Crafting a sophomore record is always a thorny process, but if your debut was a critical and popular behemoth, add a few thistles. Along with Gui Boratto's Chromophobia, Swedish producer Axel Willner's From Here We Go Sublime was one of two high-watermark releases for Kompakt in 2007. An immersive blend of dance timbres—trance, ambient, techno, shoegaze—Sublime's brand of blurry, sample-based "techno" resembled a kind of aural detailing of the post-concussive: a sonic world of serene echoes and numbing beauty.
After lengthy tours promoting Sublime with acts like LCD Soundsystem and !!!, Willner tired of working alone on a laptop and asked a couple of friends to tour with him, tweaking Sublime's one-man material into a live-band set. So when it came time to record the follow-up, Willner set out to recapture the tour's late-stage organics and invited friends like tour-mate Dan Enqvist and Battles' drummer John Stanier in for informal jam sessions. |
