Autechre: Elseq

Go nuts:

Elseq 1
1. feed1 (11:37)
2. c16 deep tread (12:31)
3. 13×0 step (8:57)
4. pendulu hv moda (12:15)
5. curvcaten

Elseq 2
1. elyc6 0nset 27:09
2. chimer 1-5-1 5:03
3. c7b2 (13.22)

Elseq 3
1. eastre (22:15)
2. TBM2 (6:44)
3. mesh cinereaL (24:28)

Elseq 4
1. acdwn2 (11:52)
2. foldfree casual (9:49)
3. latentcall (14:31)
4. artov chain (4:04)
5. 7th slip (6:36)

Elseq 5
1. pendulu casual (9:01)
2. spTh (8:21)
3. spaces how V (9:57)
4. freulaeux (11:06)
5. oneum (11:01)

LAME ENCODED

20 minutes into elyc6 0nset: that familiar "I'm not sure I'm enjoying this - but am I supposed to?" feeling during a first autechre listen :-/

each track has separate art as well - all black circles and square patterns

https://autechre.bleepstores.com/

= Ned's "Go nuts" link up there, yes

(very dark blue, not underlined, just looked like text...)

eastre is like a totally different thing alltogether after the first hour and a half

http://exclaim.ca/music/article/autechre_announce_five-disc_elseq_lp

Double CD and four LP ? 4+ hours?

will it have been confirmed if this is amazing or not

This is a fake release, I can't find the 12 in this.

idk and wouldnt presume to decide yet but from interviews it seems that they work mostly independently and probably each track is heavily the work of one or the other; the first few tracks seem quite heterogeneous xp

c16 deep tread is tiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

will it ever have been revealed which of lennon and mccartney wrote each song

fold? latent? are they referencing their earlier work?

they are more canny than to say.....to extend the analogy, they might all be written by george harrison, the fictional songwriter credited when they didn't want to parse authorship xp

we must be grateful for sound alone

probably some connection between this release and the 'death' of george harrison at the end of last year

This site suggests a physical release is on the cards:

http://exclaim.ca/music/article/autechre_announce_five-disc_elseq_lp

Although how this would be reconfigured to fit on 2CDs / 4LPs is anyone's guess ... Quaristice style edits? Analord style 'best-of'?

The site might just be wrong, of course ...

while my freulaeux gently c7b2

elyc6 0nset is going to be 27 minutes and 9 seconds of XD for you
reminds of francois bayle

Running times of the five volumes:

52:19
45:34
53:27
46:52
49:26

That's 247:38 total. You need a minimum of four CDs to hold that.

xpost yeah maybe. sort of 'Grande Polyphonie' era Bayle hiding under the beats during the first half. I sure do love Bayle. no one ever posts to the Bayle thread.

really dislike the idea of buying a physical edition of this two to five disc album again later, but I was too impatient to wait.

the other two tracks of elseq 2 are also excellent, agitated and glitchy

first impression: they do feel like 5 distinct collections, probably should have split them up instead of just queueing all in one go

lol someone .5 star'd this within 30 minutes of it appearing on RYM

That's 247:38 total. You need a minimum of four CDs to hold that.

Ha whoa I was totally distracted by the high price point and missed how CRAZY LONG this album is. Really glad this isn't the 'repackaged live stuff' I was fearing

did a quick skim of all of it and it's exactly what I'm in the mood for this year

last year I broke down and bought the rest of the roland kayn CDs I didn't have, so all 29 of them have been in random shuffle -- another pioneer of an algorithmic approach to music, where the point is an unknowable flood of so much of it that you stop thinking of it in terms of 'pieces' or 'albums' or even physical media, you stop consciously thinking of it in terms of putting on a specific album. you just engage with it as sound without that record-geek side of your consciousness stepping in to track or map which one's your favorite or which album it is or which stage of his career it is you're dealing with and instead it is all continuum. which is pretty much where you want to be; I don't want to know which disc I'm listening to.

roland kayn isn't on spotify or apple music of course, and those discs were expensive, so there's still a good deal of record geekery going on in getting myself to that space. but as everyone else I know is basically cozying up to the stream, generative music pieces from the 70s-90s is exactly what is helping me deal with living in a world that's making that transition

they were doing something like that with quaristice versions

yeah I still think of Quaristice (Versions) as the quote-unquote "real" album. might have another go with those Quadrange EPs - dunno if I can stomach that 58 minute track again though

Current status

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mdvu5ubs2J1qznncz.jpg

yeah i forget which of the quaristice versions/ep/etc tracks are which, just the generative idea
eastre (22:15) = this feels like it might have been generated from 'altichyre'

Oh well I guess that's where I'll be starting then. When I get a chance.

arright then. let us know what happens

Sure thing kid, if I make it out alive.

