Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
WChicken Axel Willner went to Stockholm’s Funky Chicken food truck last February, he was just expecting to leave with a burger. As I waited, Willner – AKA the Field, a low-tech weaver – saw another Axel standing two spaces behind him. This was no doubt due to the popularity of the grandfather-ish name among 40-something Swedish men. “I was like, oh, what do they call our burgers now?” Willner said.
In contrast, unaware of the scene, Axel was a co-pioneer of the Scandi club Axel Boman, co-founder of the funky dance club Studio Barnhus. They started chatting for a long time. “They asked me if I have music, what I’m doing, because I’ve been quiet for a long time,” says Willner. He left with an invitation to send Boman some music, which led to new commercials and his first record since 2018, Now You Exist.
Willner’s absence marred a string of albums that were released – roughly – every two years, starting with 2007’s From Here We Go Sublime which was a huge hit. He’s put his six-LP catalog to good use, from bringing in a band on 2011’s Looping State of Mind to a dark, smooth remake of 2013’s Cupid’s Head. His last record, Infinite Moment, was designed to provide comfort in a hopeless time. By the time he finally visited it at the end of 2019, he was done with the street life. “I realized that maybe it’s not the best thing for me, because to be honest, I’m very shy and I don’t like to be around a lot of people,” says Willner, 48. Of course, he refuses to put his camera away when he speaks at his home in Berlin, where he has lived since 2008, and he answers questions freely, but effectively. And I don’t like to travel, and I realized I’m in the wrong business.
These days, Willner is in the culinary business: a lifelong foodie, he joined a friend’s company to become a court chef, making dishes like “tofu masala and frittata” for underprivileged children. After 14 years on the road, he needed a break, which Covid recently established. He saw some artists “really inspired by a dystopian feeling, what’s going to happen to the world,” he says. Her focus was on family, including homeschooling her teenage son. Willner wanted to return to music and always knew that starting a new song was difficult. But he said: “When I started playing music again, I couldn’t do anything.” I felt like the music had left me a bit and it was very difficult for me to start listening again.
When the self-doubt was strong, he began to give up. Not being able to make music – something that had brought him “some kind of escape, relief, joy” since he was a teenage punk – led to a familiar problem. “Like, what am I?” Willner said. And if I can’t do this and get any satisfaction back, what am I going to do?” Germany’s strict blockade meant that he would not be able to see the family in Stockholm (live freely) for almost two years, which did not help.
Willner always wrote home; for 2016’s The Follower, he added modular synths to the studio in his Neukölln apartment. His creative tool “contaminated” the space. He says: “I was very worried. “Like, why am I going in here?” Having such a different tone began to feel like a barrier: “I felt trapped in what the Field is.” He openly says that the new history of the Field only changes that, “but it was gone and I didn’t find anything. It was like standing up and doing the same thing again, and that sucked.”
When the music started to come back, there was no great success, apart from buying an MPC synthesiser. “That was very encouraging,” Willner said, as was Boman’s interest. He had already left Kompakt, the Cologne label that released all six of his albums: “I wanted to try something new.” Studio Barnhus had a relaxed vibe (its releases are the most artistic in the business), so Willner sent Boman two songs that came together in 2019: the eye-opening, stuttering Hey Baby and 333 706, a song that seems to stutter like a human throat. He said: “This is a very inspiring song for me.”
They became the starting point for the five-song EP Now You Exist. The head itself seems clear with fear and clear relief. “That’s it,” says Willner. “It’s as simple as: the EP exists, and the music – and, in a way, me as a singer.” There is a certain kind of imaginary joy in music, an immature joy. “Some songs are relaxing, and some are absorbing,” says Willner. “It’s a feeling that’s uncomfortable and comforting in a way.”
The labels Willner created for Kompakt all had the same artwork: The field and album title hand-drawn on solid color. The cover of Now You Exist features a distorted flower, a smooth burst of pink from the green. Willner calls it “a new beginning … it reminds me of a forest in the sun.” New is Willner’s first use of a capella vocals. (What stopped him before? “Copyright.”) “What will they ask me if I tell them?” a female singer asks about the entertainment of Another Day. He found it on Tracklib, a subscription-based “crate-digging” service offering legally-cleaned samples, and heard how he felt about the stalled production and the impossibility of production. He said: “There was a lot of anxiety. The song came in the middle of making the EP. This feeling: what are people going to think?”
When Willner released From Here We Go Too Much in 2007, he was blinded by his success: declared the album of the year by many, it was seen as a game-changing release, bringing the appearance of Kompakt founder Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas project into a poppier framework. At the time, Willner was working at Systembolaget, a Swedish state-owned brewery, where he promoted food and drink. “I didn’t even know,” he said. That’s why I didn’t step back and feel like, maybe this isn’t a good thing for me.”
Willner considers going on tour for Now You Exist, but is happily shielded from being fired by his cooking job. He said: “I can say no to things and I don’t rely too much on travel. “Don’t get me wrong, what I’ve done in the past is luck. But it messed me up a bit, the whole trip. And especially the world right now, I don’t want to go far – I like to stay close to home. Not to be picky, but I’ve said yes a lot in the past and I’m trying to learn to say no, “I don’t have my Swedish skin. skin on the nosenmeaning confidence and courage built through experience.
Lately, Willner loves watching his teenage son discover music and do what he did at that age, “when music means so much to you”, even if he’s tired of his Smiths fandom. Working with Swedish characters is another moment of the cycle. He said: “It’s like coming home. Maybe it’s what I’ve been looking for for a long time. When Boman told him to sit in the burger line, “I was very interested in the idea.” Willner likes to compare lucky moments to “slipping on a banana peel”: the food is dropping him again in the future.
