Yesterday and Today - The Field (2009)

already halfway through 2009, i figured i would begin this blog with a post about my favorite album of the year (so far).



as the album art maybe reveals, this album's all about minimalism. with his ear moving closer to Steve Reich (famous for the essential minimalist work Music for 18 Musicians), Axel Willner has completed his second ambient house masterpiece under the Field moniker. moving away from the shorter, more immediately satisfying tracks he created on his 2007 debut, From Here We Go Sublime, The Field moves closer to Reich's territory by staying in the moment of a sound longer, looping seemingly infinitely on a closed circuit track of electronic bliss.

the shortest track here is barely under seven minutes, and it's the first Field track (that i know of) to feature vocals as actual singing, instead of just the instrumental blips The Field is known for. the rest of the tracks here dabble in or around the ten-minute mark. the key track for me is number 3, "Leave It," a long piece that spins and spins and spins, morphing slowly and steadily over the loop that repeats for twelve minutes.

but i continue to have trouble describing what makes this album click for me. i think to understand it, it takes a couple loud listens on headphones. when you listen to this normally, in your room or in the car, you hear a mediocre loop repeating for far too long. in your head though, forced to listen between a pair of good headphones, you hear the nuances that help the track evolve, like a virus changing its shape over geological time. little sparkly clangs that usher in transitions, bass lines that crawl out of the water like a fish growing legs, samples of female breath that exhale perfectly on time with crisp snares.



i had the very pleasant opportunity to see The Field perform at the Mezzanine in San Francisco just a couple weeks ago, and i am so happy i attended. as the photo shows, Willner is joined on stage by a couple other musicians for this tour, who took some load off Willner's job by covering some of the bases. awesomely, one of the other bandmembers actually played bass in a couple of the songs, bringing a wonderful organic vibration to the electronic thump.

if you are wondering what the title of the first track means, you are not alone. i asked Willner after the show what it meant and all he did was chuckle, saying, "it's a joke between me and my girlfriend." don't forget that humans make electronic music and human music rarely comes up with new topics.

1. I Have the Moon, You Have the Internet (8:02)
2. Everybody's Got to Learn Sometime (6:51)
3. Leave It (11:37)
4. Yesterday and Today (10:08)
5. The More That I Do (8:36)
6. Sequenced (15:42)

download or buy