Autechre: Classic or Dud?

I think you could probably lop a good 2 hours off the NTS sessions, even without cutting anything outright (though there are a few tracks I'd punt). I know it's sacreliege but I don't think "All End" needs to be 60 minutes

Yeah, it needs to be twice that.

NTS is just this incredibly dense, monolithic undertaking for me. It has its moments of course, but just approaching it can feel overwhelming.

I seriously think SIGN/PLUS is among their best work and EXACTLY what they needed to put out at that point in their careers. I hear them as a lot sparser and less serious. You can hear the sounds rather than try to disinter them from the audio soup of a thousand noises.

And each track has its own, I dunno, "hook" or "character" whereas the stuff on Elseq and NTS started to feel increasingly like 10 minute formless close-listening jams

The beautiful thing about discussing Autechre here is nearly everyone in the various threads knows these dudes are aces, and the nitpicking over our favorite tracks or albums is simply nitpicking. I love how the last few comments have people picking four different later career albums as their "peak". You could make a case for nearly every one of their albums as their "best".

It's funny, NTS is the album I feel most at home with, and SIGN/PLUS were quite disappointing - I enjoy them while they're on but I have to actively remember they exist, a bit like Oversteps. They've been my favourite music makers for 25 years tho, so this is highly relative as you say.

got a ticket for the Sydney show on late release, row 3 so in the pitch dark I will be able to hear them move sliders and clear their throats

can't believe the cowards are letting ppl sit down this time

dare we ask are they themselves

I know it's sacreliege but I don't think "All End" needs to be 60 minutes

yea, "all end" is nice and all, but I was actually a little disappointed with it on my first listen since the rest of that thing basically blew me away. for me NTS was like them finally realizing the dream of creating something on a massive roland kayn / pan sonic kesto scale and the length is definitely part of that.

It's funny, NTS is the album I feel most at home with, and SIGN/PLUS were quite disappointing - I enjoy them while they're on but I have to actively remember they exist, a bit like Oversteps. They've been my favourite music makers for 25 years tho, so this is highly relative as you say.

― assert (matttkkkk)

Co-sign

x-post

er, probably should have a carriage return between those two thoughts

anyway, I love the scope of NTS but "all end" was quite the blowout ending I was envisioning. for context, my two fave ae closers are the ones where they go a little bigger - "lentic catachresis" and "sublimit"

I wouldn't say I was severely disappointed with SIGN/PLUS myself but I was a little bummed that they stepped back from the abyss with those two

I'm listening to an obscene amount of 'techre this week so far

"all end" coincided with some massive changes in my life, listened to it 2-3 times at volume levels which altered my grip on reality and it was genuinely cathartic and healing. So the length was very useful to me.

Really loving the “London A” live set

I just don't see what's remarkable about All End, sorry

All End only works for me when I put it on relatively loud and then just do housework or something else while having it on. Casts a surreal vibe on top of my regular life.

I still think All End is a one-click timestretched throwaway, maybe a bit of a joke for them.

it sounds really cool, I like it

yes, sure, it seems likely that when putting together NTS, they had about 7 hours of material but they also had the ambient ending of Bladelores that they really liked and could just stretch out as much as they wanted and just decided to tack that on at the end. That doesn't make it any less good though.

there's def a lot of live mixing and phasing on "all end", you don't hear it much in real time but if you skip around on the track you can tell. as ridiculous as it is to have this on vinyl I think its kinda cool actually since you don't really need to listen to the 3rd LP. (like brim I found all 4 sets pretty cheaply, not surprising they didn't really sell too well)

The tricky thing about Ae is that if you dismiss one track as an indulgent in-joke throwaway, it opens the door to say the same of some of their other stuff. If I didn't know the care and effort and attention to detail the dudes put into their work, I might be prone to dismissing it as generative wankery the way some do, too.

all end is the goth cousin of vletrmx. there is a repeating motif buried in there under the layers of sludge - or so i like to think, when i focus i can only hear fragments of it.

That's what I like about it, it's like a magic eye for your ears.

I don't think it's a joke any more than the speedy-up/slowy-down tempo of Fold4,Wrap5 might be a joke, but it doesn't really do anything more for me than (as Jordan says) that extreme Paulstretched version of the Justin Bieber song that got into EOY a long time back, or that really long noise track on the Knife's Shaking The Habitual. Fine if people like it, I just don't think it's anything special beyond a very long drone/noise track

Granted, it is a bit like looking at TV static and feeling like you can see patterns and images on it, or looking at the backs of your eyelids or something

For sure. I think one difference is that staring at static, it's highly unlikely there is anything intentionally there. But in this case there could very well be a there (barely) there. Have they ever mentioned it in one of their AMAs or anything?

Agreed dl. Btw I keep meaning to go back to Sign/Plus, as I remember really liking them but just haven't listened since they came out. Maybe today's the day.

plus is kinda heavy imo, like emotionally heavy < / pvmic except the last track which is kind of another joke imo. there is some really great, top-tier ae stuff on plus/sign. and some tracks that feel more slight off but at least refreshing.

AE contain multitudes.

