Touring: The Field
By Sophie in News | 0 comments
Mistletone proudly presents The Field, aka Swedish electronic music producer and DJ Axel Willner, returning to Australia to play a late-night, all-hardware live set for Melbourne Festival, plus solo shows in Sydney and (for the first time ever) Perth. Joining The Field’s Sydney and Perth shows will be influential Berlin instigator Barker (Ostgut Ton / Leisure System), who will play a DJ set at both shows. Tour dates below.
THE FIELD TOUR DATES:
- SYDNEY: THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22 @ Goodgod w/- Barker (Ostgut Ton / Leisure System – Berlin) + Noise In My Head (DJ sets). Early bird tickets on sale now from Moshtix. Presented by 2ser.
- MELBOURNE: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 23 @ Melbourne Festival Hub, doors open 11pm. Tickets + more information here.
- PERTH: SATURDAY, OCTOBER 24 @ Jimmy’s Den w/- Barker (Ostgut Ton / Leisure System – Berlin) (DJ set) + Basic Mind. Co-presented by Camp Doogs. Tickets on sale now from Ticketbooth.
The sublime, minimal soundscapes of Stockholm-born, Berlin-based Axel Willner—aka The Field—have been wowing listeners ever since 2007, when the release of his debut album From Here We Go Sublime saw him hailed as a new prophet in the techno scene. A dreamy blend of beats, atmospheric electronic and snatches of 60s pop, Willner melds his complex layering of sound to blissful perfection. Known for his playful, pop-inflected tunes, The Field’s solo show is a journey through the raw electronic side of his sound, encompassing work from From Here We Go Sublime and latest Cupid’s Head, performed live on the original hardware. Whether soaring in euphoria or throbbing with dense driving beats, the polished mastery of this singular talent is indisputable.
Sydney & Perth support Barker might not be world-renowned, but his influence runs deep through the veins of Europe’s electronic music community. Barker started out promoting his own events under the name “Instrumentality”, an event that encouraged improvisation, collaboration, and electronic experiments every week for four years. During this time he built up a sizeable collection of analogue hardware that became the backbone for his work as Voltek. He’s probably best known as half of the Barker & Baumecker duo, and as the driving force behind the Leisure System residency at Berlin’s most influential club, Berghain.
The Field and Barker will be joined by local dance luminaries Noise In My Head in Sydney, and Basic Mind in Perth.
“One of modern electronic music’s most satisfying auteurs” – PITCHFORK
The Field sprung into existence in 2003 when Axel took to Buzz – a software program he still uses to make music today – to construct his ambient techno based on a stoic motorik and a perpetually rotating hook. He was picked up by Kompakt just a year later. The connection between The Field and Kompakt transcends all the more obvious signposts. For Kompakt, their reputation as purveyors of laudable minimal techno and microhouse had already been cemented in 2005, seven years into the Cologne-based label’s existence – not least owing to the releases created by their founders, techno producers Michael Mayer and Jurgen Paape and, of course, Wolfgang Voigt. Finding The Field was different though; Axel certainly matched the label’s mould, rekindling something of Voigt’s late 90s project Gas by marrying heavily reverberating 4/4 techno rhythms – the sort that evoke the lost thud of a distant club – with the vast expanse and translucent territories of ambient music. Yet listening even as far back as ‘Things Keep Falling Down’ – The Field’s debut EP on Kompakt – it was clear there was something more, a veiled restlessness bubbling under the loops and layers, as though Axel had set himself boundaries but then tired and sought to break them; it’s this subtle tension in all his albums that heightens them from their otherwise dreamlike state.
But first, let’s go back to the beginning, to Stockholm in Sweden where Axel Willner grew up; for to understand The Field you need to understand that everything he’s experienced from an early age and up through to the present has influenced him in his music and will continue to do so. Those same childhood and teen memories that he imprinted on his very early demos – attempted on desktop computers when the internet was but a microcosm of what it is today – through early incarnation Speed Wax has informed everything he’s done since.
His beginnings saw an early love of pop, like a generation of Swedes his first musical memory was “probably Abba.” That’s stayed in his repertoire, from the samples on LP From Here We Go To Sublime’s ‘A Paw In My Face’ to a glossy cover of 1980 hit ‘Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime’ on Yesterday & Today. Other formative experiences in music were more conflicting though. On the one hand Axel professes a teenage love of punk, citing The Misfits in particular, on the other though – as he reached late adolescence – he found himself under the strict restrictions and discipline of a music school. Perhaps unsurprisingly it wasn’t for him. “I was in this school that had people nationwide who’d applied because of the quality of their music courses, so I had all these top of the line musicians round me – but I found it dull!” Laughs Axel. “But,” he rations, “it all felt really forced, there were all these students and it seemed like they were all in a niche so it was hard to break out of it.”
Thankfully Stockholm as a city provided far more musical nutrition and fuelled Axel’s move towards electronic music. It coincided with the beginnings of a small club scene in the Swedish capital that started building up during the late 90s; “they were fun days,” he recalls, “I was in a duo called Speed Wax and the places we played were all really into Techno and Warp Records; it was cool, people helped each other out, the vibes were good; it started out just doing nights to 20 people and then it just grew and grew.”
The Field as an entity sprung up around 2003, the back catalogue of Gas at this point having a strong influence on Axel, and he took to Buzz – a software program he still uses to make music today – to construct his first forays into ambient techno, a move away from the guitar-based drone that encapsulated Speed Wax.
