Autechre: Elseq

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

the bass on some of these tracks is really nice and punchy. even with my little earbuds, I'm sure I felt a bit of a 'kick' as though I were wearing decent headphones.

7th slip is the bladerunner soundtrack of our dreams

ditch constraints of physical media at the same time and these freely flowing recordings become viable.

Interesting, though, that they've stayed within the limits of physical media in some (perhaps symbolic) ways - each of these EPs is 45-53 minutes long, meaning they could fairly easily be released on CD or even vinyl (with some judicious pruning/track order reshuffling).

I'm only 2/3 of the way through these so far, but I'm hearing lots of snippets of AE_LIVE in this. 'C16 deep tread' most obviously and I'm sure I've heard an edit of 'acdwn2' in them. The opening 6 mins or so of 'elyc6 0nset' appear in various forms at around the 50 min mark of most of the sets.

been wondering if "Elseq" comes from "Live Sequence" or something of that nature

have they given up on naming their albums after numbers now?

ppl seem to think 'eleven sequel' is a thing

xp

the EPs have number titles, loosely, not the albums

getting some nice Rashad Becker vibes off elyc6 0nset right now

xp eh what, incunabula, amber, tri repetae all refer to sequential numbers?

yeah sorry it goes back and forth, "EP7", "Move of Ten" etc

haha okay this track (elyc6) is off its tits

xp eh what, incunabula, amber, tri repetae all refer to sequential numbers?

that's been the theory since whenever but some of these connections are reaaally tenuous (Amber = color of the second traffic light, Untilted = 8 letters) - I think naming no. 11 Exai was just screwing with those people in a way

chiastic slide refers to a chiasmus, which has four components, lp5 is called lp5, draft 7.30 is obvious, basically until quaristice confield is the only one i can't work out

The opening of TBM2 = We Will Rock You

I know it was a long time ago but I was just thinking about how different this sounds to an album like Confield, which has always sounded 'next level' to my ears. Even compared to Exai there's a noticeable leap in texture and modelling here.

Okay so I'm thinking with this album:

Unlike other Ae albums, this is less a 'music to be dissected and re-listened to time and again until you get it' record and more of an 'enjoy the wild ride' type of trip. I don't know how much I'd want to go back and listen to elyc6 0nset but I do know it's a hell of a lot of fun. This is consistent with the length of the album - pick a track and groove out to it for 20 minutes etc. Also with the supposition that this is based on their live show. It's also consistent with something I was told in an interview about them knowing that it 'wasn't fair' on listeners and especially critics who were expected to form an opinion on their music only weeks or even days after they'd heard it. In making this massive album and surprise-releasing it, they kind of get round that problem.

It's the kind of thing I just want to hire out a massive soundproofed room so I can listen to it really really loud just once all the way through. The whole thing's immense in every possible way.

all that does also tie in with Milton Parker's OTM post upthread.

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.

Chimer 1-5-1 sounds VERY reminiscent of Oversteps.

"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."

isn't this how a lot of people listen now via spotify/online/phone/playlist/soundcloud mix?

reminds me of when jad fair put out a CD that included like 200 bonus tracks as MP3s. he was ahead of his time. he certainly didn't mean for people to treat it like a regular album.

chiastic slide refers to a chiasmus, which has four components

Well in their words it refers to 'the mercurial properties of the crossfader', obviously evinced in the first (I think) track.

https://media1.giphy.com/media/fatMB8ScpQrDO/200_s.gif

and I'd always read it more along the lines of Imago's definition - a chiastic device has four points. The 'mercurial properties of the crossfader' though? What exactly does that mean?

I'm sure most of the time they do more than push a simple slider to get unpredictable effects but that sounds like what they're doing on cipater from about 2:45 to 3:15.

