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

6ie is like a lumpen idm brokenbeat sort of procrustean carcass around some quite interesting melodies

needs to be said that autechre are just supremely melodically gifted in a way very few others are, even though its a talent they have never tried to overplay in their augustan period

oversteps does sort of overdo it though

agree with all of that

electro + sound art nerds

yep

the way melody has to do battle with nxtlvl drumprogramming in the aforementioned period leads to its greatest triumphs imo but then this poll will hopefully introduce me to some stuff without that sphere

all of their best work retains skein linking back to electro

there was an interview once where they almost upbraided ricardo villalobos (this would be around achso time i suppose) for citing them as an influence, saying that he was a house producer so they were a little unsure why he would take after them, autechre still sort of see themselves as 'electro' in some intrinsic sense no matter how far they have wandered from that

Unreformed b-boys to the last.

Overand pic is the hidden link between hot chip and ae, fyi.

OIC!

we getting the next five tonight btw? ;)

I was waiting for the current discussion to abate!

i've 'bated, your turn to issue

ok bb.

Is this what sexting is like?

I mean ILM-style?

in autechreland, yeah

never forget btw what do you think Autechre call their genitals?

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

43. Cfern - 77 points | 3 votes

only my #17 so it's not getting a write-up beyond that fucking bass and that fucking creeping space-age sonic development, obv an incredible piece of music and maybe THE sleeper hit on confield

really tho it's autechre's rhythmic principles - complexity, recombinations, entropy - applied to melody. now yeah melody & rhythm is a false binary esp where autechre are concerned but this track is almost all melody - intersections of tone, (dis)harmonic explorations, phrases you'd maybe expect of fucking cardiacs - it's absolutely beautiful, shows that not only can autechre write a tune but compose melodically up there with pretty much anyone you can name. it's pop, it's classical music, it's sheet music for computers & it all falls apart at the end in one of autechre's best denouements i mean what's there to hate

― Ƹ༑Ʒ (imago), Tuesday, 30 September 2014 00:09 (41 minutes ago)

approve of this post except for

i) cardiacs reference
ii) the pop / classical is another false binary

re: ii, surely the falseness of that binary is inherent in its juxtaposition - i'd not call that a binary at all

Great to come back to some of these tracks. I'm now a 6IE CR convert.

Never realised how melodic Rettic AC was till now. Noise + ambient.

Slip is so pretty. Very Aphex Twin in its own way. Always think the name is apt, and next to Silverside on the album I always imagine it's the sound of rolling/running down those dunes on the cover.

Gaekwad - Never really paid this one that much attention but I'm digging it now. Amazed at how melodic all this earlier Autechre sounds now. It always sounded so atonal. Wow the amount of bass on this track is just insane... Reminds me a little bit of Drane2 on LP5 with those chimey dulcimer noises. Cor, this is superb on headphones..! A little mutley laugh towards the end. Whoever said Ae were cold and clinical? This is so fun.

Overand - Not a super fan of Tri Repetae but this just scraped my ballot. I like it for the same reason I like Kraftwerk's Radioactivity album. Just these minute squelches of radio-like interference spinning off into the galaxy. Transmissions being sent off into the vacuum, being picked up and interpreted. One of their few (and best) pure ambient tunes.

Second Peng - Don't dig out the Anvil Vapre EP enough really. It's good though - like a tougher, angrier Tri Repetae. Some of their bangingest material on here. This is a slow stomper but the beats are hard and heavy as fuck. Autechre always got their album art so right, and Tri Repetae-era always makes me think exactly of those radio-controlled robotic creatures in the video for Second Bad Vilbel - all moving parts whirring around menacingly. My only issue with this one is it goes on a bit long. Cool way to round off the EP though.

