Autechre: Classic or Dud?

from the of that RA review:

...If you've been skeptical of Autechre, you'd best check the fourth session. Once we course through "frane casual" we're hit by "mirrage," one of the most concise and beautiful ambient pieces Autechre have ever produced. It seeps perfectly into "column thirteen," which is sublimely bizarre, warm and enveloping. There's something strangely suggestive here. Perhaps it's the melodic synth arps that seem to so faintly echo Amber's inquisitive hues. "shimripl casual" deserves paragraph for itself, but "all end" manages to outstrip it. Almost an hour long yet somehow brisk, it's like a cathedral filled with billions of vibrating light particles, ebbing and convulsing in great waves.

Despite the overload of material, listening to each of the sessions front to back reveals a narrative arc as compelling as in any of their 2015 live recordings. For music that's so detailed on the micro scale, the most arresting moments are the macro-structural pay-offs. Additionally, premiering the pieces live on NTS provided a semblance of a shared experience. It's been great watching fans' commentary online as each episode has been broadcast.

The majority of artists in Autechre's cohort either dropped off in quality or entered the extended victory lap period of their careers. Partly because their music doesn't contain the melody and repetition of, say, an Aphex Twin, critics haven't been especially vocal about how unusual it is that Autechre, an already insanely overdeveloped act, are still developing. NTS Sessions 1-4 will elicit the same critiques as any Autechre album in the last decade, but it's their best record in many years.

OTM. This final volume, for sure, at least.

"gonk tuf hi" definitely needed the word "gonk" in the title.

lol if you play any stretch of this for 99.999% of listeners the first thing they will complain about is how repetitive it is

I'm not sure "repetitive" is the first word 99.999% would use.

IMO Exai marked a shift in how critics covered these guys. A lot of them seemed annoyed at having to review an incredibly dense 2 hour album on a deadline, and that came through in the writing. I remember thinking it was kinda funny when L-Event came out right after, it's like in cartoons when a character gets pelted with an avalanche of objects and sits there dazed for a few seconds, then a teacup falls on their head. In hindsight a lot of those Exai reviews were pretty off the mark (outside of dog latin's, of course) and I think both fans and critics just handled them differently after that. They're entering a sort of inscrutable phase of their career - like how many people in this thread have a good handle on all the elseq stuff yet?

I started struggling a bit wth Autechre around "Untilted" and lost track a bit, up to and including "Exai." But I really liked elseq, iirc, and that super epic live stream they did a couple of years back, even if I never listened to them again, tbh. But this new stuff, I'm really digging it.

Hmm, so "All End," it finally hit me what this is reminding me of: Tim Hecker. Stuff like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EE9mT4JaW_0

o god pls someone affirm it's better than Hecker

Is Hecker bad? Anyway, the Ae is good, so fine, it's "better than Hecker."

personal distaste, it's all fine

wow finally something i agree with imago on

i like his early stuff tho

i love tim hecker, lol

i'm also listening to "all end" right now and this is my shit

towards the latter half of "all end" it strongly recalls one of the later-period Tim Hecker albums.. Ravedeath, I think. Otherwise, the bulk (the surface, at least) of it, is from the outro to "bladelores" (Exai)

the timbre / quality of it, even - kinda glassy, maybe it's Virgins

mirrage, column thirteen, shimripl casual are gorgeous ae

column thirteen harks back to Oversteps in a lovely way.. it brings back that sort of buttery, humid quality of pt2ph8 (et al)

There is definitely some sort of melody in "All End." Maybe just a few notes or huge chords hanging there, but it's there, in the background, spooky and menacing and cycling around.

The title makes me worry that "all end" is their swan song... hopefully it's the all end for just NTS and not Autechre as a band.

After attending a show a week ago where William Basinski's Disintegration Loops were played in their entirety over the course of an evening (with the audience encouraged to bring beddings and sleep over while listening), now I kinda want to experience the NTS sessions unedited during an 8 hour sit in at a venue.

Do their catalog numbers all mean something? They're certainly not in order anymore.

Untilted = WARP180 (something to do with 180 degrees = no angles?)
Oversteps = WARP210 (10th album)
Elseq = WARP512 (5 volumes, 12th album?)
NTS = WARP364 (36 tracks, 4 sessions?)

Thanks to insomnia, I just woke up and started Session 4 over again.

Man, I tried with Session 4 and about 30 minutes into I was feeling crazy anxious and like a headache was coming on. I've tried over and over with late Autechre, but I don't think I can do it.

Maybe I need to buy a ton of w33d to spend some time with these jamz.

I slept to v4 on a loop all night and had a full 8 hours sleep for the first time in weeks. off to he gym! lalalalala

if somebody can edit this down to the best 12 minutes i'll listen

I had to turn off Session 3 this morning and put on All End instead. That track is not necessarily indicative of the rest of the set(s), but it's what I keep coming back to. And it's an hour long, so ...

http://www.namesdir.net/s/gonk

i listened to all the NTS sets today. WOW.

'column thirteen' is just astonishing, so psychedelic and transporting, it kind of reminds me of harold budd.

there's so much great stuff here. i already like it more than elseq

maybe i need to hear these in a diff frame of mind, CDs on the stereo, proper rest, etc... Elseq seemed more engaging, interesting (sustained) beyond the initial novelty of its release.

have bought and stuck this on

so far so good

Real talk: I am unable to prevent myself from reading "shimripl" as "shrimpl". Looking in vain for companion track "wytwyyn".

so far, most of the way through Set 2, the best piece imo has been 'xflood'

xp no it is shrimpl your copy is mislabeled

shrimpimpl

i listened to all the NTS sets today. WOW.

'column thirteen' is just astonishing, so psychedelic and transporting, it kind of reminds me of harold budd.

there's so much great stuff here. i already like it more than elseq

dammit

I keep telling myself "you don't actually need this" and then my man map has to do something like this

you do need this

i think these are going to take a lot longer to sink in with me than elseq, may need some special headphone listening time carved out somehow.

yeah so far I think elseq is more relevant to my tastes but will pick up from halfway through 3 later

A rave review of NTS Sessions 1-4 is up here.

This deserves a 20/5 and everyone knows it

I'm 3/4 of the way through "all end" now and it's like a combination of some kind of pink-cloud ambient music, Aine O'Dwyer's church organ improvisations, and the beginning of Godflesh's "Love, Hate (Slugbaiting)." This whole set is amazing, but this one piece - which I'm assuming will get its own CD when the physical version arrives - is the kind of thing you want to turn up to window-rattling volume and just live in for an hour.

is there an easy way to listen to the first 3 sessions online, now? i would enjoy doing a mega-listen today but the only one streaming is the 4th.

They're all there on the bleepstore.

https://autechre.bleepstores.com/

My family keeps telling me to turn this off, which is probably for the best, because if they didn't, I would be listening to it all the time.

oh, i didn't know they were streaming there! should have been obvious, i suppose, but thanks!

I wonder if its really worth taking the 7:59:45 plunge

Could be worse, could be 8-hours long.

I bought it

'cause i depend on ae

xpost Are you a fan? I can't wait to hear your opinion. Sometimes music like this, it's easy to forget that it isn't everyone's cup of tea, even if they are already fans. Similarly, it's sometimes hard for me to tell if I like one Autechre album better than another because it actually is better or just because for whatever reason it resonates more.

all end made me want to listen to coil's time machines again