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

favorite remix is of d'breez "crazy for love"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1bTis9ee3U

Along with what nakh said about canon-building being equivalent to entombing them, I think that the clear divisions in their discography (melodic/pretty vs. throbbing noise) sets up a few camps of listeners, and the different perspective that each camp comes from reveals a novel understanding or appreciation of all the work. I think a lot of us have gotten a new appreciation onto tracks we'd dismissed or hadn't even heard of before, so that instead of a sepulchre (or even the vivisepulchre), this top 50 is explicitly a snapshot of taste at a specific time, and that if we were to do this again in a couple years' time (considering my history of doing such things, not out of the question!), the results would look pretty different ("Cichli" would still probably win though!).

― cichleee suite (Leee), Saturday, 4 October 2014 19:43 (3 hours ago)

yeah, i like things from everything they have released (note that solitary vote for accelera) so it was good to see partisans for all of those

i didnt realise cichli was quite this popular, i guessed eutow might get #1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr3CCv6OvDo

I really thought Leterel would place higher. It was my number one and I'm a proud mf for voting for it despite it getting some disrespect upper in the thread. Its a great tune but really I didn't know whether to put that first or Clipper so its nice to see the latter place high.

Listening to Confield again now and it is fckn magnificent.

Cheers all and especially Leee for reigniting my love for this weird and special music.

1. GoSheep (Gescom)
2. Bronchusevenmx
3. Yulquen
4. Arch Carrier
5. Cichli
6. Fold4, Wrap5
7. VI scose poise
8. Overand
9. Maphive 6.1
10. VLetrmx
11. Krib
12. Further
13. Goz Quarter
14. Rotar
15. Flutter
16. Under Boac
17. Drane
18. Lowride
19. Nil
20. Clipper

yes this was really great thanks lee and all for the kewl write-ups, also the roll-out pace was great as it allowed me to bitch

ty Leee

Leterel
Clipper
Eutow
Drane
Cichli
Gelk
Cipater
Krib
Basscadet
Dael
Stud
Rpeg
Gantz Graf
ylm0
pt2ph8
d-sho qub
Hub
M62
Milk DX
Inhake 2

also the roll-out pace was great as it allowed me to bitch

lol ur welcome. I don't follow these results threads much -- was this on the slow side?

can't find an autechre remix thread so am bumping the most recent ae thread as that'll be the one people have bookmarked.

anyway, ae remix article in this month's wired.

You mean the wire.

yes, i do (bought both this morning)

disappointingly the magazine is nothing like the tv series.

if there was a magazine called Wired all about the show the Wire it would make life even more complicated than it already is.

So it appears that a bracing immersion in the top half of this poll was the best way to get into Autechre after a couple of failed attempts. I suppose I made a mistake starting with Incunabula and Amber, both of which did very little for me bar one or two tracks, and I never had the interest to explore further into the supposedly more 'difficult' records. This is partly because the discourse around Autechre is almost uniquely terrible - cf their supposed shift from warmth to coldness throughout their career, when to these ears something like Confield sounds way warmer than Incunabula. All those crackling and purring noises and emberish melodies, it's like watching a fire.

I'd always liked Cap IV but assumed that was an outlier, but the run from Chiastic Slide to Confield, once they start playing more with meter and texture, is just so great. And their melodies get better as well. Been taking it one album after the next and I'm about to plunge into Draft and onwards. But yeah, good work all concerned here.

I still think LP5 is the best way to get into these dudes

The idea of Autechre as having ever made 'cold' music is one of the biggest misnomers around their music. If it were so I'd probably not be a fan. Glad you got into them Matt DC. The run you mention is my favourite era. Found things a little bumpy from then on up until the Quaristice era, but as this poll proves, there are plenty who will rep for Draft and Untilted.

X post yeah LP5 was my introduction to them.

I've been re-discovering my love for "Leterel," well done, voters.

The idea of Autechre as having ever made 'cold' music is one of the biggest misnomers around their music. If it were so I'd probably not be a fan

I do think that the gap between "what they sound like if you like them" and "what they sound like them if you don't like them" is about as big as it could be for any group

there is cold as shorthand for the emotional froideur that people find in neutral abstract forms that do not go out of their way to engage them....

that might be a misunderstanding, though there is something in it too, neutral implacability and indifference is integral to the sublime

then by the same measure, sean booth has said that when they make violent and choleric music, that directness is misread or not read at all and it gets described as just 'complex' as if it is that were an end in itself

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_JCt0jv86I

the exai bonus track, never got around to this before but its got a chimey mid 90s feel to it

wow yeah. their japan bonus tracks often feel a bit throwaway but that is lovely. a few untilted era sounds hidden in there.

that was gorgeous

yeah id agree with both parts there ledge

the untilted trebly electro sound is gorgeous although compositionally its not quite up to confield or draft

where can i see the full recap?

