Axel Willner is best known as minimal techno / micro-house artist The Field. Willner’s debut, From Here We Go Sublime (2007), was a masterful record, one that engrossed its listeners with wildly manipulated samples stretched, reformed, and re-contextualized over a back drop of endless four-on-the-floor beats. With that record Willner created a sound and a style that immediately became his own. He exposed a world, so undeniably seductive and unique that another musician would have trouble recreating it, and even then would be criticized for plagiarism. Such success must have proved troubling for The Field when it came to time to make a new record.

Yet, Willner accomplishes something tremendous on his new album Yesterday and Today. He not only matches the atmospheric mind-warp of Sublime, he also expands on the singular vision of that album. Where Sublime was insular – several perspectives on one idea – everything opens up on this new record. It’s not just minimal techno; instead it’s a balance between the ethereal glaze of ambient music, the static-laced edges of noise music, and the insistent pulse of dance music. There is as much room for the listener to lose his head in the clouds on this record as there is for him to lose it on the dance floor. The wonderfully bent samples that stitched the foundation of Sublime are here in abundance but there is also an organic touch to this mix, whether it’s live drums, human voices, bass guitars, or the occasional touches of melodic percussion.

Ultimately, it seems to me that Yesterday and Today succeeds where another album, let’s say Fuck Buttons’ Tarot Sport, fails. Indeed the groups are vastly different but both are keen on the possibilities of mixing noisier and abstract atmospherics with minimal dance beats. With its dated Moby aesthetics, Tarot Sport ended up sounding overwrought, even laughable, at times, not unlike the early-morning crossover music one might here at a drug-fueled but half-hearted rave populated with Burning Man wannabes. By contrast, Yesterday and Today, justifies its own existence – its efforts to pull together different musical threads reward on several levels: it’s dance music, it’s head music, it is beautiful, and most of all it sounds effortless.

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Download: The Field – Leave It

View the rest of Andre’s top 10 albums of 2009 after the jump.

1. The Field – Yesterday and Today
2. Marble Sky – The Sad Return
3. Raekwon – Only Built 4 Cuban Linx II
4. Handsome Furs – Face Control
5. Fruit Bats – The Ruminant Band
6. Papercuts – You Can Have What You Want
7. Califone – All My Friends Are Funeral Singers
8. Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest
9. Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca
10. Cass McCombs – Catacombs