IS IT WASHAPOLL? - ILM ARTIST POLL #57 - AUTECHRE - RESULTS thread

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41l94unr%2B%2BL.jpg

4. Chiastic Slide - 385 points | 12 votes | 2 #1 votes

http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/75/21/ef4b71a88da0dd363266e110.L.jpg

3. Confield - 395 points | 13 votes | 2 #1 votes

https://38.media.tumblr.com/d86a16bb49ba0109a86ded26dd6dd2ce/tumblr_mxygjjRgJq1qkj39po1_500.jpg

2. Tri Repetae - 455 points | 14 votes | 4 #1 votes

Amber is my favourite instrumental electronic record of all time

wow surprised envane didn't place!

http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/500/14167355/Cavity+Job+hard003front.jpg

1. Cavity Job - 699 points | 69 votes

fail

ha

(you got me tho)

hey.. wait a minute..

Correction!

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41vQ9ht8gmL.jpg

10. Gantz Graf - 212 points | 7 votes | 1 #1 vote

Everything is correct.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41kdfEYU0HL._SS500_.jpg

1. LP5 - 476 points | 15 votes | 3 #1 votes

things i voted for

Gantz Graf
Peel Session
Draft 7.30
LP5
Untilted
Confield
Quaristice.Quadrange.ep.ae
Tri Repetae
Peel Session 2
Exai

Voted for Draft 7.30, Confield, Untilted and Gantz Graf in that order. Will be using the tracks poll to direct any concerted further listening, but I've heard stuff from all the LPs at least, and this run of material, for me at least, stands out (above most music, let alone Autechre)

my ballot ... also surprised ep7 didn't place

#1 tri repetae
lp5
envane
chiastic slide
anti EP
anvil vapre
EP7
confield
amber
gantz graf

glad that gantz graf made the top 10. I almost voted it #1. It probably is their high point, but ended up voting confield #1 because there's just because it's a full album and there is therefore more stuff to enjoy.

my ballot:

1. Confield
2. Gantz Graf
3. Draft 7.30
4. EP7
5. Quaristice.Quadrange.ep.ae
6. Exai
7. LP5
8. Garbage
9. Chiastic Slide
10. Oversteps

A teaser.

http://i.imgur.com/PQspWIa.jpg

49T. 6IE.CR - 64 points | 2 votes | 1 #1 vote

What could possibly have tied with 6IE.CR? Check back tomorrow for the thrilling conclusion.

wow LP5 with a pretty bare margin

My list is dedicated to sixteen years of not getting the love for LP5

Chiastic Slide
Amber
Garbage
Incunabula
Confield
Key Nell
Tri Repetae
Anvil Vapre
Peel Sessions 1
Ganz Graf

don't get LP5? have ryan schreiber explain it to you!

http://web.archive.org/web/20050404023546/http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/record-reviews/a/autechre/autechre.shtml

Hah! I guess it shouldn't be a surprise that people were pining for the 'old' Autechre when LP5 came out.

Was surprised that I couldn't find a place for Amber on my list. Always felt it was rough and an unfinished vision that was put into focus much, much better on subsequent EPs and Tri Repetae. Exai, while a touch bloated, is a sonic monster of beauty and nearly the best thing they've done. I somewhat regret not having Key Nell in my ballot. It's probably their best EP when all is said and done.

1 Chiastic Slide
2 Exai
3 Tri Repetae
4 LP5
5 Untilted
6 Envane
7 Incunabula
8 Draft 7:30
9 Anvil Vapre
10 Cichlisuite

No Amber for me, either. I fact I was surprised at how little time I have these days for the albums prior to LP5 ... Still like 'em, just never seem to listen anymore. I would say it was down to over-familiarity, but I play the contemporaneous EPs all the time. Anti - Garbage - Anvil Vapre - Envane - Cichlisuite - Peel Session is a pretty formidable run.

Also, not enough love for Quaristice!!

1. LP5
2. Envane
3. Draft 7.30
4. Garbage
5. Peel Session 1
6. Untilted
7. Quaristice
8. Exai
9. Anti
10. Confield

don't get LP5? have ryan schreiber explain it to you!

haha

Their sound has come to define drill-n-bass

hmmmmmmm ...

So, rather than looking at Autechre as a crappy, self- indulgent, overly- experimental release from an otherwise brilliant band

It's their least experimental release by far -- that's why I've never been high on it!

In a personal aside, I think "LP5" was the most I ever paid for a new CD (non-special edition, box set, etc.) I was in Ottawa and I could only find one good store for electronic music. I think I paid 33 CDN -- the price only added to my disappointment about the quality of the album.