Fuck it, I'm gonna splurge on this and then make it the soundtrack for my flight to Detroit

:)

http://cdn1.bigcommerce.com/server2600/szowplm/products/1415/images/5693/Motor_City_Cheer_iPhone_Case__95942.1438129438.500.750.jpg?c=2

ashley must hear this

c16 deep tread is tiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

5 albums. Okay what am I, a machine??

Has it really been 4 years since Exai? Needless to say I'm still just scratching the surface of that one.

Only 3 yrs since Exai

And I'm still finding new stuff in it!

I'm still finding new tracks in it.

Listened to 3 last night. mesh cinereaL sounds like this:

http://www.pocmtobs.com/-%20New%20Folder/Nasa/Dscn0034a.jpg

Also has two quality lol moments, I was grinning when it finished. I yearn for more! I did have a freaky scary dream afterwards but hopefully that wasn't related.

To gear myself up to this, I've been revisting Quaristice and Oversteps, one of the most underrated eras of Autechre for some reason.

Where can I hear whole versions of these tracks? They're cutting off at the 1 minute mark.

Generally involves purchase.

What crosses my mind in terms of practicalities is that there's obvs a significant cost to getting that much material mastered. NTS was put out by Warp so presumably they will have paid mastering and production costs upfront but elseq was essentially self-released Maybe they could put a few quid back and get it redone. Wishful thinking.

Noel Summerville has mastered all their main releases since Draft 7.30, apparently, with the possible exception of elseq.

Further confirmation that I don't have 'golden ears'. Exai is the only one that's consistently given me audio fatigue.

Exai is quite dense and mid-rangey, perhaps. But that's more just a function of the music itself.

audio aural fatigue, of course. Listening to elseq 5 now, maybe it's just the power of suggestion but it does sound slightly harsh and thin. You fuckers!

I'm listening to this now for the first time in a while and am liking the harshness.

eastre (which I'm listening to right now) wouldn't be as good with NTS-style mastering I think. Having all these tiny bits exposed are what make this track, if this track was on NTS it would probably be more hidden beneath the main up and down melody

pendulu hv moda definitely reminds me of Eidetic Casein from Confield in that it's based off a fun and perhaps even catchy melody that gets garbled to the point of no return. but I think it's a better track b/c it demonstrates just how far they've progressed. maybe it's b/c this is the only way my dumb millennial brain works but to me they've sort of paralleled the evolution of video games, during the same time frame too - early stuff like Amber & Tri Rep like the SNES, tangible, limited but very artfully done...Confield/Draft/Untilted being the forays into 3-D worlds that were closed off...now this & the NTS records being like these huge open-world games where everything seems possible. each era being classic in its own way, but man - there's such a vastness to their recent work that's hard to explain. like...that gurgling pinball bass thump never quite goes away in this track does it? it's always lurking somewhere.

here's a track that I don't see people talking about much here: "foldfree casual". there's such a heartbreaking melody in there. it's as gorgeous as anything on Oversteps if you ask me. I don't think there's a bad track on here. Besides "TBM2" I guess, which strikes me as something that probably wouldn't have gone on any of their other albums. The 4 hours just breeze by ~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It's very much in the style of Drane2 (a good thing).

Elseq 5 is 'lost in the vast underground caverns, afraid of the monsters' par excellence.

"feed1" is the best thing that's ever happened to me

I love how Autechre's music has slipped free of easy reference points, from instrumentation to titles.

Though, that plus release velocity makes finding a tune you half-remember quite a task.

