POLLhelic Triangle -- Autechre :: Confield :: LP6

it was the actual end for me.

this album is my only autechre and it bangs bangs bangs - either pen expers, parhelic triangle, eidetic casein or lentic catachresis for me - need to narrow it down, suspect I may vote for latter - brilliant breakdown

Previous poll: POLL4, Wrap5 -- Autechre :: LP5 :: LP5

This is when they leaped forward into being special.

I think Confield completely broke me; I tried HARD to get into this, and although I sort of did, I never again tried as persistently with any other album (by anyone) ever again. That is, if a record didn't grab me after the first handful of listens, I didn't give it a benefit of a doubt. It just took so much energy.

Nevertheless, I think it's the best Autechre album of the '00s, because all the other releases are either dry as hell (UGH Draft 7.30) or cold and noodly (Quaristice). Confield is very organic, but rotted to hell -- its saving grace. Even so, I never cared much for "Pen Expers," don't know why, but "Parhelic Triangle" was always my Confield jam of choice -- nasty, brutish, throbbing, like a horror film translated into pure sound.

Also, Barry's got a great blog post on Autechre in the Confield and later era.

this one is better than LP5

VI Scose Poise represents greatness that easily goes under the radar for Autechre fans leaning towards "in your faceness" vs. ambiance

This is when they leaped forward into being special.

― a ticker tape of "must not fuck up" (Noodle Vague),

I'll argue that all the LPs after this aren't special at all

u can argue.

I exaggerated a fraction but ditching the hippies is always a win in my book.

hippies > ravers

u think Confield forward is "ravers" music? really?

no. I like confield. Do you think everything before confield is hippie music? lol

Gawd I love this album. I'll have to listen again so I can remember the music w/r/t the titles.

"Uviol" for me. it makes me sorta physically ill, and I love them for it

Tough because this is such an accomplished album but going for Eidetic thingo.

Thread sub-question: the last album before Autechre tracknames get obviously self-parodic, y/n?

i couldn't vote in lp5 or ep7 and i dunno if i can narrow this one down any better. last great album for sure in my book. totally monumental, but i think this is where they hit the wall technologically, and maybe lost inspiration as a result

that's interesting, "hitting the wall technologically"...because you might be right! probably going to get flamed for this, but...is there any album since 2001 that is significantly more O_O than Confield, just in terms of pushing the hardware?

gonna fall asleep to this record now <3

Z S I really can't think of many subsequent albums that slice and dice sound with such dizzying alacrity!

yeah, I mean there's some Venetian Snares stuff that's insane, but nothing that Confield-era AE couldn't do by turning the BPM up. I It seems like the tech evolved enough between Tri Repetae and Confield to be noticeable, but since then stuff has just evolved to make Confield-y stuff a bit easier to do, but nothing further. But I am just totally making up shit because I have no idea, it's just a gut feeling.

btw LJ you will wake up and be totally insane

I voted Lentic Catachresis. Not an initial favorite by any means

I'm gonna have to listen to this again before I vote, but I'm probably gonna end up voting Eidetic Casein. Like some other people, this is an album that completely baffled me initially but one which was totally worth the effort it took to understand it. This album brings autechre's sound to a whole new level.

vi scose poise is brilliant, the rest is ok

o_O

Relistened to this... the tracks that hadn't stood out to me before like "Bine" and "Lentic Catachresis" seemed to reveal themselves to me, but my solid favorite is still "Parhelic Triangle". It sounds like a carousel submerged underwater. Gorgeous.

Gorgeous like a dismembered carcass!

Thing I read way back on the Warpcomm forums is that "Eidetic Casein" is a woozy remix of "Arch Carrier."

