Autechre: Elseq

in this case i like crackers a whole lot. especially if they're quality crackers. they can be quite dry though and i wouldn't want to eat a whole lot of them in one go, especially if they're not guaranteed to be great crackers.

i've eaten a whole packet of carr's water biscuits in a single sitting on a few occasions

just on their own like

Surely part of the reason is "why not", right? From a couple hours' listening it's not a random selection of files, this stuff feels of a piece. So why not try banging out four hours of stuff and giving it a go? Maybe going OCD on seventy-two minutes of music every few years isn't the best way to release quality shit.

though not since the factory that made them flooded, an experience likened by one traumatised carlisle councillor to the confiscation of a third of the autechre back catalogue

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/apr/01/carrs-water-biscuits-carlisle-factory-flooding-united-biscuits

feel like the extreme length is part of the aesthetic project

re: Elseq, it's all interesting, at least. i wasn't really into the extended Quadrange stuff (Quaristice is the best of it, imo), but everything here is at least (sonically) marvelous in some way. some tracks sound perfect/fleshed out, while other tracks could be likened to waves crashing/lapping up against land... maintaining the same, repetitive structure, with small variations in color, timbre etc. i'm glad it's not a complete retread of the AE_LIVE material

dl you should read the milton parker post from two days ago where he suggests what they might be trying to do with this
a good post

feel like the extreme length is part of the aesthetic project

― Mordy, Saturday, 21 May 2016 17:02 (1 minute ago)

also with pan sonic / kesto (translates as both 'force' and 'duration' iirc)

THAT'S why I've not been able to find Carr's Table Water in months ffs

matzos are probably the next best thing though they are slightly drier

i'd've liked them to spread it out a bit more purely because £25 in one chunk is a bunch of money (especially for digital files, especially this far from payday, especially in the same month the last DSotMoog box is released). yes, i can buy them individually but it costs a tenner more that way (£7 each vs £25 for all).

(unless the website applies the saving for subsequent purchases like it did with the live stuff. anybody know?)

that too. but alright alright I shouldn't dismiss it before I've heard it and if the idea is that it's an epic as opposed to 'let's just jam around for hours and release it all regardless of quality control' the it probably I'd justified.

i would totally buy something like Kesto for 20 bucks.

the afx soundcloud wasn't "mostly rubbish"... it's not hard to find the good stuff

> i would totally buy something like Kesto for 20 bucks.

was £10 for the mp3s last time i looked. yep - https://boomkat.com/products/kesto-234-48-4

actually, £8 on google play music - https://play.google.com/music/preview/B6ngrii4nbthqvgp3ppsg2gl3be

no i mean i would buy a new autechre set of 3 or 4 CDs. i would never buy a download. but that's just me.

i still have my kesto cd box.

i guess i should say: maybe most of the AFX soundcloud dump IS rubbish.. but there are at least 20 songs of prime AFX magic and that's more than enough for me. it helps if you sort the tracks by "date uploaded"

ty for the matzos heads-up

wait i already knew about matzos

teaching at my jewish regulars' house on pesach got me a free matzo on leaving. i nibbled on it pensively as i walked to the tube. good snack

'such good music...and such large portions'

great. now when I listen to half the songs on this, I'm going to hear distorted, cut-up sounds of crackers breaking apart

that's not a bad thing. i like the theory that this is the excess that didn't make the cut for an upcoming, single-disc album (42 minutes, or 74 min) of ultra psychedelic, super concise tracks that completely fuck with the air/stereo field/whatever. they've been playing with these synesthetic, Klangfarbenmelodic (2/2) sound phenomena for a while now.. the opening part of their Denver set was unspeakably awesome. i hope they documented it somehow

home and finally downloading, nobody making music in 2016 deserves my attention and money more than Autechre tbh

yeah I bought this too

okay two tracks in this is peerless magic fuiud

i mean "c16 deep tread" it's like the swagger of Oasis with like actual music

4 in yeah this is sombre, pendulous, walking in my big black boots heavy stepping stuff, steeped in dub i think

20 minutes of noodly unnecessary excellence

I have only skimmed this so far but elyc6 0nset sounds glorious. Not listened to these for years tbh and it is going down very well.