Eidetic Casein - Nope, sorry. I don't get it and never have. I've been wanting to like this one for a long time as, like imago says, it's supposed to be the 'pop' track on Confield. All I can hear is a thousand toy ambulances running out of batteries at the same time. I hear nothing in this I can lock onto at all. If there is a melody it's totally atonal with few repetitions or 'catchy bits'. Maybe that's the point, but in that case I definitely see it as one of their more abstruse bits.
In all my time of listening to this record I feel I never quite got Confield. And yet I still come back to it once or twice a year out of sheer morbid curiosity. There's something about the frequencies they used on this album that really gets to me - all the kick drums have an teeth-gritting high-end quality that makes them squish around like someone rubbing their fingers on a balloon.

re: ii, surely the falseness of that binary is inherent in its juxtaposition - i'd not call that a binary at all

― Ƹ༑Ʒ (imago), Tuesday, 30 September 2014 00:56 (1 minute ago)

theyre just terms that dont need to be introduced in relation to something like confield which is neither

xxposts Cfern is the other example of that - I like this song in theory but those kicks are too damn loud and plonketty for this kind of tune. A strange little track though I must say.

not really interested in anyones attempt to taxonomise autechre except for autechre themselves

fair xps

cfern settles at the end for a repeating pattern - quite a few of autechre's songs find their entropy this way, and it works

playing cfern rn, one of the least enterprising tracks on confield, thomas plinkettys crapital amirite

my problem with Anvil Vapre is that i have it on vinyl and listened to it at 33 for many years before hearing an mp3 of it. what a shock. it sounds immense at 33, i can't get my head around how it's supposed to sound.

one of the least enterprising tracks on confield

it's my 5th favourite so i almost agree, ha

yeah i do really like everything else about Cfern. Just the timbre of those beats do my head in. I'd like to hear a version with those taken out please.

Last two to round out 50-41.

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

41T. Rsdio - 79 points | 3 votes

http://i.imgur.com/tn273zA.jpg

41T. Pir - 79 points | 4 votes

sort of ridiculous but i downloaded the album amber yesterday and im not sure if ive ever heard it before

these graphics are cool though
49t 'slip' the purple one is sweet

Pure speculation, but I imagine that "Rsdio" approximates tactile/acoustic soundmaking in a unique way for Autechre -- maybe I shouldn't say "acoustic," what I mean is that the act of creating a sound isn't a black box, but more like banging on a surface to create a percussion effect or, closer to "Rsdio," striking a key and a hammer striking a string. Because those "DUNN! DU-DUH-DUNNNNN" chords sound bring up the image of a pianist throwing him/herself into a composition, not so much a pair of knob-twiddling guys. It's a kind of rockist image/nonsense I see when I hear this.

"Pir" I have to admit I think of as the chintzier cousin to "Krib."

Never cared much for Rsdio, but Pir was #3 on my ballot, so I'm a bit disappointed it ranked this low. The beginning sounds like a blocked toilet being flushed and then it turns into this table-slapping, car-doors-opening-underwater cascade of rhythm underpinned by this huge bass frequncy and angelic melody box chime. I love the way the patterns twirl around and resolve themselves. The slappy-rhythm almost works as a melody itself, it's hard to describe. It's just magnificent and startling.

is there any good writing about autechre from someone with knowledge of how they make these tracks (largely idk shit about the praxis) but that isnt just arcane technical stuff

can think of a couple of musically engaged ilxor.com posters who could perhaps be able to do that

i voted for both of these. on reflection i probably had Pir a bit too low and Rsdio a bit too high. damn, Pir's so good. there's a fun little fan made vid for it here too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5XJhzPwxmg

and it's a fantastic way to end the second half of EPy - after the triple-headed hellfire sermon of Maphive, Zeiss Contarex and Netlon Sentinel, they end it with a sweet little gem like Pir.

nakh, without wanting to spam my own writing, you could try this: http://thequietus.com/articles/13899-autechre-interview-exai-l-event

..particularly the second part where Rob Brown dissects the tracks on L-Event to an extent.

great interview

was this a phone interview

dont think ive read this before

read your exai review at the time, that was good

anyway i didnt so much mean interviews from themselves but secondary writing

Twenty years since the release of their debut album Incunabula, the duo remain a puzzle to be solved, an enigma to be unwrapped, and it can take years, decades even, for some tracks and releases to sink in properly.

dont feel like this at all though, about autechre or about any music except for perhaps something terribly gnomic and remote like late beethoven or scelsi

Yeah it was a skype interview.

I know what you mean though. I'd love to read, say, a 33 1/3 book about Confield by someone who knew a bit about the technical side but really was just entertaining and interesting to read.

exactly

i voted for rsdio ... endless rolling menace