POLLhelic Triangle -- Autechre :: Confield :: LP6

I've been listening to Move Of 10 a lot over the last month and I'm always astounded by how great it sounds when you really crank it and immerse yourself
move of 10 is so immaculately produced/mastered.. i had it on one night, "pce freeze 2.8i" at moderate volume, a bit baked. it sounded amazing, so crisp, popping out of the speakers--inhabiting the room. it seemed as if you could hear around the contours of the sounds, an illusion of an enveloping stereo fiel. was floored on it

er,

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I love Move of Ten and have no idea why it's so underrated in these parts. "M62" is top ten AE for me

Also, anyone else think Autechre only became great after LP5? I never play the first four albums. Maybe they just haven't aged as well. The "mechanized trilogy" that octobeard refers to (that's great, btw) is definitely where my brain is at these days

confield is definitely where they finally became major for me, thanks in large part to an incredibly evocative write-up from former ilm'er gareth. (early ilm is littered with posts from me shitting on ae, which i don't necessarily retract but i realize now that i was being needlessly hyperbolic.) i might still argue that ep7 is the best thing they ever did, but then it seems to sit in the sweet spot between the gnarled melodies of the older stuff and the fractal/generative stuff post-confield.

Also, anyone else think Autechre only became great after LP5?

I hardly ever listen to Incunabula these days, but I still have a lot of time for Amber and Tri Repetae (which I love, but don't rate as highly as some people) ... LP5 and Confield are the ones I keep returning to, and I like a great deal of what came after and will always check out a new Autechre record.

former ilm'er gareth

i have my suspicions about saer

I still listen to Chiastic Slide a lot. IMO that's where they really made "the leap" into greatness. Amber still a great disc though

Yeah, I agree that chiastic slide is where they start getting really interesting. Confield is where they get really really really interesting.

Ep7 is really good too though, I need to listen to that again, it's been a while.

It's all great. Every album is underrated.

Cichil Suite is really good :-D

*Cichli Suite

"Pencha" is so incredibly my shit

Yep Cichlisuite is peak Ae. I presume y'all get the title pun.

I've come to really appreciate the first three albums since acquiring them on vinyl. Always loved Amber but it turns out I'm much more interested in putting on Incunabula these days; an album I always had a bit of trouble with back in the day. I like all their albums though. Chiastic Slide is when they truly became Autechre in my mind, but it's a bit of a muddle. LP5 is truly amazing.

i like / hate the way that all autechre threads end up this way.

haha yeah it's just people listing their favourites and then saying 'they're all good really'

it prompted me to dig out oversteps again, so that was good.

I played Untilted the other day for the first time in a while and didn't get a lot out of it. Kind of arid. Elseq just seems to be on another level to that stuff - whether it's because the textures and fabric of the mix is allowed to just... settle over longer tracks, I dunno. There's just so much more that's immediately rewarding, and those pleasing little jerky cells of audio stick around for longer.

I think maybe Draft 7.30 is my favourite of the '00s LPs. They've kicked it up a notch this decade.

I find IRL conversations about the 'techre often go a bit like this as well.

What a problem for an artist to have!

feel like LP5 -> Confield is sorta like N64 -> Gamecube. Maybe you like the N64 games better but once you get used to the better graphics and processing power it's a bit jarring to go back

True about a lot of electronic music

https://www.residentadvisor.net/features/2756

have y'all read the recent-ish (June 2016) RA interview?

i like / hate the way that all autechre threads end up this way.

― koogs, Thursday, February 16, 2017 4:24 AM (seventeen hours ago)

Well, they are one of the most compelling bands of any genre I've ever heard, so to me it's unsurprising that their various threads here always succumb to broader expressions of appreciation and respect.

Yeah, I agree that chiastic slide is where they start getting really interesting. Confield is where they get really really really interesting.

When Confield was fresh out, I had a lot of trouble adjusting to their more fractalized type beats and textures. Wasn't until years later when I began to understand and appreciate the synesthetic interplay of sound in their post-LP5 material. Now I listen to it much much more often than their earlier records. Find those almost boring, if not for the nostalgia. However, Cipater, Clipper, 444, Inhake 2, Goz Quarter and Are Y Are We? get me EVERY TIME.

Also one more thing... and I've brought this up here before, but post-Confield Ae seems to be where they really begin to express swagger in some of their tunes... something that I feel is missing in their earlier work. Gantz Graf, Ccec (EP7 but close enough), IV VV IV VV VIII, rew(1), 90101-5l-l, etc. Just seriously sick stuff.

Yes there's something glorious and addictive when they let a sly hip-hop feel stir the undercurrents of the abstract bit-storms they are conjuring up. Pretty much every album has some filthy, degenerate boom-bap lurking in the depths of a few tracks. The ending of "recks on" on Exai has to be the most evil, beautiful hip-hop I have ever heard. Turned loud it's almost suffocating.

which is the exact thing I said about "surripere" above, time for a new lexicon

"cfern" deserved something i think. melodies on this album are consistently lovely they're just crawling with insects

Little known fact - Mariah Carey wrote some custom max objects for this.

Could never get past the horrible kick drum sound on Cfern, although the overall atmosphere is cool. This album makes me think of wandering around a desolate moon; exploring its dusty monochrome surface (CFern); sheltering from sandstorms (Pen Expers); poking around underground catacombs and discovering evidence of ancient alien civilisations (Sim Gishel, Bine); before finding lush liquid pools teaming with fauna and insects (Uviol).

