POLLhelic Triangle -- Autechre :: Confield :: LP6

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

Maybe if there's a theme here it's "Autechre go organic". Like, up till now the music definitely sounded like machines, beautiful as it was. The sound was definitely "electronic-electronic" and rooted in techno. And while they'd hinted at this before, especially on Chiastic Slide and EP7, this is where they tip into something else entirely; where it sounds more like the surface of a fertile alien world full of beauty and ugliness and danger, as opposed to a deconstruction of extant dance music

the surface, the deep underground caverns, and up into interstellar space - but yep that feels appropriate.

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