The broad landscapes of
Infinite Moment, the sixth album from Swedish producer
Axel Willner under his moniker
the Field, come after more than a decade of slowly rippling evolution. Beginning as bright yet abstract electronic pop with 2007's
From Here We Go Sublime,
the Field looked to inventively diced samples and repetition as the cornerstones of his sound. As the years went on, the unchanging minimal graphic design of the album covers spoke to the snail-paced changes in sound, letting the music speak for itself as it shifted ever so slightly from one release to the next.
Infinite Moment moves even further into the twilight tones
Willner began exploring on 2013's
Cupid's Head and continued with 2016's
The Follower. These albums brought
the Field into protracted song structures and darker applications of dub production and noisy shoegaze-like textures. With one eight-minute exception, the six tracks here stretch out past the ten-minute mark, building so incrementally that their subtle drifting takes on an almost ambient quality.
Willner paints in darkly gorgeous tones, using a steady pulse to tether fluttering feedback sounds, breathy vocal samples, and dubbed-out digital synth lines. These slow-motion sprawls tend toward hopeful, romantic bliss, as with the pristine crackle of "Something Left, Something Right, Something Wrong," or restless melancholy, as with "Hear Your Voice."
Willner's use of vocal samples is limited to half-words and pitch-shifted snippets that move in and out of the frame as the songs unfold. Light years away from anything resembling even the outsider pop of his earlier material, even the wobbly groove- and house-influenced rhythms of "Who Goes There" are obscured by waves of noise.
Willner seems aware of the floating nature of the album, and mid-way through the dubby throb of "Divide Now" he takes a complete left turn, switching up the beat for a just few seconds with a vintage '90s jungle break in a different time signature. This playful moment lasts just long enough to break the trance of the song before it melts into its repetitive second movement. Taken as a whole, this is easily
the Field's most majestic and composed material, and also some of the project's most captivating. At times it recalls both the muted searching feeling and densely layered approach of
Gas or
Jan Jelinek. The perpetually unraveling nature of
Infinite Moment results in a perfectly paced listening experience that's almost impossible not to get lost in. ~ Fred Thomas