It's not my favourite of their albums, but each track is very much its own thing

u wander into abandoned club on desolate moon where "sim gishel" is playing on a loop

i do love that the more i go back to this era of autechre the more i notice, for all its difficulty, much of it is essentially eroded club music with sand in its joints. the glass warehouse of untilted perhaps makes this clearest

That's a good way of putting it. Sometimes it sounds more like moving sands that spit out the occasional vestige of club music, but the reversible figure is part of the charm.

"eidetic casein" is like being locked in a bounce house on acid

or like the way a jellyfish swims but you're hearing it from the inside

eroded club music with sand in its joints

A+. This def goes for their three 00s albums imo.

xp lol

I just figured out that Eidetic Casein means 'Cheese Dreams' lol.

Anyway, picked up the new Draft7.30 reissue but going to wait for Confield as it's still the Ae I have the most difficulty with

Confield is the only one of the reissues released so far that I haven't bought.
I've always had a degree of difficulty with it since it came out, but I know a lot of fans vouch for it and some might even say it's their best.

So go on, convince me. Why is this the best Ae? Why should I buy the vinyl beyond mere completionist reasons?

I wish they'd re-release EP7 on vinyl

this album just has a really pleasing ratio of chaos:beauty

Remember how polarizing this album was? lol.

It's funny that a group with a rep for being super cerebral has such physical music. Vi Scose Poise and Cfern so far are both about gravity. I got the idea to listen to this from a music YouTuber who had a reaction video to Cfern and asked half-jokingly "why would anyone listen to this, it's academically interesting but I connect to it not at all." I'm not really sure what to say to that. It's not a matter of connecting to it. Cfern is a thing that is happening in my living room. I can almost see it.

Now if he said that about Pen Expers I might understand. This is no longer a thing that is happening in my living room, because my brain is telling me that what my ears are hearing is physically impossible. It's just a rent in the fabric of space. The universe is slightly less coherent now. Synths ... synths in the deep ...

... it pays off at the end, though, as the rhythm tears the track to shreds.

Sim Gishel comes to give us something to hold on to. I'm a few minutes and and what's happening in the high end on this track is wrong, unholy angles, it's vibrating my amygdala in a very unpleasant way. Something in there sounds like singing?

Four tracks through. I have learned that melody is evil and only rhythm can save us.

Wait. Parhelic Triangle is arguing with me. Why is it so insistent? I'm listening to this album louder than usual but I don't remember it being so uncomfortable. Those almost sound like bells in the background, which is soothing, to be reminded of life before this album. But the rhythm keeps trying to accelerate with those horrible scraping noises and then falling back. A gentle fadeout now, so you can't hear the omnious gurgling very well. Someone has been dragged just out of sight and is being devoured.

Bine is less hostile. It's an overwhelming amount of sound but the shellshock has me a bit numb, I can just let it wash over me. It even seems to be gaining in coherence, which makes it a suspicious outlier here. There's something tremendously exciting happening here now, unbelievably fast but conveying focus and calm, it's almost casual. It's like hearing a musician whose mental and emotional processing is much faster than our own (instead of just its limbs being faster.)

Eidetic Casein is my reward for making it through tracks 3-5. I can resolve what I'm hearing into a few actors whose motivations I might be able to understand.

Uviol sounds like I feel at this point, specifically the groaning that starts around 2:36. It sounds perilously close to tension actually being released. There are some lovely floating pads with tons of vibrato going in the back. They barely sounds actively triggered, it seems like they're just being vibrated by the rest of the track. It's pleasing at this point to hear something so ... passive. Receptive. The ending, as you know, is gorgeous ...

... and into Lentic Catachresis. I saw them in 2005. Still the only show I've been to with the lighting provided only by strobes. Urgency is coming and going now, at times it seems we're just going to fall apart, with just a distorted pad in the high end pushing consistently forward. Now the hi hat and kick rushes ... have to defocus my ears to keep the whole track in front of me ... and it's over way too fast.

I like this

Funny, Bine, sounds like the most hostile track on this album to me

I revisited Confield pretty recently in part to confirm it remains amazing (it does)

I've warmed to it but I still find it their most challenging album.

We've talked a bit about how a lot of these albums are demarcated by "themes", what is the theme for this one?

e.g. the woody textures of Draft; the B-boy ballbearing sounds of Untilted; LP5's flat-plan approach; Tri Repetae's grinding, industrial vibe; the dub(step) influences on Oversteps etc... I can't quite nail Confield's aesthetic though

Funny, I just listened to this yesterday as well, it still blows my mind. I don't think the world was ready for it in 2001 but even now it doesn't sound like anything else. I agree there's something very physical and tangible about this music, each track feels like a different room in a museum, rooms where things are moving in ways your brain can't understand. DL is right though, Bine is the most 'hostile', in that it makes me feel like my head is going through a car wash. IMO the best part of the album is the end, Side D if you've got it on vinyl - Uviol is kind of like their take on jazz, it's surprisingly pretty and hypnotic, then Lentic Catachresis which I think is like the aural equivilent of a roller coaster. Actually I'm pretty impressed by how well this all works as an album, front to back - each track sort of builds on what came before. So the last two is where it all comes together.

Yes, Uviol and Lentic are where it's at