LP5 is brilliant. Very surprised at EP7 not making it - sometimes it's my favourite thing they ever did.

The one I don't get the love for is Tri Repetae - always saw that as a transitional album between old and mid-period Autechre with too much reliance on crunchy hip hop beats (not bad in themselves) but not enough melodic touches.

/geirhongroetc...

Oh look, my #1 track already made it. Might as well leave the thread for good now! Unless you want an essay about why 6ie.cr is the best Autechre song?

Would read.

Especially since yours and my Autechre tastes seem to occupy polar opposites. Always foudn the Confield through Untilted period hard going.

#1 vote for Go Sheep was mine and Envane was top of my albums picks.

I've sold two copies of Keynell; don't like it all that much, bit dour (LOL). The remixes on Warp are a much better thing IMO.

I had a copy of Cavity Job that I got for £4 in a Music & Video Exchange.

Apparently it doesn't even command very high prices now so I guess I sold that one at the right time! Would still be pretty funny in a hardcore set.

here's my pretty predictable top 5:

1. Tri Repetae
2. Confield
3. LP5
4. Chiastic Slide
5. Amber

I didn't get around to listening to the EPs aside from EP7, which was a near miss.

Ok -

6ie.cr is placed rather unassumingly third on Autechre's most anecdotally impenetrable record - neither a deep cut nor a lead-off track, it occupies a position one might expect (were this a rock album) of a single. Autechre are often described as 'intelligent dance music' - however misleading or reductive this descriptor, it does lead one to hope that occasionally they will bang - they will produce the kind of music that doesn't just suggest kinetics but demands them, triggers involuntary physical movements, appeals to the reptilian rhythm located in every avant-garde music fan's hindbrain. 6ie.cr is Draft 7.30's single, then, and it bangs - it bangs harder than more or less any straight 4/4 club anthem you could name (although don't forget that unlike some Autechre it's also 4/4 and doesn't really deviate from this). It piles in immediately with an extraordinary, raucous lightspeed cataract of drum sounds, in turns smudging into one another and then crisply demarcating the different edges of the beat, all while making the sort of unignorably vibrant sorts of noises that trigger instant synaesthesia in whichever listeners don't instantly reach for the skip button (if ever a first 3 seconds of a song must polarise an audience). Possibly key to it all is the infinitesimal silence between the very first drum sound and the rest of the song - you're hooked inside the first quarter-second, then immediately bludgeoned with the whole palette. This astonishing, futuristic beat makes me dance. It makes me bob my head, stand up and pull all sorts of fluid robot moves, body-pop, you name it. It's pure kinesis and I can't get enough of it. I'm familiar enough with the opening few bars to essay my own beatboxed attempt at imitation, although such is the precision of the sounds Autechre produce, it must only work in my head.

So then, almost immediately, the beat changes. Or rather, it keeps its overall structure, but initially minuscule amendments begin to creep in - longer blurs, quicker cut-outs, extra bleeps - mostly during the 'falling downstairs' second half of the cadence. It's tremendously appealing, but while I'm trying to keep up with this, the melody becomes apparent - what sounds like a sampled string instrument playing an extremely funky, minimal, off-kilter riff in the background. As the beat is manipulated towards greater heights of sensory overload, the sampled riff also passes through subtle changes, mostly truncations of the first note. Then, about a minute in, the riff drops out entirely, and returns a bar later in a different key - this commences Phase Two of the song, probably its most important part.

Except the riff doesn't quite return as before - it threatens to play out but then shifts a further key upwards. We now only hear it in snippet form, fragmented and unpredictable - Autechre's deconstruction of the beat is here applied to the melodic aspect of the piece, as the beat piles onward in thrilling style. Soon the timbre of the melody sample changes - it loses the stringy fuzz, modulates down to a more haunting synth pad tone - and then a more euphoric blare - one that will come to define the song's third movement. MEANWHILE, the beat if anything SIMPLIFIES - it loses some of its tricksiness and simply plunges headlong towards pure dance - it becomes a non-stop barrage of distorted snare hits, spilling in a demented, tone-shifted rush toward some moment where all is consumed in movement...