(pendulu hv moda, this time)

if you just play them all the time then you don't have to remember anything

c16 deep tread and eastre are the alpha and the omega here for me

Has their been a trend piece on big-name electronic musicians from the 90s (Autechre, Aphex Twin, Underworld) turning to a strategy of releasing massive amounts of material? Underworld's Drift seemed a little more structured than Aphex Twin's big Soundcloud drop, though maybe if you graphed Autechre's release history over time there would be a pattern.

everyone releases massive amounts of material now

of course since Oversteps their releases have roughly gone 1, 2, 4, 8 hours in duration - awaiting the next with interest

In a time when the internet can quash any initial mystique about a piece of pop culture in just a few clicks, Autechre's music still feels enigmatic and mysterious to me.

don't forget the 28 hours of live performances.

and those weird colour-noise videos

indeed, they are restless spirits

you could also maybe add FSOL's endless stream of archival releases & Moby's very long ambient albums, though this along with the Aphex dump all seem like very different things than what Autechre & Underworld are doing. both those groups have always produced a ton of music & I think the 'trend' is just to go, "what if we didn't have to cut this to an hour?". to me there isn't a huge difference in what Ae is doing now and say, the Tri Rep/Garbage/Anvil Vapre period, or say LP5/EP7, just that those releases were edited to fit the CD and these aren't. which in turn affects the sort of things they choose to pursue. in Underworld's case, they've always had endless B-sides and non-album tracks for people to obsess over, most of which just never got released

to me this definitely feels like artists not having the constraint of physical media as the main distribution method anymore and adjusting accordingly + having a solid enough fan base so that they can release really long and possibly difficult material and know that enough people are willing to put in the required time to listen to that material

Also more releases probably = more streaming revenue, right?

Well, since streaming revenue is per track listened rather than time listened, then autechre are possibly making bad business decisions.

of course since Oversteps their releases have roughly gone 1, 2, 4, 8 hours in duration - awaiting the next with interest

Two more and they'll be up there with Terre Thaemlitz's Soulnessless (16GB microSD card, 32 hours). I never bought that, but I did get that Farmers Manual DVD-ROM back in the day. About 93 hours of material on that. Of which I think I've heard about 2%. Still, time off over Xmas, eh?

if you just play them all the time then you don't have to remember anything

― j., Tuesday, December 3, 2019 1:26 AM (eleven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is pretty much my philosophy

fretting about remembering track titles is for boomers

to me this definitely feels like artists not having the constraint of physical media as the main distribution method anymore and adjusting accordingly + having a solid enough fan base so that they can release really long and possibly difficult material and know that enough people are willing to put in the required time to listen to that material

― silverfish, Tuesday, December 3, 2019 10:44 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

tbf this level of loyalty currently applies to about .02% of all living / working artists

https://8apr.de/transmediale/

Listening to curvcaten and the percussion feels like it's crawling into my ears
(love that wall piece too, j.)

"feed1" is the best thing that's ever happened to me

― american bradass (BradNelson), Thursday, November 21, 2019 9:08 AM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

7th slip is so weird. It's really weird audio. It starts off weird and then gets weirder.

very weird. some autechre tracks are like a really bizarre cursed image to me. i listen in horrified awe.

Nine is the most cursed of them all

Not Mine, Bine

Argh fecking phone.

I definitely mean Bine. Not Nine. And certainly not Mine, which is a track on their next album

I feel like there's cursed but I dig it, and just plain cursed - lots of NTS 2 & 3 and the entirety of l-event just has me scratching my head.

I think this might be their best

Actually, it's probably NTS Sessions

MODS

was gonna say

no it's this one

Let's settle this:
Latent Poll: Pick your favorite long form Autechre album (2013-2020)

'c16 deep tread' has always been a highlight for me on Elseq. Those high, shrieking, wailing sounds towards the end are so spooky.
Might have already said this, but it reminds me of that penultimate scene in Ben Wheatley's 'Kill List' wehre they get chased through those tunnels by the demonic sect members.

I think "foldfree casual" is their single most beautiful track. Soul-piercing synths

eastre has become something of a fave over the last 6 months or so.

this is tighter than NTS so I think it wins

https://www.combinatorics.org/files/Surveys/ds7/ds7v5-2009/pic/17x17.gif

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Baker%27s_map_mixing.gif