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

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

is this where the title comes from?

forgot how good pir is, it's practically a jazz ballad

Thoughts on some tracks above:

- Rettic AC is so short but so gorgeous. Feels futuristic and nostalgic at the same time. Chiastic Slide is my #1 album of theirs and while it doesn’t have the luscious, sculpturally evolving sound design they’d perfect post Confield, it has a really amazing and unique textural continuity and “album” feel that few of their other LPs have. Love the comment about Chiastic being a winter album. Every song on that record to me is important.

- Overand was the first time I heard Autechre outside my own CD player. It was the chill room at my first rave in the late 90’s in the bay area and I was actually tripping on LSD for the first time, and HARD. It was an awesome experience knowing that others liked this weird ass band I had fallen into. As a track itself it’s a nice calm breakdown on Tri Rep, but in terms of Ae’s ambient epics, it is nothing compared to Vletrmx, Pule, VI Scose Poise, or See on See.

- Eidetic Casein… I forgot how much this track initially I despised and now I adore - perfectly paced evolution and it transitions into Uviol so brilliantly. I love how the baseline starts off as a squealing high pitched almost staccato melody and ends up devouring the track and digesting it until there's nothing left but excreted dissonance. Probably the best case of experiencing initial revulsion to gradually “getting it” and eventually going full grok on an Ae track. Probably regretting not putting this or VI Scose Poise from Confield on my ballot, but there were just too many others to choose from. Eidetic is by far the masterpiece from Confield.

- Pir was for many years what I thought was going to be the last “pretty” Ae song they’d ever write, so it somewhat is near and dear to me due to it closing the door of an era. I was of course wrong in a big way when Quaristice and Oversteps came out, but the melancholic nostalgia remains for it. Ae always seem to write the best openers and closers for every album/EP and this is no exception. The exquisite sampling for texture (water filled barrels or something) perfectly coupled with that melody melts me every time. Reminds me of Krib from Cichlisuite with the stunning combination of found sound sampling and bright, ethereal melodies.

And Imago, I can't wait to write about my #1.

forgot how good pir is, it's practically a jazz ballad

When I attempt to describe Autechre's post-Chiastic output to someone I tell them they're an electronic jazz band. Jazz in the sense of intense improvisation, but along with melody, timbre, sonics, percussion, rhythm are improvised. In addition to this they often transition these attributes into each other (timbre becomes rhythm, melody becomes sonics, percussion becomes melody - at times all at once). There's even traditional melodic jazz elements, seen early on in Acroyear2 off of LP5, Stop Look Listen off of WAP100 (a fantastic and overlooked track, btw) and more recently on Irlite (get 0) off of Exai.

Exai to me feels more fluid in this respect and is by far and away my favorite "jazz" record of theirs in that it is so wonderfully balanced in its improvisations.

^^^ wow, this is also how I finally 'got' Confield: I started thinking of it as a jazz record, rather than techno, and it began to make more sense and open up for me.

more like jazzy post-rock

hah, yeah i felt like that about Pir being the last pretty Autechre too

i was listening to some Exai cuts on headphones last night and I'd say the difference between that album is as greatly felt as the difference between Confield and Tri Repetae. It's seriously next level.

Also, loving the idea and totally agree with the idea of Autechre as jazz band. Pir has a kind of 'Lonely Woman' quality to it where it feels like about five vamps or 'parts' strung together in sequence.

alright then gaekwad. i'll try and keep it brief. it's off kilter, it's giddy making, it's like a spinning top continually in danger of falling over then somehow righting itself. no matter how many times i've listened to it i feel like i can't really get my head round it. it has krib/bucephalus bouncing ball style percussion taken to the limit, spooky marimba, a glockenspiely thing hovering uncertainly between melody and random vamping. all the elements fight for dominance, things fall under the waves, resurface, spin and wobble. around 3:30 there's an unsteady truce, the percussion settles down, the marimba comes to the fore. but the truce doesn't last, the percussion falters, some woozy top heavy synth strings come in and destabilise everything. spin, wobble. demonic laughter bubbles up out of nowhere and holds sway for a minute, then everything falls away and we're left with a metallic whine, the hum of the top suddenly and finally spinning steadily.

autechre and jazz, hmm. i can't stand the jazzy chords and melodies in autriche or lowride but i don't really hear anything like that in anything else they've done. that's obviously a pretty limiting definition of jazz though.

