There are a lot of seemingly negative words you could use to describe The Field’s music; droning, repetitive, simplistic. There’s one word you can’t use: boring. The Field is music stripped down to basic elements, then blown out, expanded, overexposed and pushed to extremes. Minimalism without restraint.
You can describe a typical Field song as such: take a sample of a recognizable pop song. Now trim it down to the point that it is unrecognizable. Less than a syllable, less than a full note, just a pulse of sound that hardly bears any relation to the original. Loop this, over and over, with a slowly shifting bed of pulsing delay and a steady, deep kick drum pulse. Slowly (and I mean ssssssllllllllooooooowwwwwwwwlllllyyyyy) add in layers of hihats, filtered synths, and occasionally a melody buried beneath it all. Do this for 7 to 10 minutes at a time. On record, it’s a recipe for spacey bliss-out sessions, where you can close your eyes and coast on crescendo after crescendo, waiting for the tension to break with the introduction of one more element in the mix, then feel it build again, over and over.
It doesn’t sound like the sort of thing that will drive a crowd wild, but somehow it does. On stage, The Field is a band, or something that can pass for one (two guys hunched over mixers, one guy running live visuals, and one guy switching between bass and drums), and they push the shimmering, pulsing songs farther and deeper, with the live instruments guitar filling in the edges. Parts stretch out longer, grooves run deeper, the echoing feedback is more volatile. And while they didn’t get the entire dancefloor moving, they had the cluster of dancing bodies in the center of the room begging for more, with their hands and their voices raised.
I was too tired to stay for The Juan MacLean afterwards. Was it lack of sleep the night before, or was I exhausted just by listening to the overpowering wall of sound that ended The Field’s set? Probably a little bit of both…
