Pitchfork

The Field is Axel Willner from Stockholm. He's made some very graceful waves with two 12-inches on Kompakt, had one of the best tracks on the latest Pop Ambient compilation, and is now gearing up to release his full-length debut, From Here We Go Sublime. His stated respect for the work of Kompakt head Wolfgang Voigt (aka Gas, Mike Ink, Freiland) isn't just an employee complimenting the boss's tie; Willner's music obviously draws from the shape-shifting ambience of Voigt's final Gas album Pop, though Willner favors builds and drama over pure mood.\

"A Paw in My Face" is built using one of Willner's preferred techniques, the looped micro-sample from an obvious source that reveals itself over time and subliminally rewires our collective pop unconscious. The raw material in question, we discover at the end of the track, is Lionel Richie's "Hello", the 80s ballad that set unattractive guys the world over in search of attractive blind women in need of sculpture models. At first it's just a split-second fragment of guitar and a small nugget of synth from the original tune's break dropped into Willner's puffy, pulsating loops, but then "Hello" steps out from behind the curtain in the track's startling final moment, blinking into the light like a man awaking from ocular surgery.

"The Deal" blows Willner's aesthetic up to cinemascopic proportions, draping a vast screen of staticy white mist onto which he projects distant female voices yelping in at the end of every few bars, punctuating the chords like the sound effect rush in Pink Floyd's "One of These Days." Changes are minimal but the intensity continues to build for nearly ten minutes, as spacey sound effects and downy beds of drone struggle to crowd there way into the frame created by the relentless 4/4 pulse. Dude is in the zone here, and it's impossible not to follow him in.