He was picked up by Kompakt just a year later in 2004, a demo that stood out amongst pile, though at the time he wasn’t “really aware of any buzz.” Yet in his first release for them – the aforementioned ‘Things Keep Falling Down’ in February 2005 – there already lurked potential within its two tracks. Both ‘Love vs. Distance’ and ‘Thoughts vs. Action’ soared beyond the 10 minute mark; the latter a crackling jump-and-stop minimal effort, to listen to it now is to listen to The Field stripped away of the scale he has since brought to his work. It was ‘Love vs. Distance’ that provided the template for what would follow; based on a stoic motorik and a perpetually rotating hook, it provided an early demonstration of how the Swede could take just four bars of sound and deftly deconstruct, alter and rebuild them to create a constantly changing canvas.
That, alongside follow up 2006 EP ‘Sun & Ice,’ made it clear that his match with the label made perfect sense. Kompakt’s other releases around this time included ambient house legends The Orb’s first release on the imprint, as well as the mellowed out soft-focus bliss of German producer Superpitcher’s ‘Today’ mix featuring other Kompakt members DJ Koze and Triola among others. In ‘Sun & Ice’ The Field imbued a sense of wandering expanse, yet where his contemporaries were happy to submerge themselves in ambient fog, he cut through with more pronounced percussion and purpose, tracks like ‘Over The Ice’ skipping along like skimmed stones over water.
It all came together in 2007 on the phenomenal success of debut LP From Here We Go Sublime; its accolades are numerous – a 9.0 and a place inside the Top 200 records of the decade by Pitchfork, highly regarded by the NME and the BBC and receiving the best aggregate score on review compiler Metacritic to name a few – it came out at a time when electronic meant brash, obvious, loud. Electro was its most swollen. Drum n’ bass was well in the throes of eating itself. In comparison The Field came across like fading noises of the night, the beats still driving but the sun coming up, that transition between the club and journey home and down.
It was never more evident than on ‘Good Things End,’ which at one thundered and also fawned, industrial rhythms overlapped with lost sounding vocal samples and blurring, faded-pale drones. For Axel the success of the album surprised him, “I was flattered! I didn’t think there’d be much interest; it’s a record that’s still important to me though. I’d had a lot of the tracks for it a while, there’s a lot of old memories on the album, a lot of good times connected to it.”
2009’s follow up Yesterday & Today embodied Axel’s belief in the communal nature of music that’s always imbued itself within The Field; there’s always a human heart beating among the electronics and samples. On Yesterday & Today that became more explicit as live instruments were worked in with Willner’s laptop experiments – never more so than with the cameo of John Stanier, drummer of respected American math-rockers Battles, on the title track. Linking back to a distant past again, pop was revisited with a cover of The Korgis ‘Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime,’ and overall the album felt more pointed, with rhythms and synths gaining harder edges.
It was around this time Axel also switched countries, a romantic interest resulting in him leaving Stockholm as a home for the first time since childhood, and moving to Berlin. One of the most famous clubbing cities in the world, for the artist its hedonism is something he shuns when not playing – “it’s like going to your office,” he says simply, adding credence to the notion that The Field’s work is music meant for a myriad of situations – not just late night basements and warehouses – but for fading afternoons, early morning sunrises a feeling of expanse that’s always existed.
In 2011 third album Looping State Of Mind, recalled his previous work but also pushes on in new directions. “It’s been evolving and it will keep on doing so,” says its creator, “people come and go, adding their things to it, you change as well and so will the sound.” As ever The Field transcend their mere components, Looping State Of Mind could almost be a manifesto for them. Certainly for Axel there is no beginning and end to the impact of what he sees and experiences in every day life, things will always come back around; the challenge for him is to adapt and alter them when they do in order to create something that understands and re-defines them in a new way each time.
2013 saw the release of Cupid’s Head, hailed by Resident Advisor as “one of Willner’s most affirming and beatific creations to date”.
Barker (Ostgut Ton / Leisure System – Berlin)
Born June 7th 1983 in Bedford to guitar teacher mother and builder father.
Grew up nearby on the outskirts of an industrial town called Milton Keynes, best known for having concrete cows, also known to truckers as ‘the Devil’s Lay by’. known by ravers for The Sanctury (Helter Skelter, Dreamscape) and various free parties (J13, Dissident, Survival, STS Harcore etc).
Learnt to play a lot of instruments in childhood, and played in various bands before discovering computers and rave music in the late 90’s. Made my first electronic tracks age 13, and built up a sizable collection of vintage analogue synths after leaving school. By 18 I’d started performing live sets at raves in the area.
Went to study Music in Brighton in 2002 and became part of the experimental electronic scene there, spearheaded by Wrong Music, and running my own weekly live electronic night called Instrumentality (www.instrumentality.info) which brought over 200 artists to Brighton in 4 years. Everything from a 26 piece marching band from Seattle (Infernal Noise Brigade) to the first UK Flying Lotus show. It was an exciting time for music, felt like a lot of musical boundaries were being pushed.
Started working for Ned Beckett on his Overkill parties and Littlebig agency towards the end of my studies, before moving with to Berlin in 2007. A year later, we started a quarterly residency at Berghain called Leisure System, bringing a more genre-defiant programme to the techno superclub at their request. At the end of last year the brand expanded to become a label, and we’re having our 4th Birthday this September.
In 2008 I started collaborating with another Berghain resident nd_baumecker, which became the project Barker & Baumecker. After our first EP ‘Candyflip’ was released on Ostgut Ton in 2010, we toured our live show extensively throughout Europe’s techno scenes and are currently getting ready for our 2nd EP on March 26th, leading to an album in August.
A constant throughout all this is a passion for improvisation and collaborating – I’ve worked with the likes of Tim Exile, Clark, Jimmy Edgar, Shitmat, Scotch Egg, The Field, Leafcutter John, under various projects like Rushing Forth Like a Fiery Law, The Trips or Knight Terrors.
email this | tag this | digg this | trackback | comment RSS feed
