he uses samples that suggest, but never deliver, resolution to build songs that remain constantly on the verge of exploding. This process might sound too automated or micromanaged on paper, but The Field's songs are anything but canned, due largely to Willner's insistence on mixing everything live and leaving mistakes in his final cuts. The album breathes.

Cut and Paste

Despite the hours I've spent listening to From Here We Go Sublime, I still can't tell you what it means. By nature, the sublime does, of course, blow minds rather than encourage reasoned responses. In a couple of tracks, though, Willner lets his guard down in the final seconds, allowing the tunes he's been sampling to play unaltered. Is he deconstructing himself, laying his process bare before us? Is he telling us that even the best parties have to end? Maybe he's showboating, demonstrating his prowess as a producer by telling us, "Yes, Lionel Ritchie's 'Hello' is a ridiculous song, but I just made it sound great!"

Willner has offered few clues of his own in interviews. His brief comments on his music suggest that he creates it simply for his own pleasure. A member of punk and hard rock bands during his teen years, Willner eventually immersed himself in post-rock and modern compositional music and began piecing together songs on his laptop when he found himself estranged from his guitar. He has little interest in playing live deejay sets and describes himself as a poor beat matcher; like Seefeel and Gas - two of his favorite artists - he makes electronic music with home listeners like himself in mind. Kompakt learned about his music through a demo, not underground hype. For live performances, he simply sits behind his laptop and lets his music play. He sometimes samples human voices, but he has no use for lyrics, for text.

In other words, Willner is as unassuming an artist as there is. But when you deal exclusively in Good Parts, moments that ultimately outline our limitations as human beings, can you say anything that the songs can't say better?

Phillip Buchan

Liner Notes is Flagpole's music opinion column.