And, here's something from the boys themselves:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NsvXJ5DyAk

Things gleaned from close-listening before sleep: Sim Gishel and Bine are EXTRAORDINARY where I hadn't expected anything. Sim Gishel has something not unlike the consistency of wood in its sound and uses a palpable drum-drone as space-filler. Ah yes, the knocking. Dybbuks are knocking on the rush of xylem. Amazing development of beat, and the astonishing incorporation of momentary drum-pattern chords near the end is revelatory. Bine is much longer than its minutes and is arguably the most intense assault on the record. So completely progged-out to fucking infinity; it probably involved more work than any other track here. Maybe not. It's a symphony in oscillation by any standard. Cfern into Pen Expers is like one track, one manifesto: simplicity (or at least, an idea you can track) segueing perfectly into insanity. I love how the first two tracks both act as minimalistic scene-setters, VSP being more an overview of the Confield vision and Cfern being the true start-point of the adventure. Word-up too to Parhelic Triangle, which is the sound of one beat shifting and disintegrating over 6 minutes as a seriously killer heavy-drone chews it to oblivion. Moody as fuck, the dark heart. Already loved that one but now it is among equals.

By the time I got to the last three tracks, I was falling asleep, which led to a distorted hearing, but after a full album hearing, Eidetic Casein is ABSOLUTELY the pop relief, the melodic, catchy, twisted return to Cfern's relative accessibility (and again, we know it's setting us up for cataract). This song applies the modes of percussion to melody, so the beautifully cross-tonal blasts, holding an explicable beat, speak the same vocabulary as the rest of the album but in a different language. And when it disintegrates, it is the melody that disintegrates, not the rhythm. It is a brilliant repurposing of the album's sound, and it works in context, but I think to call it the finest track is to deny what the album is about. Besides, I have a feeling that what it sets us up for, the last two tracks, FULLY synergise the just-attained advanced melodic sensibility BACK INTO the percussive organism created earlier. But then when I heard them I was in a VERY strange place indeed, so I'll need to listen again, awake. My god. But I SUSPECT that Uviol introduces the two elements slowly and minimally (perhaps more itself a Cfern-type track than the unique Eidetic Casein), only SLIGHTLY off-base and unsettling, but enough, and then the astonishing Lentic Catachresis (which I'd have voted for no question without another listen) completely fucking kills our brains dead, as melody strives and CHAOS PREVAILS. Supreme record.

count me in among the 'this album is a tour de force' crowd.

Cfern into Pen Expers is like one track, one manifesto: simplicity (or at least, an idea you can track) segueing perfectly into insanity

I actually see the first three tracks fitting into that pattern. And arguably they are less of a departure from ae's previous sound, so I've always seen them as ever so slightly apart from the rest of the album. Sim Gishel is where shit gets real. But this slight fracture in coherence really doesn't affect my enjoyment or appreciation.

Now to relisten. I really should give this the proper speaker treatment but that will have to wait.

Well, I said Cfern and Pen Expers were of a piece, then said the first two were of a piece as well, thus intimating that I believe the opening triplet stand apart as an establishment of the Confield sound, for the remaining tracks to build and ruminate upon more sophisticatedly. I really cannot get over how astonishing a piece of music Sim Gishel is, coming on Pen Expers' already-impressive heels. From Cfern to that one, we have a consistent level-up in terms of complexity, and then Parhelic Triangle acts as fearsome eye of the storm before we tumble back into a yet-heightened madness.

I mean, there are SO many 'well, we're back here, but it's weirder' moments on this record. It's a proper modernist narrative in song, which is so rare to see done well; done flawlessly, in fact.

I've been listening to this album since its release, but you can count me out of the "this album is a tour de force" crowd. To me it's the aural equivalent of buying a jumper straight off the shelves because you like the pattern, but trying it on at home you find the neck's cut way too low and the arms are really tight around your shoulders but really baggy at the elbow, and there's a huge paunch on it and it's got five different neck openings. It's an awkard, unstreamlined thing compared to LP5's enticing niftiness. Must be something to do with the generative processes employed during this phase, as some decisions (the unpleasantly prevalent bass drum sound on Cfern for example) could have only been chosen by a machine on auto.

