- There’s a delicate balance that lies at the heart of a solid party. The right music, people and atmosphere all have to coalesce for a few short hours in order for things to really get on the proper level, and more often than not that elusive equilibrium never quite materializes. Unfortunately, when Axel Willner, aka The Field, Kompakt’s wunderkind purveyor of ambient minimal, came stateside last week for a showcase at Brooklyn’s Studio B – a venue known for its hit and miss nights – things fell well short of the blissful heights that I had envisioned for the evening.
Strolling through the door with my expectations lowered after the disappointing Demon Days party I had attended at the club a few weeks earlier, I wasn’t shocked to find the DJ spinning a set of bland techno to a virtually empty room. Immediately after our entrance, the night took its first stumble as the sound system abruptly cut out, leaving the dance floor in limbo as music pumped solely from the DJ booth’s monitor speakers. My friends and I watched with nervous amusement as Studio B’s staff scrambled to solve the problem, only managing to do so after 15 or 20 minutes of what appeared to be aimless fiddling about and the frantic pushing of random buttons. All the while, the same DJ played the same boring tracks through the busted system, failing to inspire anyone to get into the mid-week party spirit.
Finally, with technical problems resolved, Kate Simko took to the controls, launching headlong into a typically impeccable live PA set of minimal techno imbued with her signature feminine flourish. Things coasted along perfectly, with quasi-organic drum patterns propelling her intricate arrangements to ever-greater heights; unfortunately, her performance went largely unappreciated by the majority of the crowd. As most stood around sipping on their drinks and watching her as if they were at a rock concert, the die-hard few took to the floor to sweat it out. To make matters worse, Studio B’s system threw another temper tantrum four tracks into her set, cutting the sound completely and plunging the club into silence. Simko recovered after a couple minutes, only for the same DJ from before – who I had identified by this point as Gang Gang Dance’s Brian Degraw – to take over after her, derailing the party once again with his lackluster selections.
Finally The Field took to the stage to rapturous applause, mercifully cutting off Degraw’s mixing. Coasting in gently on the stuttered doo wop cut-ups of the title track from his wonderful ‘From Here We Go Sublime’ LP, things began on a high note. This is what we had all come to see: the ecstatic pillows of sound, the referential samples, the pulsing kick! Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that Wilner’s production skills did not translate to the big room. Brusquely cutting tracks out and fading into the next led to a jarring beginning to the set as he sped through favorites from his thin catalogue. As wonderful as the tracks sounded on a powerful system, he didn’t manage to really hit his stride until well into the set’s first hour, and by that point it was over. It seemed like as quickly as he had taken to the stage, he had turned his laptop off and was gone, literally fleeing the stage and leaving the crowd scratching their heads, unsure if there was an encore in store.
Sadly, there was no encore. The Field may have ended his all too brief set on a fairly high note, but as the last peels of reverb-drenched bliss echoed out across the dance floor, Degraw snuck back up to the decks for one last attempt at getting the party started. At that point the crowd had wised up, clearing out en masse at the exact instant his needle hit the first record. One or two stragglers tried to persevere, but for the rest of us the night was over. A disappointing end to what could have been a truly classic party.
Photo credit: Amanda Hernandez