The Field - Infinite Moment
Pitchfork 80
The Swedish producer takes the long view on his fifth album full of drifting compositions that knit together twin feelings of melancholy and hope.
Mon Sep 24 05:00:00 GMT 2018Tiny Mix Tapes 60
The Field
Infinite Moment
[Kompakt; 2018]
Rating: 3/5
In scents and on eaves and vines and ancient sills, I hear Infinite Moment. It is bio-charred and chemical-infused and maybe even death-laced and love-laced and packed in heavy snow. It is a window, opening, in the midst of something vast. It is the sound of the cosmos inside of us, being recycled.
It is an album of rhythms in search of melodies that can only find them when they are torqued and twisting in the sun, relentlessly and inexhaustibly. Or, it is an album with rhythms like the way a lifeless silk flower can dupe a honeybee. It holds up its body as it wiggles in the air, jamming emotions together as if they were blood transfusions or rainbows or two rivers, merging into one. I feel lost, but present.
It is an album that carries itself quietly, like a secret. Or a stem cell. Or inside an iceberg. Or in one time zone, then another. With one foot in one, and the other in the other. On the brink of an enlightenment, aloft and agleam. I hear its seamlessness, how it blends marble and snow, how its symbols circulate without disclosing their symbolic energy, glimmering with the promise of transcendence.
It is an album with a human soul, soiled and damp and torn and dispossessed — stolen even. It contains voices slit between glaciers and arms composed of ice. It falls asleep in warm blankets and wakes up when the sun slashes its eyes. It goes from gray to pale-gold to a brightness that only topaz has. I re-listen to it and hear how it likes to pull the presence out of itself, as if wanting to awaken itself from itself. It wants to not be for a while, then return to being.
It is an album that asks: Can time accommodate eternity? Can trance be a rhizomatic apparatus that can lack arborescence? Can new worlds come out of old, new love from old rubble?
It is an album of specks dancing in the dust in an amorphous bubble of babble and bawling thoughts, yearning to be unthought. Like a forest in the winter, it shimmers. Like an old dog or cat, it follows you. Like a shadow filling the world in a surge of air, it conceals. Like an ancient astronomer, it glimpses another world: the moon, the planets, the love of heaven above, the glow of an infinite sound burning in the night and becoming morning, in a nucleus like an island in an ocean, swarmed and lonesome, but inside us, always inside us, wanting to be more to us than we can ever imagine.
An Infinite Moment. An Eternal Intimacy. The Essence of a Great Expanse. Energy, entering us, evermore. A Childhood’s Return.
Tiny Mix Tapes 60
The Field
Infinite Moment
[Kompakt; 2018]
Rating: 3/5
In scents and on eaves and vines and ancient sills, I hear Infinite Moment. It is bio-charred and chemical-infused and maybe even death-laced and love-laced and packed in heavy snow. It is a window, opening, in the midst of something vast. It is the sound of the cosmos inside of us, being recycled.
It is an album of rhythms in search of melodies that can only find them when they are torqued and twisting in the sun, relentlessly and inexhaustibly. Or, it is an album with rhythms like the way a lifeless silk flower can dupe a honeybee. It holds up its body as it wiggles in the air, jamming emotions together as if they were blood transfusions or rainbows or two rivers, merging into one. I feel lost, but present.
It is an album that carries itself quietly, like a secret. Or a stem cell. Or inside an iceberg. Or in one time zone, then another. With one foot in one, and the other in the other. On the brink of an enlightenment, aloft and agleam. I hear its seamlessness, how it blends marble and snow, how its symbols circulate without disclosing their symbolic energy, glimmering with the promise of transcendence.
It is an album with a human soul, soiled and damp and torn and dispossessed — stolen even. It contains voices slit between glaciers and arms composed of ice. It falls asleep in warm blankets and wakes up when the sun slashes its eyes. It goes from gray to pale-gold to a brightness that only topaz has. I re-listen to it and hear how it likes to pull the presence out of itself, as if wanting to awaken itself from itself. It wants to not be for a while, then return to being.
It is an album that asks: Can time accommodate eternity? Can trance be a rhizomatic apparatus that can lack arborescence? Can new worlds come out of old, new love from old rubble?
It is an album of specks dancing in the dust in an amorphous bubble of babble and bawling thoughts, yearning to be unthought. Like a forest in the winter, it shimmers. Like an old dog or cat, it follows you. Like a shadow filling the world in a surge of air, it conceals. Like an ancient astronomer, it glimpses another world: the moon, the planets, the love of heaven above, the glow of an infinite sound burning in the night and becoming morning, in a nucleus like an island in an ocean, swarmed and lonesome, but inside us, always inside us, wanting to be more to us than we can ever imagine.
An Infinite Moment. An Eternal Intimacy. The Essence of a Great Expanse. Energy, entering us, evermore. A Childhood’s Return.