I've never been able to make out a discernible melody in the "pop" hit Eidetic Casein - any tune it holds sounds like twenty toy ambulances running out of batteries. Another track people compare to more accessible fodder such as Arch Carrier is Pen Expers, which sounds like someone hoovering up pennies whilst listening to a string quartet tuning up on an ipod for five minutes. Unlike Arch Carrier, there's no payback, no part in either of these two tracks where the chaos melts down and transforms into something tangible - just noodling notes and abstruse beatfuckery for an allocated time.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to get all Geirest about Autechre - I love their rhythm'n'chaos stuff too, but their best work happens when I have something neat to focus on - an interesting melody rising out of the debris, or a sound that develops over time or makes me think of something particular. The majority of Confield tracks sound clumsy and uncalculated to me. Where are the textures of Chiastic Slide? The melody of Rae? The emotion of Pir? This is what I crave from this band most of all, whereas the sounds and emotions on Confield just sound like brain damage.

I'm voting for Uviol - a nice ambient respite from the toil of this work. You may have guessed I still listen to Confield quite a lot in the hopes I will somehow understand it, but it's been nearly ten years. Can't help feeling this album marked a beginning to a long stretch of dry-as-fuck Autechre music, ending with Untilted. Oversteps is a much much better album than this, and just as excting and complex.

I've already mentioned how this album splits up for me, tracks 1-3 and then the rest. The first two I don't have much to say about, they open the album perfectly adequately. Pen Expers is where I think "aha! now we're talking!" It's like Pir turned upside down. In the former, the melodies float and ride over the percussive chaos. In the latter, the rhythm overwhelms and drowns the melody, but it is still there, floundering under the surface. My favourite moments are around 4:55 and 5:20, where it makes its strongest showing, a small handful of descending tones breaking the surface momentarily.

Then everything changes. Yeah the familiar signposts of melody and even beat seem to have disappeared, or at least buried deeply. There is no map, but there is territory in abundance. Huge sonic soundscapes of sound. Dog latin I dunno how you can say "where are the textures?" to me this is the most visually textural music I know.

Tracks 4-6 work as a piece for me. We're somewhere deep underground; dark, cavernous walls of granite, crystalline formations glinting, vast and ominous noises echoing around - immense techtonic forces at play, or something more sinister? Parhelic Triangle certainly sounds monstrous, some great beast lumbering through the depths and darkness. And then for Bine we're suddenly in motion - there's a great sense of forward movement on almost all the tracks here, but Bine is a journey at breathtaking speed, still underground, tunnel walls flashing by, brief glimpses of vast caverns and extraordinary formations, the earth still heaving and booming.

Eidetic Casein is a break for the surface, almost a return to sanity, music-wise, but then for the last two we suddenly head for the stars. Uviol is a deep space probe, cruising the lonely interstellar gulfs, scanning, measuring, and transmitting. And Lentic Catachresis is the transmission received, after being beamed halfway across the galaxy; decayed, fragmented, intercepted by alien intelligences, half absorbed by black holes, polluted with galactic noise and radiation.

fwiw I don't think Eidetic Casein is any more amelodic than the jazzy midsection of Maphive 6.1.

Also, wish Gareth was still here, to expound on his 'autechre=folk music' theory.

or expand

i like these descriptions, ledge - i think this is similar to how i think of the album being broken up too.

Thing is, this has to be the album I like the least which I've listened to the most. It's not as if I gain absolutely no pleasure from it, but I find the cries of "this is Autechre's best album and beats everything before (or after) it hands down" just bewildering. Yet just reading this thread makes me want to listen to it, but when I do listen to it I find parts so irritating.

I can't say the tracks don't transport me somewhere or evoke imagery in me, but it's a blood-from-a-stone process in places and often I get an emperor's-new-clothes feeling that Autechre were letting the MAX/MSP parameters do the work - an impression I certainly don't get from pre-Confield Ae.

