40 - Jens Lekman

- A beautiful performance of a beautiful song -

Jens knows how to craft a sense of intimacy for his audience. He's made a habit of personally engaging with his audience, partly in order to establish rapport,  partly so as to provide him accompaniment. Although modest and unassuming, he subtly moulds the crowd to his needs like a true professional.

020 - The Field (From Here We Go Sublime)

The Field has a different approach to John Roberts (or  James Blake) with regard to how frequently sounds should be used. Whereas John & James value pauses and silence as devices almost as much as they do sound itself, moments of non-sound in The Field's work are hard to come by. Instead, he champions looping of the same sounds back-to-back, an uncommon take on the concept of repetition. The result is simply a constant wall of sound, placing the tracks in perpetual motion. His melodies are very basic, but his use of dynamics isn't: occasionally elements are thrust into the foreground through a shift in dynamics. For better or for worse, there's little variation on this album: formally it remains constant throughout. There is, however, enough variation in the sound-sets of the individual songs to make this an album worth listening to.

The Field - A Paw In My Face

The Field - The Little Heart Beats So Fast