Most loops repeat well for a couple minutes before another loop is revealed. DJs make career of this: one sample slowly bleeds into the next. The Field does things differently: a loop will easily fill an entire eight-minute track, with minor permutations and changes in beat affecting everything surrounding it. It’s atmospheric electronic music, less subtly called techno, at its absolute best and most coherent.

That’s not to say that The Field is resting on his laurels: Willner has made these tracks his most muscular yet. Monte Veritá is a great example: a swirling bass line in its middle occupies the centrepiece of the song, despite almost sounding like an electronic version of a discordant and polyrhythmic Meshuggah riff. It’s not a breakdown, and it isn’t a drop — in fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find any real drops on the record — but it’s s feeling of disarray and of muscular motion.

As the loop repeats, it slowly gains its footing against a backing track that begins to catch up to its rhythm, and by the end of the track, the dance has continued unabated as multiple other electronic parts have entered the fray before suddenly leaving it, or joining the rest of the cacophonous layering and madness.

And so it goes.

For fans of Axel Willner, not much of this is going to sound new. In fact, there are no new boundaries broken here. For a man who could arguably change the way we see music with just a few tweaks of some digital knobs, Willner is playing it remarkably safe.

But for newcomers to his music, he has made a strong, powerful statement about his breadth and depth as an artist. This is the most provocative Field album yet, one that’s rich in detail and requires close listening with a good pair of headphones to fully understand.

Will it change the world? Not this time around. Instead, it feels like Willner is gathering our attention and reminding us what he’s capable of doing. The Follower is an impeccable record, and one that inspires hope in Willner: maybe next time, he’ll surprise us with re-invention. For now, he’s got a commanding grip on the genre.

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Even the record’s most popular tracks would be considered oddities by today’s standards, but I’d argue that’s what actually makes it a great record. Before electronic music became a convention, Autechre was testing the boundaries and trying things out. And I don’t feel like we get that today, at least not in the same way.

Part of that is the way the album embraces techno. In a lot of circles, particularly today’s synth-pop scene, techno seems to have fallen out of fashion. Autechre was inventive with Incunabula, but they weren’t so many years ahead of their time as to sound like Sylvan Esso. They were influenced by techno like everybody else was in 1993.

That being said, it’s not as if all electronic music used to sound like this. Autechre is in a league of their own throughout. Even they know they’re doing something unique: Incunabula is Latin and references the early development or infancy of an object. (The term was originally used to describe printed books published before 1501.) It’s a sly reference to the groundbreaking work Autechre was doing in the genre.

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