VI Scose Poise is pleasant enough, but feels like filler and just seems like an overture, or a lead in from LP5. But I love the bassline and melody on Cfern, they make me imagine huge spiders planning some sort of underground uprising on a far away planet. But what is up with that beat? It's horrible, and horribly loud too. Any sound engineer would have immediately turned down the velocity on that thing and it would have been a better track. As it is, it overwhelms the subtlety of the track as a whole.

Pen Expers is again a good idea, following in the same footsteps as Arch Carrier or Garbagemx36, but delivered cack-handedly. The chopped'n'screwed beats are exhausting to listen to - loads of high-mids in this just going SMACKSMASHCRACKCRACKSMASHCRASH while this diminutive repetition of chords fight to be heard. I get the idea behind this track - using loads of ducking compression to nefarious ends - but I don't think it's as good as many people say. The harmonic aspects of the track are like a poor man's "Arch Carrier" strings, but not as stirring or interesting, just repeating themselves throughout the course of the track. The beats are again, way too loud and could do with a bit of a roll-off in the velocity stakes. As it is, they beat the harmony into submission before it's had a chance to let itself be heard.

I have fewer qualms with the middle section. Subtle and organic in the most parts - kind of frightening in many places. One of the tracks makes me think of an army of feudal Japanese samurai standing stock-still but ready to go into battle. Possibly the next track is the army on the march.

I can't put my finger on Eidetic Casein. Apparently there's something to be gained from this track, but it's like listening to those cow-moo-box toys all droning away out of unison. People at the time were saying stuff like it was the most accessible track with the strongest melody. I can't hear it, it transports me nowhere other than to some horrific ketamine-fuelled domestic fire emergency. Nothing like Maphive 6.1, which has some interesting atonal bits but somehow sounds less like a complete mess.

Uviol is rather smashing though. Nothing amazing, but they almost go back to Amber in terms of twilit mood - I'm thinking of Piezo or even Overand here.

Lentic Catachresis starts a trend for the next few Autechre albums of working as a summary of the album as a whole. A neat trick, in that it ties the album up at the end and gives it well-needed purpose. As the quintessential track on Confield, I hear it as a necessity rather than anything extraordinary. If you want to hear a track off Confield and only want to listen to one track, this is it. It also works as a "what's-to-come" for Draft7.30.

In all, this is the oddest musical experience I think I've ever encountered. Whereas most Autechre releases have involved a certain amount of ear-tunage to fully appreciate, there are parts of this I just cannot parse, particularly Cfern which is a great track ruined by too much faith in the generative system.

It's also the group's most nightmarish album - very few positive or upbeat moments (compared to LP5 for example, which is actually quite major in its melodic structure). Maybe it sounds sinister because of its atonality, I dunno? There were some creepy moments on EP7, but nothing compared to Bine for example.

So yeah, a strange one. I've spent a lot of time with it, but I'm still having trouble getting my head round it and the divided feelings it stirs in me are much greater than anything else they've released before or since.

Thanks for the link Leeeeee ... after the Autechre discussions on the ambient listening club thread, I realized I needed to revisit/reevaluate the post-2000 period ... once these polls started, I figured I'd better get it done before we finished polling the 90's.

Tough choice here. My gut says to vote for the most bonkers track, "Lentic Catachresis".

fwiw, from the chiastic poll:

"Hub" sounds like a dry run for "Confield" in retrospect ... again, when we do those polls, I'll really interested in hearing what you guys have to say about "Confield" and "Draft 7:30". Because if you can't come to grips with the likes of "Hub" ...

Hub isn't nearly as dense as Confield, and that off-kilter, pugilistic percussion is too dominant.

Nice posts everyone. This album seems to get the descriptive noodle working, and that's something.

Hub isn't nearly as dense as Confield, and that off-kilter, pugilistic percussion is too dominant.