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

"Nuane" is one of my top 10 faves i think, so satisfying in every department

that whole album and especially that track gives me this vibe of abandoned missile silos in siberia

i love the way it descends into that final outro of chattering teletype noise and the way they let it run on

been in a real Autechre mood since it turned out my housemate has had a vinyl copy of Draft7.30 stashed away and didn't tell me. Man, that album did nothing for me when I first heard it but it's taken this long to really show its colours. I always heard it as an extremely rhythmic, monochromatic album with few melodies, but listening to the record in the kitchen on my battered old portable turntable somehow made the basslines and more melodic textures jump out loads. There are at least 3 tracks on there that I'd consider putting in my top 10 or 20 tunes now, whereas before I'd written it off as a dud.

This is an interesting poll. If I'd have put money on it, I'd have expected Arch Carrier to win outright but it got beaten by a good few places. Funny that Cichli, the winner, didn't get any number 1 votes. Also strange that Cap.IV, the third track on a relatively obscure stand-alone single made it right into the top 5 - not a track I'd have expected to place so high.

It's a shame Dropp and Outpt ranked so low - two peas from the same pod that rely on a very simple idea executed really well on EP7.

The top ten is a jumble of my all-time faves and ones that just never really registered or moved me (VletRmx, Clipper, Pen Expers, the latter which I find actively horrible).

I also wonder, if we were to do this again with the latest album included, would more late-period Ae place? Much as I love Cichli and Arch Carrier etc, it's interesting to hear how some of their music has aged. LP5 sounded like the most complicated, futuristic, impossible music ever at the time and now it sounds relatively flat-pan, poppy even. I can't even listen to Amber any more although strangely Incunabula sounds better than ever these days

'latentcall' would have a shout of making the top ten i think

c16 deep tread would be in there too i'd hope

LP5 sounded like the most complicated, futuristic, impossible music ever at the time and now it sounds relatively flat-pan, poppy even.

hah I know exactly what you mean. I still think their pre-Confield material holds up quite well (Amber still sounds great to me), but yea LP5 sounds a bit gimmicky now, though my opinion there is probably colored by the fact that I too thought that was probably the pinnacle of IDM and maybe electronic music in general at some point

would be interesting to run this again, especially given that Ae's stuff generally tends to run through a three-year cycle of "This is hardly music!" -> "It's actually pretty good, just different" -> "Absolutely classic". As great as they were in the past, every time I want to listen to them I wind up playing something from the last 10 years. "d sho qub" would be my #1 if I were to take it again.

a three-year cycle of "This is hardly music!" -> "It's actually pretty good, just different" -> "Absolutely classic"

Or even 15 years in some cases (fuck, how did Draft come out FIFTEEN YEARS AGO???)

Anyone else think of Autechre in terms of 'eras' above albums, a bit like console generations? For fear of starting yet another Ae poll, this is how it's organised in my head:

1st era - Incunabula, Amber, Tri Repetae
This is the trickiest to define really since each album sounds quite different from the last, but it's kind of them starting out, finding their sound etc. Incunabula and Amber were groundbreaking and full of great ideas, but in retrospect slot nicely in with the Warp/Artificial Intelligence roster. Tri Repetae certainly points to the granular, mechanoid sound that would come to define them.

2nd era - Chiastic Slide, LP5, EP7
This is the 'classical' period for me. They've worked out who they are and are making a completely unique sound away from most. I still go back to these albums all the time. Chiastic Slide still sounds challenging. LP5 is actually a little more accessible and has fantastic flatplan melodies for days. EP7 is just a chocolate box of great ideas.

3rd era - Confield, Draft7.30, Untilted
I guess I'd call this a 'wilderness' era. Confield was so hyped at the time but compared to the (relatively) accessible sounds of LP5, I always found it an abstruse and awkward listen. I treid and tried with that one, but I felt like there was something I wasn't getting, and that any attempt to 'enjoy' it felt a bit like I was eating my greens. I've come around to Draft and Untilted in recent years, but at first I was disappointed by the focus on pure beats and lack of pretty hooks. It also felt like this kind of music was losing its cachet around this time - Aphex was to all but stop releasing new music in the 2000s, Plaid were in a creative dead-end, and dubstep and minimal house stepped in to fill the 'home listening electronica' hole (except you could dance to it).