I listened to SIGN a bunch when it came out and liked it, started playing it again and now I like it even more. that sort of fully symphonic sound is something they hint at now and then but I think this is the album where they really go for it.

that sort of fully symphonic sound is something they hint at now and then

so is this stuff on SIGN or PLUS? this is what i was talking about, i should give them another listen

I would definitely call those albums symphonic. Or at least while not a full orchestra, a string quartet. I like to hear them a bit more stripped back and being able to play around with fewer elements than everything being piled up on each other

But speaking of which, I decided to give NTS 4 a good listen today apropos of this thread and while it's still not my fave, it's a fine listen, especially if you let it roll out at a decent volume..

Yeah Add Ends has something in there too, buried under the mid range. It's like a body of water - the fast current over the top but this huge symphonic undertow that makes itself heard every so often. As others have said, you have to listen to it loud and adba piece for it to really make an impression

so is this stuff on SIGN or PLUS? this is what i was talking about, i should give them another listen

― the late great, Wednesday, August 16, 2023 1:12 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

SIGN. there's a bit of it on PLUS but that's more beat heavy.

Granted, it is a bit like looking at TV static and feeling like you can see patterns and images on it, or looking at the backs of your eyelids or something

you can, though! even patterns "everyone agrees on" like "the constellations" are not only arbitrary (and culturally specific) but subject to change over time

For sure. I think one difference is that staring at static, it's highly unlikely there is anything intentionally there. But in this case there could very well be a there (barely) there. Have they ever mentioned it in one of their AMAs or anything?

― Josh in Chicago

it appears you misunderstand how TVs and antennas work!

no offense because i realize signal engineering is an esoteric art, but when you tune a radio or TV to static it's not conceptually the same as pointing a microwave antenna at an empty patch of night sky and reading "the background", it's a lot closer to punching your LED laptop monitor so hard it shatters into a million bits, then looking at the sort-of-pattern and saying "there's probably nothing intentional here". quite the opposite, you've just mistuned your system and so you're resolving an abundance of pattern into bullshit (in western cities we are blanketed by patterned EM radiation at many frequencies, you very rarely tune into "dead static", which unlike cosmic radiation doesn't really exist per se on broadcast frequencies)

if you are a skilled ham radio operator tuning into atmospheric background hum then i respectfully apologize for my pedantry

and i think this is a necessary digression because i hold that the patterns we see in abstract music like autechre are as meaningful if not more as the ones they seem to be trying to communicate with carefully coded album art and titles (pfft) and AMA statements, many of which, just like my pedantic example, drag in a lot of technical and process jargon that don't actually add meaning to our experience of the music, at least not compared to the personal patterns we see

this is very much #onethread with the DJ mix discussion for me

what would be the kolmogorov complexity of your shattered lcd screen example vs cosmic microwave background radiation (vs all end)?

Thing is, there could still be intentionality in all end, but residual from bladelores, so it could still be a simple timestretch. I don’t care in the slightest: the original track, the choice to do it and the choice to release it are all their art.

i would say by making that statement you’ve made it your art

ooh

xxxp leaving aside the abundance of annoying "information theory and black holes" pop science articles out right now idk if they've actually ever tried to figure out the kolmogorov complexity of any cosmological process

with that out of the way, if that's a serious question i've vastly overstated my own credentials (and also obviously overdone it with my analogy!)

I just wanted to know what you were driving at, my own knowledge of information theory is not academically rigorous!

I suspect the complexity of all end is significantly lower than either white noise or cosmic background radiation though - I think the artefacts I can hear are in fact present and would be the same over multiple listens. but it still sounds cool.

i was not driving at anything rigorous! except that tv and radio static isn't really "noise" in the sense of "purely random noise" (that's more like the real atmospheric hum or a mains hum) it's actually more like the type of "noise" you might get looking at a van gogh through a really radically wrong set of prescription lenses plus a funhouse mirror too

in other words, it's not empty noise, it's actually chock full of meaningful information, you're just not processing it right (because you're between spots on the dial)

i am just sketching a rough analogy to "intense listening of electronic music", we often make a lot of assumptions about whether there's "meaningful information" there, but it's often assumptions and we're generally not in the right spot to hear that information (ie we're hearing a snapshot of the output, not looking at the actual process) ... i would argue we get entirely too much information about music these days but that's partly just consumerism / capitalism rounding out the process of trying to sell us things by teasing us with tantalizing facts about our prospective purchase

There are more beats on SIGN than I remembered! In my memory it was almost entirely drum-less and ambient.

I think it's odd, with all of the discussion of late-period Ae on ILX, that there (seems to be) little to 0 talk of the AE_LIVE material. The 2015 sets were a revelation (imo), especially in person.

It could be that I'm simply overlooking parts of threads where it is written about, but most of the things I read are about the NTS stuff, or the proper album releases. Of course, the 2022 material was just barely released. It just seems odd because I'd been so floored by the 2015 live sets, and the subsequent, official release of them. I apologize for the drive-by whinging, or 'wtf, people!' sentiment. Just sayin', is all

There's 28 hours of it!