The Field - Infinite Moment Vinyl 2LP

Two years on from his last outing, The Follower (KOMP 130CD/KOM 350LP, 2016), Axel Willner puts on his Field suit again to present his sixth full-length effort for Kompakt, Infinite Moment. Infinite Moment sees him striding further across the deeper, richer rims of the hue cycle. In Willner's own words, "the threshold of creating something new had to be broken", as had been done with his past albums, including his acclaimed debut From Here We Go Sublime (KOMP 057CD/KOMRSD 002LP, 2007). For Willner, "stepping outside of the studio opened up fresh perspectives on the creation of new music"; it was the opening cut, "Made Of Steel, Made Of Stone", that got him into the flux of things, "making of the rest of the album easier as I went". Substituting the up-tempo vim of his previous pieces for a sense of mind-expanding horizontality, Infinite Moment is an album filled with hope and draped in a diffuse, appeasing light, easing the pain and troubles of the human soul through a lushly forested recital of shoegazing modular, complex textural interplays and solar, atmospheric fractals. "Made Of Steel, Made Of Stone" gets the ball rolling on a thumping down-tempo note, which as Willner explains, "gives me a lot of hope". "Hope is something I've been missing in the nowadays climate and this album is a relief to me, a type of comfort, like a moment that feels good and you don't want to end." "Divide Now" is a sonic mitosis, engaging the metamorphosis to come; like a larvae pupating and reemerging weeks later from under rough bark in the form of a butterfly - fluttering breaks shed their skin to make way for a more intimate and hypnotic second chapter. "Hear Your Voice" propels the lavish, pad-upholstered glamour of its melodic lines in a bolder syncopated re-visitation of 1980s-indebted pop harmonics, while "Something Left, Something Right, Something Wrong" returns to a flaring post-euphoric daze. A more arrhythmic affair, "Who Goes There" spins out into orbit wildly, fusing acid bass moves with a haunting motorik, playing with the listener's mind intensely before the ten-minute-long epic "Infinite Moment" ushers its listener into a highly immersive final ballet of buzzing chords, trampling drums and all-consuming drones. This album is a direct soul-to-soul transmission, aiming no further than at finding the right balance between contained emotion and an expressive eloquence.