6.45

6 minutes, 45 seconds.

The patient twitches. The once silent heart quietly murmurs. Eyeballs, like cats trapped under blankets, begin to stir. The beat. That tenacious beat. That heart beat. The quickening, the thud. That affirmative beat. The roaring beat that clarifies, cleanses and erases the past. That irreversible, sea changing beat. Suddenly alive - everything alive. Everything alert. Everything sharpened. Everything beyond limitations. And everything is now.

6.45. This is the moment. The moment Yesterday And Today ceases being a let-down, and focuses on the get-down.

The Field is Axel Willner, the Swedish composer who emerged in 2005 as one of dance music's bright lights through a series of beaming 12" releases on Germany's lauded imprint Kompakt. Yet it was with his feted debut album From Here We Go Sublime - a peerless modern techno wash of unravelled melodies, spliced twitterings and undulating elation - that Willner was thrust into the critical limelight. That album dedicated itself to carefully arranged nuance and subtlety that thrust dance music into more artisan territory, yet remained steadfastly and thunderously rapturous. Effortless and complex, ...Sublime explored limitless possibilities and, via masterly execution, meticulous sample-editing, breathless wonder and, er, Lionel Ritchie, made those translucent dreamlike wishes substantially, and dazzlingly, more tangible.   

As the title of new album Yesterday And Today atests, The Field/Willner returns in 2009 caught in the crosshairs of transition: eager to explore new ventures but cautious not to alienate Sublime's devotees. Given the future-facing fast-changing nature of electronic music it would be a dangerous move to consolidate success, so it's credit to Willner that he, like the other zeitgeist-attuned minds of Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas, has made the bold decision to enmesh traditional instrumentation to his pre-planned pursuits. The approach to this newfound alliance has been wholly organic, with Willner foregoing sole laptop orchestration via Yesterday And Today's pre-cursive live outings in favour of integrated live players; the move giving him time, patience and the judicious authority to harvest the live highs for the studio hereafter.

That hereafter kicks off with I Have The Moon, You Have The Internet, a track that, despite the rather self-satisifed name, is placed firmly in the 'Yesterday' camp of the album's title. An elongated, low trajectory ascent, I Have The Moon... encapsulates the featherlight majesty of Sublime. Tumbling arpeggios, reversed hi-hats and those hand-crafted harmonic samples subjected to meticulous arrangement; chord and key changes mingle to create its own otherworldly, yet blissful, aurual vortex: even though eight minutes long, and not the sort of track that permits dipping in and out of, it compels your attention to be dragged along by its ghostly tidal pulsing for the entire celestial duration. Then comes the Willner-rebooting of The Korgis' Everybody's Got To Learn Sometime which isn't so much an overhaul as a gushy epic re-rendering by Barbara Cartland. Hanging by a bathetic thread it heroically bypasses disappearing into a mawkish void by the enormity of its synth swells and the striking grandeur of its vision.

The second half of Yesterday And Today ushers in the modernity of the title's equation: fifteen-minute closer Sequenced is spacious, jammed-out, twinkling and anthemic; it's symphonic, dubby, oozing postivity and aligns itself as a vamped Screamadelica incarnate. Lead single The More That I Do, liberally snatching from Cocteau Twins' Lorelei, would have been an intangiable amalgam of vaporess drift and ethereal quaintness without its bold rhythmic propulsion. Willner's staunch percussive vigour underlines that this is not neoteric shoegaze but sensual, sweaty and adrenalized: this is strobegaze.

The ambient sweeping and swooshing takes a firm backseat on the album's title track, and it's the clearest signpost that Willner's compass is pointing in the opposite direction from whence he came. Malnourished, hungry and chromatic, Yesterday And Today bears all the stern, streamlined syncopated hallmarks of Detriot techno, ripping through Willner's trademark heady oscillations with steely resolution. Then, this unheralded marvel turns its ultimate trick. From the desecration of his past, and out of the rubble, comes the blood - the life-blood. Loose and renewed, breakbeats slowly tumble into the mix, not of machine-precision origin, but with the freedom and might that only non-generative, human-handed decision making can provide (courtesy of Battles' John Stanier and Dan Enquist). It's the album's unrivalled moment that proudly announces its malleable personality of blistering force and quixotic expression.

And the time on the clock reads six minutes and forty five seconds.

At sixty minutes plus in duration, and with only six tracks in hand, the feeling of being short-changed can't be shaken, especially when you consider the repetitive nature of Willner's output. Yet to water down or truncate Yesterday And Today's offerings would be to neuter their impact. Like gyroscopes and time-lapse photography, much of what there is to admire about these compositions - the gradation of textures, the subtleties in the arrangements - comes from embracing the full arc of the songbook and letting its many nylon, gossamer and metallic threads gloriously unfold of its own volition. This is not music to instantly grab your attention; there are no choruses and the option to put a donk on it is immovably void. The devil, and delight, is in it's intricate detail. With Yesterday And Today, Willner has assiduously unified a rich bond between then and now, of forgotten moments and forever changes, of heavenly daydreams and the thumping human heart - music's precious past and promising present just came alive.    

Release date: 18/05/09
Artist website: www.myspace.com/thefieldsthlm
Label: Kompakt

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