It makes sense to me as a description in terms of the cross-rhythms and interplay (real or accidental), especially Confield on.

"T ess xi" is another one with quite a blatant and almost straightforward "jazz" chord progression, maybe via UR or something.

LP5 = Dave Brubeck's Time Out.

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

― nakhchivan, Monday, September 29, 2014 8:00 PM (Yesterday)

no, i think there is largely nothing good written about their music

i think in that they have been the victims of their own experimentalism, which not only challenges listeners/writers (who are already usually disinclined to really get at the heart of a piece of music, or how it works) but is given so much misleading cover by their music's character (o bioluminescent robots dancing etc., o cold techno aspergers lab employees) and by their praxis (o dark DSP secrets, o automatic tuneification beatlets) that all that junk has to be cleared away or firmly situated somehow before anything meaningful can be said about the music, what its experiments are and how they work, etc. no one seems to have bothered. a shame, because ae also create the suspicion, from time to time, that they are charlatans / savants / fringe weirdo hobbyists / incapable of or uninterested in quality control / mired in a DSP bizarroworld they know not how to extricate themselves from, and seem like they would really benefit from a better understanding among their audience of their work.

I think that's a little harsh on ae ;-)

If anyone hasn't seen it before, they did an 'ask me anything' last year with the WATMM forum:

http://forum.watmm.com/topic/81109-aaa-ask-autechre-anything-sean-and-rob-on-watmm/

There's a fair bit of fanboy nonsense to sift through, but there are also some genuinely interesting contributions from Sean & Rob.

yeah music = speech - text

at least roughly - i reckon it's a kind of super-developed version of the pitch and intonation parts of speech (the aural bit that doesn't contain textual info)

sean is obv some ridic super-level synaesthete genius - this is brilliant

xp i think a little harshness would be useful! but partly to figure out how critical one ought to be, neither to the fannish degree (barely, enjoying what one likes, passing over the rest) nor to the judicious record reviewer's degree (safely, at a distance, 'very remarkable sounds and production techniques but…').

the other day i shuffled the new aphex, the xx's debut, and 'move of ten', my favorite recent ae, together and especially up close, on headphones, there were passages in the ae of such delicacy and conception that they just made aphex seem like a plodding wanker. (and i am enjoying that record!) i just think conditions are not ideal, in terms of audiences and critical culture, for ae to be appreciated and understood as well as that comparison suggests they deserve.

At the end of Dog Latin's interview with Rob Booth (link upthread), RB talks about the making of "L-Event" in a really accessible way -- no gearhead talk, just a peek behind the curtain into the general concepts behind the tracks.

The faceless techno/electronic persona has been around forever, Autechre don't really cultivate that image more than anyone else. But it's true that their experimentalism makes it hard for people to write about their music using the typical song structure reference points, i.e. talking about "the intro" or "the melody that comes in at point ___" doesn't really work with Autechre. But instead of trying to break down the structure of the piece, I've always been more interested in hearing how the music makes people feel. I'm much more interested in hearing descriptions on this thread like "Rettic AC is like trampling through the snow and trying to climb over an iron wall" or thereabouts than any attempt to really describe how the music works.

xposts

also his answers are p zingy. he'd be a brilliant ilx poster (sean i mean)

MastaN8, on 02 Nov 2013 - 5:03 PM, said:
Sure. How do you feel your music has been received over the years by fans/critics?

in various ways

yeah it was really muddy, like insanely muddy, and i was already somehow covered in mud, and i was really beyond drunk at that point cos we didn't have to play (our tent was flooded and cancelled) and i had already downed a couple of bottles of champagne - i thought it would be a really good idea to try and push mike paradinas into the mud (he seemed to be really concerned about getting any mud on him at all). anyway it failed and i ended up face down in a load of mud next to him, but he got pissed off about getting some mud on his wrist, so I WIN

someone stop me, I cd do this all day :D

half asleep and playing confield quite loud rn