― e.g. delegates at a set age (ledge), Monday, 22 November 2010 17:17 (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

Disagree to some extent. That irregular approach-retreat whomping sound on Hub is very similar to Confield. Also Chiastic is a much less of a "dance" album in my eyes (ears?) than LP5 or any other 90s Ae.

"very similar to Cfern" I meant.

ach, forget it, that post makes no sense. All I'm saying is Chiastic Slide sounds more like a precursor to Confield than LP5 of EP7.

One thing these polls are certainly confirming is that it's endlessly amazing how differently other people hear things. That 'x sounds more or less like y' can be a radical source of disagreement, even among confirmed fans of x and y, is still a wonder to me.

haha idk ledge, your big Confield travelogue is in many ways pretty similar to mine! We draw more or less the same narrative distinctions.

I'm generally don't appreciate the dancier/poppier ae tracks. It depends a lot on how weird the higher register "melodies" are though. Weirder is usually a bad sign. Wackadoodle doesn't sit well with house/pop

Hip/hoppy tracks are fine with me though

Nice posts everyone
^^

This thread is an excellent read! And it makes me feel kinda bad for picking Uviol because that seems to be the consensus pick for people that don't really like the rest of the album so much, but I love (almost) all of it.

this has become sim gishel vs lentic catachresis for me I think, bine still an outsider

Confield is great reviewer litmus, btw: http://www.popmatters.com/music/reviews/a/autechre-confield.shtml

Surprisingly enough, the NME kinda gets it: http://www.nme.com/reviews/autechre/4997

Long shot: but does anybody happen to have the fake version of this album which was floating around before it came out? It featured what was ostensibly a Bola remix of "VI Scose Pose"; I think all the tracks were other people mislabeled - Kit Clayton maybe? But I think the moment when I realized that I liked the fake better than the actual album - which I dutifully tried to care about - was when I got off of the Autechre pony.

Is this album the point at which IDM ran out of steam? That might have been part of my problem with this record; but listening to it a couple months ago, I still couldn't hear anything. I don't doubt that other people could, of course, but it stopped working for me.

https://www.residentadvisor.net/features/2756

have y'all read the recent-ish (June 2016) RA interview?

i like / hate the way that all autechre threads end up this way.

― koogs, Thursday, February 16, 2017 4:24 AM (seventeen hours ago)

Well, they are one of the most compelling bands of any genre I've ever heard, so to me it's unsurprising that their various threads here always succumb to broader expressions of appreciation and respect.

Yeah, I agree that chiastic slide is where they start getting really interesting. Confield is where they get really really really interesting.

When Confield was fresh out, I had a lot of trouble adjusting to their more fractalized type beats and textures. Wasn't until years later when I began to understand and appreciate the synesthetic interplay of sound in their post-LP5 material. Now I listen to it much much more often than their earlier records. Find those almost boring, if not for the nostalgia. However, Cipater, Clipper, 444, Inhake 2, Goz Quarter and Are Y Are We? get me EVERY TIME.

Also one more thing... and I've brought this up here before, but post-Confield Ae seems to be where they really begin to express swagger in some of their tunes... something that I feel is missing in their earlier work. Gantz Graf, Ccec (EP7 but close enough), IV VV IV VV VIII, rew(1), 90101-5l-l, etc. Just seriously sick stuff.

Yes there's something glorious and addictive when they let a sly hip-hop feel stir the undercurrents of the abstract bit-storms they are conjuring up. Pretty much every album has some filthy, degenerate boom-bap lurking in the depths of a few tracks. The ending of "recks on" on Exai has to be the most evil, beautiful hip-hop I have ever heard. Turned loud it's almost suffocating.

which is the exact thing I said about "surripere" above, time for a new lexicon

"cfern" deserved something i think. melodies on this album are consistently lovely they're just crawling with insects

Little known fact - Mariah Carey wrote some custom max objects for this.

