POLLhelic Triangle -- Autechre :: Confield :: LP6

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.

I think IDM already started to lose its momentum around Drukqs, but Confield may have killed it for good.

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.

Dog, listen to "Eidetic Casein" next to "Arch Carrier," and you'll hear why it gets upped as the easy song on Confield!!!

Weird; I've always admired "Uviol" for being smooth, but having relistened this week, I'm actually particular to "VI Scose Poise" a lot now.

cool Leee

xpost
I've always seen 2001 as the "great glass ceiling" year for IDM. Lots of people had said it was dead already, but this wasn't true. Warp and Rephlex were at the peak of their powers: Druqks, Double Figure, Confield, Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives, Go Plastic etc were all released around that time and all felt like momentous albums in their own ways. I'd venture the thing that killed IDM wasn't Confield, but rather Kid A.

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.

this is a great image. lots of them in this thread.

anyway, the percussive stuff on this album ("Pen Expers," "Bine," "Lentic Catachresis") is really quite intense. "Lentic" in particular edges towards harsh noise territory towards the end. it just builds up to this huge, dense, oppressive blast of sound. but an immaculately rendered blast of sound (of course) that is very much working in the lower registers. (no masonna skree here.) reminds me of some of some of kevin drumm's more digital work in that respect.

but that stuff is a little too unpleasant for me to vote for. went for "Parhelic Triangle". a dense, throbbing banger and I love the chimes that drift throughout the track.

and despite the queasy, uneasy sound on many of these tracks, I found confield immediately more palatable than draft 7.30. I've listened to that one many times throughout the years and have retained absolutely nothing.

Listening to Confield will no doubt remind one of the unbelievably annoying pseudo-intellectuals who frequent museums spending hours showcasing their impressive lexicons as they ponder over the meaning of the most elementary of works.

popmatters review is pretty dumb, huh?

Tried to sit down and listen to this again last night and just wasn't feeling it. I figured my time would be better spent listening to Draft, Untilted or Oversteps - if only because I still don't feel like I've discovered those fully yet (Draft was 2003?? Yikes!). Sim Gishel is the track I think was the one I've been overlooking the most, but really it sounds like a holdover from EP7.

Eidetic Casein still sucks - the melody just sounds random - not melodic or generative or amelodic, just a mess of noises. It's really unpleasant, and nothign like Arch Carrier. Sorry.

I would understand if you called it less interesting or emotive than Arch Carrier, but it's not random, there's definitely order in there. Both the string-like and ehrm soft glockenspiel-esque parts are basically repeated descending patterns, although the latter skips around more than the former.

Yeah, it's those out-of-tune harpsichord-y noises I don't like. They sound like a three-year old got hold of a cheap keyboard. Without those noises and the later bleating siren noises it would be a cool track. I like the quasi-disco strings and the rumbling sub-bass though.

Eidetic Casein is like a detuned Cardiacs - i.e. magnificent - and I'd consider voting for it if it wasn't parenthetical to the album

fairly sure it's on the album

strange thinking how old this album....seemed a pretty monumental release at the time when i'd barely begun thinking about music

tho i seldom play it, rather icy and obviously requires some attention, i'd still rate it near their best

lentic catachresis, probably

(Draft was 2003?? Yikes!)

signs that you are getting older

btw massive cheers to Leee for reviving my ae interest. Yesterday I spent the whole day with Oversteps/Quaristice/Chiastic Slide and had a wonderful time.

One more thing: My perpetual gauge of musical quality is what Geir thinks how many listens an album requires to hit its peak. Confield took about 40.

This was the first Autechre album I bought so I still have a lot of fondness for it even though pretty much all the others I've heard since surpass it in one way or another. I love the brittle prettiness of 'Bine' and 'Uviol' but in my heart I know I've got to vote for 'Pen Expers', such a striking track, it really did mess with my head (in a good way).

My first, too! Perhaps that's why I'm so fond of it.

damn! i didn't even have to ponder this. first track.

totally their best album, hands down.

after a couple of relistens, went with Pen Expers, though I love pretty much every track on this album

I think this remains to this day the album I worked the longest and hardest to really "get". I remember Draft 7.30 being released and thinking it was way too soon, like I'd just gotten my head around this album and they were already releasing another one.

I was pretty patient back then, I can't imagine spending that much time with an album waiting for it to click these days.

there hasn't really been an album quite like confield since.....something with that level of formal difficulty that a lot of people were prepared to persevere with

no matter how much avant/noise stuff i listen to, confield still seems pretty severe...

i mean, this was an album probably a fairly significant proportion of those who bought kid a also tried to like! and mostly failed, but i remember ppl discussing it on the teletext music pages

lol stuart braithwaite used to send messages to planet music, 'the ghetto internet', lol him

confield >>>>>>>>>>loads>>>>>>>>>> kid a obv

the only track i like is VI scose poise so that.

Pen Expers is an audible representation of rape in my opinion. The way the high pitched noises get silenced by the lower register noises which get more and more violent. It is a piece of art and I enjoy listening to it (2nd fav track).

I think this remains to this day the album I worked the longest and hardest to really "get". [...]

I was pretty patient back then, I can't imagine spending that much time with an album waiting for it to click these days.

My experience exactly.

btw massive cheers to Leee for reviving my ae interest

Also, the chance to make stupid puns.

Pen Expers is an audible representation of rape in my opinion.

wtf? sounds like a fuckin jam to me. ecstatic even.

i dunno how to pick here but might have to do parahelic. i like the underwater carousel image upthread but i always thought it sounded like something digging and digging

Does anyone know from where the drum sound in Pen Expers is sampled? For some reason I think it's an early hip hop track but icbw.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

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