Autechre: Classic or Dud?

oh nice! i'll take a look. also, that's awesome! :)

xpost

apropos of nothing other than autechre, the twitter account for label ghostly international (or more accurately, "ghostly by night", the unknown night editor who makes ridiculous in-jokes and shitposts) had a running joke that apple after the return of steve jobs was completely inspired by autechre. a few funny ones in there

Autechre at Oakland CA's Club Indigo May 18 2001 = Zero Hour of Apple Design. Ive and Jobs in attendance. Like Sex Pistols in Manchester 76. pic.twitter.com/I1ZhtMzZY2

— Ghostly (@ghostly) April 2, 2017

argh it's "ghostly after dark" #gad

aphex twin got a compilation of remixes! they should release an autechre one

Plaid have a remix comp as well.

xp woah I might've been at that show!

Can neither confirm nor deny Ive or Jobs being in attendance though.

I listened to elseq as one thing for a month or so but almost all my listening for the last few years has been via big randomized playlists with auto crossfade and ae are almost always in the mix cos they work great in there

Re: 'upgrades' - I'd swap out elseq for this latest batch if I had to choose one set. It's clearly from the same ecology but almost entirely a refinement IMO, and I don't feel that attached to many of the older 'tunes' when there's something new and 'better' in any of those modes. Who's got the time for all of it? I'm happy to move on and I feel that's the spirit in which it's made as well.

That's both good and bad. I mean it means the music is improved as far I'm concerned, but also I paid for the last lot and it's non transferrable ;-)

Actually more prosaically maybe elseq could do with being remastered less obnoxiously squashed.

It's a pretty great time to be an Autechre fan, we went from long periods of toughing out the gaps between albums, to a release schedule which allows barely enough time to assimilate each release before something even bigger drops. Years of hunting down live recordings and the occasional soundboard (will anything top Glasgow Art School 2005, I doubt it) then suddenly a 9-set archive of soundboards. The last 3 longform releases have been 2 hours, 4 hours, now 8. After 20 years I've reached the point where I don't have to "get" any of this stuff, it's just their latest ideas using a vocabulary they've worked on for ages, here's some cold beauty, here's some shattered funk, here's the most fucked up hiphop bottom end paired with a sublime glacial drift. Listen to the kick degrade slowly. Can you still feel the pulse as the beats drift around the timepoints. I feel like they do a LOT of work to set up amazing spaces and foundations and parameters and turn their algorithms loose, then bring back the coolest shit they found. Never been an artist like it, maybe never will again.

will anything top Glasgow Art School 2005, I doubt it

just downloaded a copy - and all the remixes i was missing - as if i didn't have enough to be getting on with already.

i think the way they've released this stuff is great, the excitement of a shared experience plus a keepsake to take home and treasure forever, enchant the grandkids with. unlike elseq it does seem designed more like a live experience though, interesting to see if it will stand up to repeated home listening.

Holy shit this new set is great

a release schedule which allows barely enough time to assimilate each release before something even bigger drops...The last 3 longform releases have been 2 hours, 4 hours, now 8.

This reminds me of something I wrote about Anthony Braxton recently.

braxton is kind of a good analog, actually.. an unwieldy corpus of work... lots of hard hard thinking implied

.The last 3 longform releases have been 2 hours, 4 hours, now 8.

just as i expected, autechre's grand plan is to exponentially grow and become the universe. by the 30th release there autechre releases will be more than a billion hours long

I'm a total Autechre newbie, I just dived into everything a few months back and tried to make sense of it. The key I found to the last phase was the way they kept elaborating on Quaristice, releasing a double disc version with different versions, then an EP called Versions, then four more EPs with different versions. Yeah, it's jam bands, it's remixers, but it's also 'Versions' as in Dub-culture. It's like they're creating their own culture, a computer-culture, a sort of scenius of the singularity. Someone on here described Confield as portraying a planet in sound, but the new stuff portrays a city, a people, a species of aliens, for whom this type of thing makes sense. At least that's how I think of it, and even though I kinda don't belong to that tribe, I like that it exists.

Btw, I was listening through everything Rhythm & Sound released related to 'See Mi Yah' and it's a bunch of EPs all based on the same riddim, a couple of dub versions of some of the versions of the riddim, and then a bunch of remixes of the versions of the riddim, including a remix of a dub of a version of a riddim. I love that sort of thing.

yesssssss

(that was to KM but I like Frederik’s take too)
It’s interrsting to hear elements reused and track names more obviously referencing elements and feel - like we’re seeing more of their process these days.

god i love the na feh throw dub, so deeeeeeep

and i don't know how i only just heard this the other day: https://www.discogs.com/Paul-St-Hilaire-Ren%C3%A9-L%C3%B6we-Faith/release/188064

e.g. all the references to pendulu(m), casual etc. Also “violvoic” is obviously using a “voice” from Confield’s uviol when you listen to it.

it seems like the end goal is for autechre to have a catalog of 1 trillion songs, all of which can be recognized as autechre-like but difficult to define in terms of when it was actually released and how, pumping throughout the world in hidden speakers, like the music is just called "autechre" and no one really remembers where it came from, or something

I've always felt their endgame would be that right before retiring, they'd release an app that would generate tracks. You could, over time, influence the parameters genetically by approving/disapproving the output and have your own personal never ending Autechre releases catered to your tastes. There would be a whole culture around people's "discoveries" and grass roots curated collections of the "best tracks".

didn't Oval do something like that

It would be interesting to have a neural network try to create autechre songs

(maybe start with song titles)

decided to play Exai on this fine afternoon, its like getting a brain massage

the track that sounds like a woodpecker going to town on a piece of sheel metal owns

didn't Oval do something like that

― frogbs, Friday, April 13, 2018 12:02 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah: https://www.soundonsound.com/people/oval-markus-popp

generative music is a thing

they could call it fauxtechre.