Could never get past the horrible kick drum sound on Cfern, although the overall atmosphere is cool. This album makes me think of wandering around a desolate moon; exploring its dusty monochrome surface (CFern); sheltering from sandstorms (Pen Expers); poking around underground catacombs and discovering evidence of ancient alien civilisations (Sim Gishel, Bine); before finding lush liquid pools teaming with fauna and insects (Uviol).

It's not my favourite of their albums, but each track is very much its own thing

u wander into abandoned club on desolate moon where "sim gishel" is playing on a loop

i do love that the more i go back to this era of autechre the more i notice, for all its difficulty, much of it is essentially eroded club music with sand in its joints. the glass warehouse of untilted perhaps makes this clearest

That's a good way of putting it. Sometimes it sounds more like moving sands that spit out the occasional vestige of club music, but the reversible figure is part of the charm.

"eidetic casein" is like being locked in a bounce house on acid

or like the way a jellyfish swims but you're hearing it from the inside

eroded club music with sand in its joints

A+. This def goes for their three 00s albums imo.

xp lol

I just figured out that Eidetic Casein means 'Cheese Dreams' lol.

Anyway, picked up the new Draft7.30 reissue but going to wait for Confield as it's still the Ae I have the most difficulty with

Confield is the only one of the reissues released so far that I haven't bought.
I've always had a degree of difficulty with it since it came out, but I know a lot of fans vouch for it and some might even say it's their best.

So go on, convince me. Why is this the best Ae? Why should I buy the vinyl beyond mere completionist reasons?

I wish they'd re-release EP7 on vinyl

this album just has a really pleasing ratio of chaos:beauty

Remember how polarizing this album was? lol.

It's funny that a group with a rep for being super cerebral has such physical music. Vi Scose Poise and Cfern so far are both about gravity. I got the idea to listen to this from a music YouTuber who had a reaction video to Cfern and asked half-jokingly "why would anyone listen to this, it's academically interesting but I connect to it not at all." I'm not really sure what to say to that. It's not a matter of connecting to it. Cfern is a thing that is happening in my living room. I can almost see it.

Now if he said that about Pen Expers I might understand. This is no longer a thing that is happening in my living room, because my brain is telling me that what my ears are hearing is physically impossible. It's just a rent in the fabric of space. The universe is slightly less coherent now. Synths ... synths in the deep ...

... it pays off at the end, though, as the rhythm tears the track to shreds.

Sim Gishel comes to give us something to hold on to. I'm a few minutes and and what's happening in the high end on this track is wrong, unholy angles, it's vibrating my amygdala in a very unpleasant way. Something in there sounds like singing?

Four tracks through. I have learned that melody is evil and only rhythm can save us.

Wait. Parhelic Triangle is arguing with me. Why is it so insistent? I'm listening to this album louder than usual but I don't remember it being so uncomfortable. Those almost sound like bells in the background, which is soothing, to be reminded of life before this album. But the rhythm keeps trying to accelerate with those horrible scraping noises and then falling back. A gentle fadeout now, so you can't hear the omnious gurgling very well. Someone has been dragged just out of sight and is being devoured.

Bine is less hostile. It's an overwhelming amount of sound but the shellshock has me a bit numb, I can just let it wash over me. It even seems to be gaining in coherence, which makes it a suspicious outlier here. There's something tremendously exciting happening here now, unbelievably fast but conveying focus and calm, it's almost casual. It's like hearing a musician whose mental and emotional processing is much faster than our own (instead of just its limbs being faster.)

Eidetic Casein is my reward for making it through tracks 3-5. I can resolve what I'm hearing into a few actors whose motivations I might be able to understand.

Uviol sounds like I feel at this point, specifically the groaning that starts around 2:36. It sounds perilously close to tension actually being released. There are some lovely floating pads with tons of vibrato going in the back. They barely sounds actively triggered, it seems like they're just being vibrated by the rest of the track. It's pleasing at this point to hear something so ... passive. Receptive. The ending, as you know, is gorgeous ...

