With From Here We Go Sublime, Willner has crafted an electronic album that is utterly original and not easily forgotten.An atypical album release by Kompakt, From Here We Go Sublime, the debut full-length release by the Field, is nevertheless stunning, its less-is-more aesthetic striking because of its elegance as well as ease. He uses that influence the way it should be used, sparingly, and uses it to his greatest advantage. So it is with the Field, and Willner manages to avoid letting the atmosphere, the drone and fuzz of feeling, take his songs over. And like the best in shoegaze (which, for my money, is Slowdive), the songs get better with repeated listens, revealing small surprises hidden in the murk. As with My Bloody Valentine, the melody is not always immediately apparent in the Field’s music it is buried down in the songs a little and the listener has to work to pull it out. Willner has never been shy about his love for shoegaze, and he achieves another small success on this album by incorporating that influence into his music and making it his own. And, just as quick as it came, the Field picks the track up again, making you realize just how much you’d invested in the album to that point, how disappointed you’d be if it went away. It’s a big enough blip to make you raise your head and look at the stereo with concern. And just when you’re into the rhythm, the song shorts out for a second nearly six minutes in. It is a song - like many of these songs - that earns every moment, not giving the listener the lift the song provides, but making them participate and pay attention to the elements of the track. Following the amazing “The Deal”, the song soars as sounds swell and circle back around to swell and rise again. But the Field moves north without a doubt, pushing the borders as it goes, to create something quite vibrant. I don’t know if it’s format - disc or vinyl or cassette alike - but most music comes across as moving horizontally, from beginning to end. From Here We Go Sublime reveals a pretty brilliant structure in which the album seems to move vertically as it goes. By the end, the trajectory of the album is cemented. It drives on, taking its time and drawing the listener in with its choir of angels sound, for 10 minutes. The sample gives the song a choral feel, like something one man couldn’t possibly have created himself. On “The Deal”, perhaps the most epic of all these epic songs, the sampled vocals raise the stakes of the song, and consequently the album. And each time he uses the trick, it works. Most of the samples here are looped woman’s vocals, usually cut to one simple note and repeated over and over. He manages to incorporate basic electronic elements - like, for example, heavy sampling - without calling attention to them. The production always sounds under control, never forced. And perhaps what is most impressive is Willner’s confidence in the face of such ambition. Like both a challenge for Willner and an inevitability. The entirety of From Here We Go Sublime sounds like that. The movement of it is beautiful, pushing the song both to its absolute limits and the only possible place it could go. The song gradually adds layers of keys and stilted vocals and shuffling percussion. Then, the looped sound of a woman’s voice comes in, sounding both robotic and ghostly, setting the tone for what is to follow. It starts simply: all thudding beat accompanied by nearly inaudible synth notes. “Over the Ice”, the album’s opener, builds slowly and deliberately. Even the scant parameters Willner imposes on his compositions are constantly being stretched at the seams. These songs seem incapable of being contained. For over an hour, the Field (aka Axel Willner) plays with the drone of various sounds to construct music that is constantly expanding. From Here We Go Sublime is an album not only concerned with space, but more than that - it is concerned with infinity.
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