4th era - Quaristice, Oversteps
I'm not sure what you'd call this period, maybe the 'First Data Era'? Often overlooked, I see it as a creative (if not commercial) bounce-back. A bigger focus on melodies and the kind of playfulness heard on LP5 and EP7 rather than the po-faced hyper-intelligent rhythmic overdrive of Untilted. Quaristice is an outlier in that it seems to be made up of short vignettes that keep things moving along. Oversteps is a really enjoyable 12-track album you can listen to in one sitting without getting a headache. But conversely, it's also the start of Autechre proliferating multiple accompanying albums which bulked-out their output considerably. No longer was it about a handy collection of tracks but a huge sprawl of sounds that would only multiply as the years went on.

5th era - Exai, elseq, NTS Sessions
I remember reviewing Exai and wondering at the time whether a double album of Autechre was really necessary, expecially when I was struggling to catch up with quaristice.quadrange and Move of Ten. Were I to know exactly how much material they'd go on to release in the 2010s, I would have kept quiet. The Second Data Era is defined as much by the medium as the message: the format being one of the most remarkable things about it. The fact they were able to release the whole of the NTS Sessions on vinyl (whereas they'd stipulated that MP3 was the preferred format on previous releases), was interesting but not surprising. Autechre have always stayed firm about being a breaks-based act and it would make sense that their music is playable on a vinyl format.

Good post. I like the 3rd era far more than you seem to, and I'm one of those people often ridiculed here for thinking that NTS is not only Ae's masterpiece but one of the greatest collections of music of the past ten or fifteen years, but I think this is a pretty reasonable breakdown of the distinct eras

yep. this is exactly how I break it down too. good observation about how that 3rd era was just an all-around downtime for IDM - 2001 really felt like the last hurrah for this sort of music. of course Autechre are truly a peerless group - you don't really think of them in terms of a particular scene anymore. in retrospect they were really the only one of those groups still pushing forward in the 21st century. I wasn't into them back then but I remember a lot of grouching about those albums. Same people who loved Ae for being so futuristic and advanced were now turning on them getting a bit too abstract. There was a lot of straight-up questioning about whether or not they really knew what they were doing anymore.

Confield was really polarising at the time.
Lifelong fans were denouncing it as garbage (no pun intended), and there was a feeling of Emperor's New Clothes.

And yeah, 2001 was like the 'New Jersey' year for that kind of music: Druqks was a big, hyped album that gave mixed results; Double Figure had some incredible songs on but was inconsistent. There was lots of other great stuff out around that time: Chris Clark, Prefuse73. But it did feel like most creative avenues had been explored.

There was a point where I became really disenchanted by the increasingly spoofy aspect of it - all that Tigerbeat stuff that aped Aphex's irreverent humour but without the steez. I felt like I was wasting my time - what is the point of experimental music if it leads nowhere? If you're constantly doodling and never painting?

It's not that people weren't doing new and interesting things - VSnares, for example, was taking up the mantle in ever-more extreme territory. But IDM seemed to have equivalently gone from DIY art-punk to bloated prog-rock, for want of a better analogy. Whereas the original Warp roster saw themselves as making rave and hip hop music, the newer artists were cribbing directly Aphex and Autechre, with no grounding or interest in the original scenes, and so you ended up with this quite limited, unimaginative, and very dorky, insular kind of music that stank like nerdy boys' bedrooms.

Really 'IDM', had won. It was seen as the future of music, and once you started hearing those sounds filtering back into pop and dance music, you knew it was true. There was no use for it any more when labels like Kompakt and Hyperdub were pushing things in newer and more interesting directions.

I'm not sure how and when the IDM revival sparked back in, but maybe around the time of Exai? Aphex releasing the Soundcloud dump definitely helped. But it was as though someone had clicked their fingers and suddenly you had Scintilli and Exai and Syro and a bunch of other things... Maybe a generational thing? Skrillex talking about how Flim is his favourite ever tune probably switched a bunch of millennials onto Aphex...

I think prog is a pretty good analogy. Same sort of idea...you started with people who wanted to take rock & jazz into new territory and expand outward in a way that had never really been done before. That produced some really great stuff, but once it became endless imitations of Yes and Genesis it got considerably less interesting, because they'd already defined what you can and can't do within the genre. IDM circa 2001 was maybe a bit like prog circa 1975 or so. And in both cases there was a revival about a decade later.

