Music: The Field - From Here We Go Sublime

The Field
From Here We Go Sublime
[Techno]

Three quarters and forty-five minutes into Axel Willner's first full-length recording, I found myself faced with the rarest of questions: could this be a perfect record? Not just a solid album (where well-polished pleasantries sneak by, polite and unassuming and unspectacular: think Antics, Transformer or Revolver), but an album where each song is your favourite song of the year, where each song fills you with a kind of unbridled, childish glee, where each song just works?

And then, just as I was beginning to believe, the thing collapsed in on itself, delivering three successive sour notes, one after the other, bringing From Here We Go Sublime's almost indefatigable momentum to a stunning anti-climax. Bang, bang, bang. Nice try. Better luck next time.

Repeat listens both reassured and disappointed; Willner (a.k.a. The Field) has indeed crafted an album's worth of gorgeous, minimal techno with the first seven songs, only to have gone and spoiled the fun by cluttering the mix with a final, unnecessary three. Given the breathtaking simplicity of his technique - electronic and voice samples, sliced and diced and looped, over and over and over, set to the simplest of beats - you'd have thought overcrowding the least of his worries, but alas not. The result? Willner only has himself to blame for 2007's most frustrating listen.

However, as frustrating listens go, From Here We Go Sublime must surely rank among the most satisfying. Opener 'Over the Ice' slips and slides with remarkable grace, peaking and subsiding innumerable times during seven seemingly short minutes, as blissfully urgent as a hurried hallucination. As with much of Sublime, it sounds like something you should be able to knock up on Pro Tools in half an hour, but at the same time you know you just couldn't resist slotting in an extra hi-hat here or another bass-line there. To strip music down to its bare essentials is any genre is a risky business, but to do so in modern electronic music, post-James and -Jenkinson, is verging on suicidal. Somehow, Willner pulled it off.

'A Paw in My Face' then resumes the steady momentum for a patient minute, before soaring skywards as the beat strengthens, synth textures sweep in from acute angles and a clipped guitar sample provides the first glimpse of melody. A predictable crescendo involving all three arrives, lights flashing, after four minutes, but the sheer bliss of the moment is so overwhelming that any sense of over-familiarity is quickly forgotten.

Though the opening pair are excellent, by far the strongest track on Sublime is sixth song 'Silent'. Gradually climbing to an anthemic peak from a steady, beat-driven birth, its wispy "ooh-oohs", astral swirls and progressively hardening drums combine for a truly transcendental experience, like the fitter happier cousin of the Velvet Underground's 'Heroin'. Music this beautiful, this ethereal, this...colourful is just so hard to come by.

Elsewhere, 'Good Things End' is perhaps the most club-ready track on offer, rumbling with a muffled, skittering beat and warmly cushioned by frequent ripples of lush background noise. 'Everday' is epileptic and chilled in equal measure, surfing a sea of snappy, erratic clicks and a soothing vocal loop, while 'The Little Heart Beats So Fast' grooves under and over suggestive gasps. 'The Deal' is the record's ten minute centrefold, a brooding, atmospheric piece built around an obtuse wall of interlocked shifts, taps, groans and howls. It's Sublime's deepest and most rewarding track, and would have served as a useful end to the record had Willner opted to quit while he was ahead.

As it is, we're left with 'Sun and Ice' (a weak wave of candy floss white noise which fails to invigorate), 'Mobilia' (Willner's doomed attempt to do something a bit odd) and the pithy title track to close the album with a confused, dull whimper; a certain album of the year becomes a sure-fire top ten fixture. Oh Axel, you had us all going for a minute. 87