The Field: Looping State of Mind (Kompakt)

Being a bit of a late starter when it comes to techno, i first became aware of The Field via their standout remix from Miracle's remix album earlier this year, cracking the song down to a long ambient murky mush - in a similar way to some of the best tracks by Wolfgang Voigt's excellent Gas records. I touch a punt on this album, hoping it would be more of the same and was both excited, and slightly disappointed, to find that it was so much more than the near-gas experience of the remix. Whilst there is a fair degree of ambient noise as the bedrock of each track, there are beats bolted on to almost everything, which tend to override the other sounds to make you nod your head in time (as i'm doing now whilst it plays behind me) rather than to actually listen to what is going on. Whilst this is undoubtedly the reason most dance music exists, this is not the reason why i listen to music. Being not much of a dancer, and not very knowledgeable about the different streams of techno music, i rely on something to catch my attention rather than a beat to latch onto.

And there's plenty going on here for me to latch onto - the subtle instrumentation of each loop (and, as the title gives way, this music is pretty to heavily reliant on loops - albeit live played as opposed to sampling somebody else) is really effective and references many other non-dance sources. I can hear a strong post punk and shoegaze/dreampop element to a lot of these tracks and this is what sets it apart from many other techno things that i've heard lately. I suppose i need dance music to bring to mind strictly non dance things for me to be interested, as i come from a purely non dance listening background.

The repetitive loops on here generally work well in a hypnotic way, in a similar manner to the more rhythmic krautrock like Neu's 'hallogallo' but sometimes they can really grate. Case in point has to be the final track - 'Sweet slow baby' where it loops the same sound over and over and over and over again. And that sound is 'cleverly' created to sound like the needle is skipping, so us vinyl fans are sent backwards and forwards to the turntable to check what is going on. At one point during this track Helen walked in and asked if the record was stuck, i checked it and moved the tone arm. It sounded exactly the same. I moved it again and it still sounded exactly the same. I gave up.

Which is a sad way to end a generally great album.