...except then, at the moment of highest tension, just before it becomes unbearable, the beat falls apart completely and an absolutely gorgeous pair of synth textures take over. One's hollow and plays some simple, beautiful chords as a backdrop; the other is that aforementioned blare - muted, but stark and vibrant - harplike - as it spangles an unplaceable swathe of rising ecstatic sound over the whole song, like a silken, gilded cloth draped over a clinking treasure chest. There's still a beat - a muted, hesitant (how Autechre can program hesitancy is beyond me, but they do), thinned-out iteration of what came before. As this third section progresses, sonic elements of the former beat - snippets of the raucous distorted snare, rhythmical alterations, counteractions to hesitancy - creep back in, but discretely rather than all in a rush. It reaches the point where the giddy rush of the song's opening is fully implied, but it does not actually have to be spoken - it's all present in absentia, except now with an ecstatic, emotionally-pungent melodic overlay - the hindbrain AND forebrain are being seduced in tandem - beauty, nostalgia, kinesis, funk - all together - and THAT is when you realise that a THIRD synth element has snuck in almost without you noticing - a frankly ASTONISHING synth bassline, fatly tying the rhythmic and melodic elements together. It actually doesn't creep in until about 30 seconds into this section, and fades in as if it had always been there - it's such an incredibly good fit that it feels subliminal, elemental to the piece, but it hadn't existed until nearly 3 and a half minutes into the song. It represents Autechre at their most inspired, most devastatingly architectural - to hold it back so long, then deploy it so subtly, so artfully, takes my breath away. It emerges from the very drum sounds, modulating INTO melody from rhythm. And so the song reaches apotheosis - pure listenability, pure engagement - with the introduction of this bassline. At which the drum sounds are permitted to fall apart, grow hesitant once more, falter, wither...

...and die. But what's also been happening is that the edges of the bassline, the moments of hit and fade, have taken on a life of their own, a sort of thin, membranous cycle that in the same instant the drums fall out swooshes over the remainder of the song like a rewound cassette, cycling ever-slower into oblivion, the end of rhythm, the ultimate settlement into reflection, melody and death. (This song, a synaesthetic metaphor for the life of an IDM fan?) Suddenly, the synth blare is gone, and only the hollow chords are left, playing their delightful waveforms on some simple (yet still almost impossible to predict) cycle, surging peaceably as the final rhythmic clicks fade, and then losing will, slipping into atonality, developing schizophrenia - the lower tones RIGHT at the last become a sort of moaning, whalesong bassline, stumbling and wavering to a toneshifted, uncertain close, and the higher tones play out maybe a couple more times, retaining their melodic integrity but first to die, as everything falls into the softest and slowest, most absent sort of chaos imaginable. It's an absolutely inspired way to end a song that has contained, FOR ME GARY, all of life and all of music. Stick this one on my all-time C-90! It's pop music, really. More so than much Autechre, but more demandingly so, more intricate and complex, more sophisticated in its unspoken thesis. It makes me move, and it makes me think. It eventually equates kinesis with repose. Incredible song. You should all go and listen to it right now.

just sounds like a load of robotic insects to me.

jks - thanks for that imago. i'm listening to it now and it's great to hear outside the context of the album while reading your right-up. you're right, this is pretty rockin'. my track of choice off Draft is V-Proc though.

Uh, delete "probably its most important part" coz the third bit is, or rather the whole thing is - it's all interrelated development, symbiotic narrative. o and ty dl! v-proc is also on my ballot, don't worry ;)

hehe, that outro is pure LP5.

Everyone has to do this for their #1 btw. I command it

we should have polled the album covers. I've love to read an interview with Ae where they simply focus on the album artwork. I love a lot of it. Others (Confield, Untilted) I can't work out whether there's a concept or not.

I didn't end up voting for 6ie.cr. Great track, but I already had 2 other Draft songs on my ballot.

6IE.CR made 8th place for me. Doing this ballot made me realise Draft is my 2nd favourite LP proper, which I didn't see coming.

How did I forget about Envane when I voted??

^ envane wuz robbed, possible culprit

my albums:

1 Confield
2 Tri Repetae
3 Envane
4 LP5
5 EP7
6 Amber
7 Anvil Vapre
8 Cichli Suite
9 Untilted
10 Incunabula

maybe coulda/shoulda squeezed gantz graf in there, still hoping exai will reveal itself in its full majesty but hasn't happened yet - more headphone listening required perhaps. draft would be right at the bottom of my list but hey i haven't read louis' screed yet.

and the top 3 remixes are pretty cool n all but seriously that stereolab mix is one of the nastiest & scariest things they've done.

It's also one of the funkiest & most recognisably pop things they've done.

The saga continues.

http://i.imgur.com/gBskxHy.jpg

49T. Slip - 64 points | 4 votes