Judging by DL's comments upthread - I won't bother recommending the Merzbox to him!

there's a quite extreme level of obtuseness in simultaneously loving their music, which would credit them with having some sort of intelligence/tact/aesthetic integrity, and imagining that they could have no possible reason to release this other than having 'no filter' and just flytipping a load of random shit out into the world in one go

not that i would enjoy autechre thread's without dl's obtuseness :)

I'm not really into biscuits

I'm not really into eating at all - I just digest food:p

freulaeux is really nice.. pulse/kick reminiscent of the 90101 variations (Quadrange) and Gas, but with a bevy of crystalline bits woven into the body of the track. that clean synth is gorgeous, and the textures! overall price is a bit steep, but this stuff is worth it. i think all of the mp3s can fit on one cd-r

be nice to have a Chosen Lords-style best of, like Quaristice reversed.. a single cd of 20 vignettes. in addition to the bundle, something material to *hold*

i really relished oversteps/move of ten and then found exai to be often overbearing and tedious. interesting to me so far that elseq seems to aim at similar scopes, durations, ways of working through sounds without a lot of the succor of enjoyable synthy textures, 'melodies', etc., but it is much less anxious about it - i've been playing 1-5 fairly non-stop (so uh 4 times thru) this past several days and it works fairly easily into the territory of a running sonic stream that manages not to become oppressive or annoying. even though some parts of it are really quite annoying-sounding taken out of context.

there are places on the longer quaristice remix/ep material where i can feel like they free themselves of some of the tics and reflexes of their style, and sound more like the impersonalist mood that can often strike one in moments of e.g. pan sonic (though they have their own stylizations), but often i feel like autechre's styles are soooo set in and personalized now that it is hard to hear the music for what it is. maybe some of the lengthier excursions here get away from that in novel ways.

I have a notion about "melodies" that they are patterns of hearing that almost always impose themselves when you listen to the same sound artefact enough times, would definitely argue that ae are exemplars of this

sure, sure

something i like about the new material is how bass- and beat/pulse-heavy it is so there's often something to keep pulling you along even if you aren't feeling something else for the time being - but i tend to get fixated on that and then have trouble hearing the broken-up sound-patterning that's supposed to be melodizing elsewhere

like most of their last several/many years' worth of stuff it all sounds very monochrome to me, probably for related reasons.

enjoyed listening to this release today :-) very groovy

I found myself tearing up at one point, not sure what that was about

no there are definitely some moving sequences imo

Juxtaposition of moods, moments when apparent chaos resolves into something human

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

― “bad” mothers, rebel mamas, and other radical/transgressive moms (nakhchivan), Thursday, May 19, 2016 6:42 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this was very astute of you

purchased in LAME format

re: monochrome -- agree in that i think they've been converging on a vocabulary since oversteps or maybe quaristice. their hurtling 90s trajectory was at least in part tied to changes in available production technology, but you can push software about as far as you can imagine now. ditch constraints of physical media at the same time and these freely flowing recordings become viable.

there are places on the longer quaristice remix/ep material where i can feel like they free themselves of some of the tics and reflexes of their style, and sound more like the impersonalist mood that can often strike one in moments of e.g. pan sonic

Is there really such a thing as an 'impersonalist mood' or is it just a style that you don't notice because it fits with your sensibilities as opposed to jarring up against them?

Maybe I should give pan sonic a go though. I gave up on them when I was among roughly half of the audience who walked out during their set at the queen elizabeth hall on the south bank some time in the early 2000s, the punishing son et lumiere, including someone on the stage attacking a large piece of sheet metal with a giant hammer and various power tools, proving too much to handle.

(Subsequent research tells me it was in 2000, they were supporting Scanner (whose set I don't recall), the maniac with the metal was FM Einheit, and it was maybe 30% of the audience who couldn't tolerate it)

xp dunno, could be. i hear a lot of their characteristic style in the rhythms, so i tend to hear their music as more unmarked (not as 'sounding like them') when it is more sparse, slow.

i do like a lot of the characteristically autechreish sounds as well, i'm just saying, they seem to be at a point where occasionally freeing themselves of those, agreeable or not, is notable.

Got round to listening to the opening two tracks on my way into work today. Lovely textures. There's a great vibe to these so far. Not sure whether these compositions needed to be quite so long though as they seem to be riffing on the same idea all the way through but ultimately enjoyable.

I've been going back to Quaristice and Oversteps lately. Especially Quarisitice which I simply didn't spend a lot of time with originally stands out from all the other Ae albums in that it seems to do a LOT with itself in the allocated track length. Simmm, for example is like a whole sci-fi disaster movie unfolding over the course of 5 minutes. Exai, and even more-so Elseq appears to be more about jamming around textures, at least that's my impression so far.

Having been recently enthralled by Eno's The Ship, I'm kind of wondering what extent Ae use binaural/3D sound in their tracks.

my god the eastre false ending