13x0 step is really *popping*, some peculiar spatial things going on. hearing icy, recycled elements from the cloudline (Exai) in the latter half, as well as that sweet, squelchy synth from tuinorizn. Exai definitely has a grey-ish monochrome quality, but i feel like they softened the edges with the AE_LIVE sets and brought in fresh colors and timbres, more 'organic' elements. there's a general lushness and warmth to the live sets that's lacking on Exai

>isn't this how a lot of people listen now via spotify/online/phone/playlist/soundcloud mix?

it's always been a dangerous pleasure to be have the ability to listen to a piece of music more than once. it's warped our entire perception of what music even is -- technically every time you press play it's a new performance with many different variables.

not like I'm doing anything but guessing but Untilted / Quaristice seemed to be the point where their max patches became sophisticated enough to produce the bulk of a track out through improvisation, with the aux Quartistice releases being the public documentation of the new process. as much as I like the studio albums since Draft, all the original non-album music in their live sets since 2005 have been the most interesting & listenable because it seems like the bulk of where their attention / work is going is on gaining the ability to play complex music in real time. between a 'live album' that is the same piece of music 9 different ways and a studio album that feels more like their live sets, they are finally calling it

the history of live performance in electronic music has always been a bit obscured by the fact that so much of the pioneers work in extended formats that don't lend themselves to easy releases. it's interesting watching this come up in the 'I dream of wires' doc where everyone interviewed mention how they've developed an allergy to recording, but it's an issue with form going back to the 60s & it's only recently through streaming & CD boxes that we've been uncovering the live history, off the top of my head

https://www.discogs.com/Pauline-Oliveros-Reverberations-Tape-Electronic-Music-1961-1970/release/3653950
https://www.discogs.com/David-Tudor-The-Art-Of-David-Tudor-19631992-/release/4590517
https://www.discogs.com/Kluster-Klusterstrasse-69-72/release/3687689
https://www.discogs.com/League-of-Automatic-Music-Composers-Archive-1978-1981/release/1980483

and of course this guy

http://www.kayn.nl/musiccatalogus.pdf

latentcall is proper

i have a friend who performs under the name noise nomads and he will often do electronic sets live. i asked him after a set once if he was doing any recording or putting anything out for release and he said: "wasn't that enough?" referring to his set. he is a rarity in noiseland. sometimes i wish more people had his attitude.

It's cool that electronic music is now heading in a direction that can be fully improvised. I guess there's always been a streak of that with people playing around with drum machines and 303s even as far back as the mid-80s but this is free-jazz levels of improv that hasn't really been seen before.

eastre is almost incomprehensibly brilliant

yeah it's sick

You folks that can talk about specific Autechre tracks by name are my heroes, hats off.

that snare sound on hats0fff is cavern-like right?

it is a matter of listening to songs by the band and then writing comments about the songs

It is a matter of the band naming songs things like 88* d,lm;lm_.

a semi-colon would lie entirely without their aesthetic, as would most if not all punctuation really

can't put punctuation in a filename see

See, I can't win. I think of Autechre albums by name, but that's about the best I can do.

I have a mental lookup table of metaphors - spl9 = that one which sounds like aliens being fought off by a broken 303; tewe = that one which sounds like organising your collection of springs during an earthquake; under BOAC = bridge being attacked by hammers; zeiss contarex = giant slabs of methane ice drifting past a woman speaking French. And so on.

http://p.autechre.ws/proxy?lnk=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.discogs.com%2Fartist%2F41-Autechre

who says they don't have a sense of humor ;)

and here I thought you were talking about 'Fartist'

My 3 year old daughter doesn't like autechre. This is extremely disappointing.

play her this. my kids loved it when they were little.

https://www.discogs.com/Florian-Hecker-Acid-In-The-Style-Of-David-Tudor/release/1723190

My 3 year old daughter doesn't like autechre. This is extremely disappointing.

Even the early era stuff? I'd think a number of tracks off of Incunabula and Amber would be sweet lullaby material. Doubt many three year olds are going to jam to Gantz Graf or feed1.

holy shit, latentcall is an idm track.

also: artov chain, lol. i wonder if it really is.