The Field: another kind of trance

(Credit: Lars Borges)

“I don’t know,” says ambient techno icon Axel Willner with a nervous laugh. “Sometimes it’s good to read and sometimes it’s not.”

When you ask the man behind one of the best-reviewed albums of 2007 whether or not he reads his press, this isn’t really the answer you expect. “From Here We Go Sublime,” Willner’s debut album as the Field, received a 9.0 from the famously stingy critics at Pitchfork and had the highest rating that year on Metacritic.com, a reviews aggregator. One particularly smitten critic called it “one of those rare albums that makes you wonder how you ever got by without it.”

How do you top such an achievement? If you’re Willner, you invite some friends out to the boonies of your native Sweden (“this house that we borrowed from friends on kind of a remote island”) and jam (“a six-day, seven-day session, just playing day and night”). The result is “Yesterday and Today,” which sounds like a Field record as performed by some cyborg jam band from the future—Willner’s trademark loops and modulated synths extended out over eight-plus-minute tracks and augmented by live bass, guitars and percussion (some of the latter played by John Stanier of the math-rock group Battles).

Just before his first U.S. tour in support of the new album’s release, Metromix called Willner at his home in Stockholm to discuss the roots of his unique take on electronic music—and why Tiësto had better watch his back.   

You worked more with live musicians on this album than you have in the past. How did that come about?
After playing [as] the Field just by myself with a laptop, I got a little weary of that. I wanted to develop the sound and the whole live thing a little bit. So I decided to ask two old friends of mine if they wanted to join me to play live. We had our first gig in Stockholm, which was a little bit of a test or experiment to see if it would work. And everyone seemed to like it very much…so that’s what we did. We’ve been touring like this, as the Field, for one and a half years now.

Knowing you’re going to have live drums or live bass on a track, does that change the way you write the music?
Not the actual writing in the beginning or the pre-production sketches and all that stuff. It’s more the other steps in the whole process that have been very different. We mostly worked around created loops by me and [created a] very free, kind of jamming style around this. That’s really ideal for me to work like that.

And for this upcoming tour, will you be performing solo or with other musicians?
No, it’s the same guys as usual. I can’t really picture myself ever going back to standing there playing live by myself.

Just you and your laptop? You didn’t enjoy that as much?
No, it was of course good sometimes, too. But just being there with a laptop was pretty—I don’t know. It didn’t really suit me that well.

When you first started getting into making music, what kind of stuff were you into?
Punk rock. I was very into the Misfits, Bad Brains, Crass—the Ramones, even. The Clash, too. The usual suspects in the punk scene.

And then what first got you interested in electronic music?
I remember I liked “Little Fluffy Clouds” by the Orb very much. And the most definite [moment] when I felt I wanted to make electronic music was with Daft Punk’s “Homework.” That was really when I thought, “Oh, this I should try out.”

The other element I hear in your music kind of reminds me of avant-garde composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Does any of that style of music influence your sound, as well?
Yeah, I am a true, big fan of the minimalists, like—yeah, Philip Glass, too, but one of my definite favorite composers, ever, is Steve Reich. And Terry Riley and all that stuff, too. I had the [experience] of working through, as a young man, all this kind of music—and one thing leads to another, like the minimalists, and then you get into the post-rock thing. You can find so many genres just listening to one artist.

It’s too bad the word “trance” is already taken to describe a whole genre of electronic music, because to me, your music is very trance-like in the literal sense. Listening to it can put you in an actual trance.
Yeah, I can totally agree there with you. That’s also something I really like [about] repetitive music with very tiny changes—when you come to a very trance-like state of mind when you’re listening to it. I guess you can really hear that in the music I create.

Maybe you can reclaim “trance” from the Tiëstos of the world.
[Laughs] Yeah, yeah.

At your live shows, is it a full-on dance party like it is with a more traditional house or techno act? Or is the crowd more subdued?
It depends. Often, lately, we’ve been trying to pay attention to what people are doing when they’re watching us—we watch them back. And often, we start pretty slow, and then it gets more layered and layered and then it’s more beats, too. And mostly, at the end of shows, a lot of people are dancing. So I don’t know—it’s something maybe in-between; some people really want to just be there and listen and watch, and some people really like to dance.