... and into Lentic Catachresis. I saw them in 2005. Still the only show I've been to with the lighting provided only by strobes. Urgency is coming and going now, at times it seems we're just going to fall apart, with just a distorted pad in the high end pushing consistently forward. Now the hi hat and kick rushes ... have to defocus my ears to keep the whole track in front of me ... and it's over way too fast.

I like this

Funny, Bine, sounds like the most hostile track on this album to me

I revisited Confield pretty recently in part to confirm it remains amazing (it does)

I've warmed to it but I still find it their most challenging album.

We've talked a bit about how a lot of these albums are demarcated by "themes", what is the theme for this one?

e.g. the woody textures of Draft; the B-boy ballbearing sounds of Untilted; LP5's flat-plan approach; Tri Repetae's grinding, industrial vibe; the dub(step) influences on Oversteps etc... I can't quite nail Confield's aesthetic though

Funny, I just listened to this yesterday as well, it still blows my mind. I don't think the world was ready for it in 2001 but even now it doesn't sound like anything else. I agree there's something very physical and tangible about this music, each track feels like a different room in a museum, rooms where things are moving in ways your brain can't understand. DL is right though, Bine is the most 'hostile', in that it makes me feel like my head is going through a car wash. IMO the best part of the album is the end, Side D if you've got it on vinyl - Uviol is kind of like their take on jazz, it's surprisingly pretty and hypnotic, then Lentic Catachresis which I think is like the aural equivilent of a roller coaster. Actually I'm pretty impressed by how well this all works as an album, front to back - each track sort of builds on what came before. So the last two is where it all comes together.

Yes, Uviol and Lentic are where it's at

Maybe if there's a theme here it's "Autechre go organic". Like, up till now the music definitely sounded like machines, beautiful as it was. The sound was definitely "electronic-electronic" and rooted in techno. And while they'd hinted at this before, especially on Chiastic Slide and EP7, this is where they tip into something else entirely; where it sounds more like the surface of a fertile alien world full of beauty and ugliness and danger, as opposed to a deconstruction of extant dance music

the surface, the deep underground caverns, and up into interstellar space - but yep that feels appropriate.

Yes!

It might not be my favourite one to listen to on a regular basis. It's deifnitely not the funkiest Autechre or the most immediate, but it definitely conjures up the most imagery. I'd equate it to a video game like Super Metroid where each track is a different biome-as-level. And just like planet Zebes in that game, it's a treacherous one! Confield is NOT an especially easy listen - there's a lot of rough terrain to negotiate, but it's a lot of fun too

i'm giving this a go for the first time in many years. i bought it at the time and tried, tried, tried to get into it but it just kept running off of me like water off a duck's back. i am hearing more here than i remember but the first four tracks still feel kind of clumsy and flat to me. there's a flatness to the overall sound, the paddier sounds and the rhythmic sound design aren't very well integrated i don't think, too often they're relying on fast looping of sounds, one of my least favorite things. it feels like a collection of pretty rudimentary templates for what they would do much better & more thrillingly later on. ok the last half is a lot better i think, 'parhelic triangle' is getting interesting and then 'bine' is the first really good thing on here. eidetic casein is properly meaty and weird, same with 'uviol'. lentic catachresis yeah idk again the fast looping thing just doesn't hit for me. i would take 5-8 and leave the rest.

I think you're right about some of the clumsiness at the start.

"VI Scose Poise" is pretty, but feels like a retread of some of the stuff they'd done on LP5, or 'Nannou' by Aphex. It's a very-much "IDM" track with the bell-sine waves and the spinning-coin percussion. It's good and fine, just nothing new, even for the time.