I mean it's been done before, but Ae would release something that would produce tracks with enough nuance, novelty and originality to rival their best work

I am of the sneaking suspicion that these last 3 releases are exactly that. "Sean, turn the machine on for another 4 hours, we've bills to pay"

"It's a pretty great time to be an Autechre fan, ..."

pretty much sums up the last several years. I don't see what's so problematic about this pattern of output - with something like AE_LIVE.. does it really warrant serious deliberation over how to index it, or feel the need to 'get to the bottom of it', conceptually? It's sound art / sculpture, and it's successful. Ae has been honing in on something marvelous. Sometimes it resembles the motion of weather / atmospheric phenomena, fluid shapes, complex machinery, or a malfunctioning electronic device. It brings to mind ideas of [any sort of] state variables, and the physical action that might entail.

Ae's music conjures fantastic imagery and movement, with sounds.. is it so unusual to sit with a piece of music for an hour or two? Listening to NTS 1 right now, it's all sticky techno, part of the structure disintegrating, becoming deformed and then composing itself through countless mutations. It's wild. It's a spectacle.

As somebody mentioned upthread, I've really enjoyed tuning in (NTS Sessions) at any point of the broadcast, knowing it's there (all the time), repeating. Take your time with it.

in case y'all were wondering I'm pounding Exai again while drinking beer and losing my ass in online poker. feels good

please pardon the corny sentimentalisms.. these NTS sessions are dope "af"

wondering which track sounds like a woodpecker hammering on sheet metal... is it Flep, or Fleure?

its Flep. coincidentally the one that's playing right now

Flep is wholesome.. it makes me think of scraping barnacles off the keel of a boat, or something like that.

Oversteps is so good. Like a glacial breeze

Loving the mellow, latter third of NTS 2... these tracks are really well-composed, beats all over the 2nd session.

still haven't tuned into these, been kind of obsessed with 'exai' lately, especially running to it. i'll cop the wavs when i can, because i love to listen to their stuff while i'm outside and moving. i'm totally on board with what they're doing, don't feel it's too much at all. i was obsessed with early autechre for a long time and didn't get the post-confeld stuff in spite of being into noise and sound art and all that but now i mean it all hits differently but it's a joy to listen to, such a wide range of moodiness from the hard as nails stuff to the flying atmospheric stuff. i like the long running times of their latest releases, you can listen to the release a lot and still pick up new pieces to focus in on and enjoy. my oversimplified take is that they're zooming in on a bunch of aspects of early electro and creating these very spacious and dynamic sound worlds out of them. anyway, really happy they're back with a bunch of stuff so soon after elseq.

of course they've always tended towards releasing long-ass albums with lots to digest but probably their label situation now makes it easier for them to really go for it, which i say rock on dudes

> their label situation

???

Has anything changed there? I'd figure this is all still warp but given that there haven't been physical versions of recent things it's kind of hard to tell.

(Oh, the new CDs do have a warp catno)

(I wonder how this stuff does commercially and all. They are one of the prestige warp acts, always have been, and have a loyal fan base that buys everything but is that enough? Does it provide them with a living?)

It'd fucking want to, with the amount I have spent on their vinyl and CD releases in the last 5-10 years.

and re the new session, what the HELL is going on with "dummy casual pt2"? shit is INSANE

a quick hack: https://github.com/acdean/fauxtechre

example output:

fauxtechre: [Baderoupre]
fauxtechre: [arideraet]
fauxtechre: [:NSterbqMal]
fauxtechre: [E.]
fauxtechre: [cer]
fauxtechre: [Ofa]
fauxtechre: [jadferlederlee]
fauxtechre: [7]
fauxtechre: [Jotrdetill.Caca]
fauxtechre: [e]
fauxtechre: [bqudeveast Bind]
fauxtechre: [deni]
fauxtechre: [Zewacouanons]
fauxtechre: [h90101)]
fauxtechre: [12]
fauxtechre: [wepchiiianterthavo]
fauxtechre: [bloias]
fauxtechre: [wocerestreeluas]
fauxtechre: [mal IVilit T tilatr]
fauxtechre: [wonc9X]
fauxtechre: [vilizeg]
fauxtechre: [Focal]
fauxtechre: [=0nceaumee]
fauxtechre: [l9 JYux)]

it picks a random start character and then randomly chooses the next letter based on the frequency of letters following that letter in the original track titles. repeat until it gets a newline.

code could be nicer and it needs to consider matching braces, i think. and perhaps a minimum length of 3 characters.

fauxtechre: [Focal]

wow!

I'm thinking of moving my Autechre CDs from the "Electronic • Dance" section of my collection to the "Out • Avant" section

wocerestreeluas

going for that experimental music/experimental condiment crossover market?

no gonk/casual, no credibility (but seriously: nice!)

Autechre are the only group of this ilk (IDM or whatever) that I've bothered to keep up with. Well, I guess Aphex Twin is the other one.

to the "Out • Avant" section

this is correct

it is also why their 20th century records are p. boring now

koogs, great work!

I like the NTS sessions so far, but it is pretty weird that their recent stuff makes me think of discs like LP5 as "their early, pretty songs."

it is also why their 20th century records are p. boring now

nah, i just picked up the EPs box set last year, and most of it holds up pretty well (!?)

but i don't have copies of any of that stuff, except for ep7

I put these on at bedtime yesterday and woke up in a sweat thinking something horrible was happening to the pipes or something in my apartment, but it was just the last few minutes of "violvoic"