Feel like IDM and stuff like vaporwave are now intertwined - you hear a lot of today's vaporwave artists talk about BoC & Aphex the way 80's musicians would talk about the Beatles and the Stones. Artists like Oneohtrix & Vektroid are taking this sound in some pretty crazy new directions, in a way that I think is sort of consistent with the original aesthetic.

It's not that people weren't doing new and interesting things - VSnares, for example, was taking up the mantle in ever-more extreme territory.

I would agree with this but I would also point out that V/VM mined similar territory to the wacky Tigerbeat6 stuff you mention (and I agree that most of that stuff was tedious and uninteresting) and also managed the feat of being both irreverent and joyless. Though thinking about it now, V/VM (and the Caretaker to a lesser extent) was kinda vaporwave before vaporwave, no?

Yeah, it's not like all of a sudden there was a dearth of good avant-electronica, it's just that it felt less vital and the commercial and critical cachet had waned.

I remember, even on ILM, people saying things like 'I hate all that Aphex stuff - it's for nerds who just want the music to sound like video games' - which is totally true, and I felt very attacked by that at the time, lol

There was also this aloof, snobby attitude permeating that scene after a while. This whole 'this isn't dance music, it's intelligent'. Not only that, but a lot of stuff being released on labels like Rephlex, Planet-Mu and Tigerbeat etc seemed to quite like taking the piss out of 'regular' dance and pop culture.

Bit Meddler's 'Shitmix2000', Squarepusher's 'Red Hot Car', for example, even the video from Windowlicker which in retrospect comes off cringily racist. Different times, of course blahblah. I wasn't much of a popist back then either, but even I felt like the joke got stale quickly what with all these spotty geezers who couldn't dance making fun of music that you could dance to.

The eras thing definitely tracks for me, except I absolutely love Confield; "VI Scose Poise" may be my favorite Autechre track. I never need to hear Draft or Untilted again, though, or the first three albums.

Draft is amazing (and I didn't necessarily think so at the time)

or the first three albums.

― shared unit of analysis (unperson), Tuesday, October 8, 2019 9:42 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

gtfo

I like Tri Repetae a little better than Chiastic Slide, which I remember as basically just a series of crunching noises, but I can pretty much take or leave either. LP5 was where I came in, so it's always gonna be one of my favorites and a big part of how I define "good" Autechre.

LP5 was my first. That and EP7 will always be 'my' Autechre albums. I'd love to read some sort of 33 1/3 style longform thing about those.

I've come round to Draft and Untitled, mostly thanks to the enthusiasm for them in this poll.

Haha, Tri Rep is the crunchiest of all the Ae albums. i have to say that I'm more of a fan of them when there's some sort of hint of melodic emotional tug going on underneath the maths. I guess that's why tracks like Cichli and Arch Carrier do so well in polls like this

The first three albums are just lush though. I mean I originally wrote off Incunabula as being not really a proper Ae album as it's very much an ambient techno record compared to what came later, but buying the vinyl reissues it ended up being my most played.

I wish Warp would hurry up and release the next three 'classic era' LPs on vinyl. I'd snap them up so quick

The 5 star Amazon reviews of Draft 7.30 put the purple ponderings of the ILX Autechre Fan Cult (of which I am a member) to shame

Since Autechre has become a part of my life, I have become healthier, more physically toned, keener with my wits, and even more anxious to stay busy. Yes, I have increased and enhanced my longevity work performance as a result of improved health by my addiction to listening to Autechre over the years.

What I have done to make this IDM sound drug more potent is that I have put all my Autechre CD's on a CDR burned by a program called Sonic Stage. It comes with Sony CD players that play the ATRAC3plus CDR's that you make through the computer. You can put more than 30 hours of music on a single CDR. So, having about 15 hours of Autechre playing in a continuous shuffle for hours on end while I'm at work has caused me to work a projected 3 and a half hours worth of work in just under 2 hours. I'm actually quite disappointed when I run out of work to do because I am still on an Autechre high. Sometimes, I've even clocked out but went right back to work because I can't seem to get myself to break away from this sound euphoria. Their music helps me love my work.

So, in a nutshell, the music of Autechre turned me into a healthier, better physical shape, faster mental processor, higher self-esteemed, workaholic. And yet, this music drives my boss crazy. Thankfully, my fellow workers (the carriers anyway) don't seem to mind it, because they all benefit from my work performance as a result of this audio drug.

If anyone else has experienced this same kind of Autechre euphoria, please share your story.