Cfern is clunky as hell, but it's grown on me despite some really unpleasant sounds. Although I like how it makes me think of a moonbuggy bouncing over really bumpy terrain, jumping and landing, spinning somersaults and tumbling down dunes. Rhythmically interesting, just wish those kicks were a tad less aggressive. Like "VI Scose Poise", it also sounds very "IDM", especially with the melody, which like map says doesn't really syncopate satisfactorily with the beat. More like a jam band who haven't learned to listen to each other.

Pen Expers also suffers from "too much going on, not enough cohesion". The beats, again, are overly aggressive and the effect is like a toddler let loose on a drumkit while a string quartet try and rehearse.

After that, the whole thing becomes a lot more listenable. Perhaps if I were to play god, I'd switch out some of the earlier tracks for a couple off Gantz Graf, but on second thoughts it might work even worse. Those tracks mentioned above might not be my faves, but they imbue the album with a lot of character

How would you even get to level 5 without playing levels 1-4

"VI Scose Poise" is one of my favorite Autechre tracks from any era. In fact it's probably the first thing I'd play for someone who's never heard them.

i don't think I would have been that intrigued to hear more if it was the first thing I heard by them! I do think it and cfern are ok but inessential - but pen expers is a glorious piece of beauty hidden within chaos.

not chaos so much as force. a velvet fist in an iron glove.

DL is OTM in describing this as "organic". I love how they sampled rubber bands wrapped around a shoe box for Parhelic Triangle, and the use of sampled bell sounds on that same track and Cfern. Some of the sounds and textures are never used again in their later work.

Also agree with frogbs describing this in the context of each track being its own room in a museum exhibit. Their music definitely began to sound "sculptural" starting here. Sometimes I feel like this album is their actual debut, and everything prior was under a different band name.

BTW - back in 2001 I'd have picked Uviol or Pen Expers. Now, I'd probably go for Parhelic Triangle or Eidetic Casein. The former is one of the most compelling and unique tracks they've ever composed.

yeah Parhelic is top 5 Ae for sure. If forced, I would probably choose this as *the* Autechre album, although I love their recent work too. It's the first album where they discarded dance rhythms altogether. Altho I love their bangers and boom-bap workouts, this is the emergence of their own unique and untouchable thing.

Huh, did they really sample those things, octobeard? I can definitely hear the rubber bands. Super interesting as I rarely think of Autechre as being sample-driven

Their music definitely began to sound "sculptural" starting here.

what does this mean?

xp yes, it was mentioned in the WATMM AMA years ago. I don't have a link to the comment.

They've used samples a lot. Decco loc's beats are apparently wood and rubber sounds recorded. I believe Rob mentioned some field recordings of NYC were samples used in M39 Diffain. A tissue was draped over a microphone for the static textures of Rettic AC. Clearly some wood creak samples in M4 Lema

Much of Draft 7.30 uses samples of wooden blocks - "xylin room" being a direct reference to this.

yeah I don't know for sure, but I'd bet the marble bounce sounds in Krib are also samples rather than DSP per se too.

BTW that song is seriously gorgeous.

Listening to that track now, and it’s gorgeous and uniquely weird.

It’s been ages and ages since I last listened to Draft, which was the first AE I reviewed professionally. At the time it wasn’t thrilling me … but in retrospect, yeah, there was definitely a wood on wood vibe.

It’s a little arid for my taste, but “surripere” is immense if you crank it up

I love Krib

Maybe that's why I'm not so hot on Vi Scose Poise - I feel they perfected a similar idea with Krib a few years before

Draft and Untilted have massively massively grown on me since they first came out. I really didn't think much of them at all and for a long time figured Ae had lost the plot.
They're among my favourites now

How have I never seen this before?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tiVmPXNzdM

Watching this, it dawned on me that Cfern is conceptually very similar to Miles Davis' Nefertiti, a modern jazz tune which is notable for the melodic instruments (the horns) staying anchored to a similarly-repeating cycle without any solos while the rhythm section (bass, drums, piano) improvise around them