Autechre: Elseq

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.

http://www.factmag.com/2016/05/24/autechre-elseq-review/

autechre fans are patting themselves on the back. i'm still fixed on 13x0, wondering if it was made along with the rest of Exai and left off because it's too straight ahead dope? or too many shared characteristics with cloudline. wtf

this thing (elseq) is just too good.

Finally managed to listen to all of this. This is the most enjoyment I've ever gotten out of an initial listen to an autechre album. It's unclear at this point if this is because this is a more accessible autechre album than most or if I've just gotten better at listening to autechre. Possibly both.

the living room just received a proper routing by c7b2. top track, very chiseling

yeah, I had the same thought about it being accessible but maybe that's just because I've been trying to digest the live sets. i should go back and listen to Exai.

also, for some reason my assumption is that these tracks were more played live than pre-composed, although obviously they put quite a bit of work into the ... hulking musical exoskeleton / landscape in my imagination. maybe off-base.

It's too early for me to single out tracks/"discs" but overall this set is like...spatially/physically AE are flinging about larger objects whereas on the studio/previous albums it was a shit ton of fireworks, ball bearings, jacks. (not the best analogy, I know, will work on it)

yeah i'm fairly sure the four longest tracks on this release are my four favourites [/vmic]

It's too early for me to single out tracks/"discs" but overall this set is like...spatially/physically AE are flinging about larger objects whereas on the studio/previous albums it was a shit ton of fireworks, ball bearings, jacks. (not the best analogy, I know, will work on it)

― Crazy Eddie & Jesus the Kid (Raymond Cummings)

something changed with Oversteps, production-wise.. u can recognize it on ilanderst, the sound is noticeably 'larger' and more elegant, there's a polished stone-like sheen to it. the various atonal slurry/debris (for lack of better words) of their previous albums seemed less magnified somehow, whereas with Oversteps and Exai especially, the sounds have monolithic, macro-detailed qualities, like the bassline/riff on cloudline, fizzy textures of Treale, pixelated patter of Yuop and nodezsh, etc.

nice choice of the small object names, i like it

Quaristice and Oversteps are good examples of the contrast. the production, and the content/activity sound vastly different to me... where there's a lot of micro-detailed activity on Quaristice, Oversteps has these big swathes of reverb and color. the percussive elements of Oversteps are less frequent and they seem to carry more weight.. but that's how I hear it, I imagine it could sound different to diff. people

I'll need to revisit the last few albums/releases, Lowell - I dug Exai a lot at first but a good deal of what they've done post-Confield (which is a totem for me) has left me a little cold, with exceptions. (Never to the point where I don't follow them or get excited when new material is announced. In the back of my mind I always think "I don't totally get this now, but years from now I will, just gotta keep at it.) Elseq is nicely scratching itches.

There are many things that I don't 'get' about their music, but there are a lot of sounds, patterns, and parts that are stimulating/awesome, my interest is maintained. And the WTF-ness of it is part of the appeal. I love LCC, especially the second half. But the first half, while there's that dope, super dry kick/hi hat pattern (nice, aggressive attack), there's still the snare break, that 'KA KA KA' that totally disrupts/retards the flow of it. I don't understand why they did it, I suppose it works somehow? Maybe there's something to it, it just doesn't really flow as I'd like it to. And there's shit like Tess xi, where the beat is just straight up retarded. Maybe there was one time that I heard it and it kind of made sense.

Love the KA KA KA! It doesn't flow I'll give you that, but being sharply checked with three hits to the face every bar is invigorating. Don't have a problem with T ess xi either, seems quite conventional on the surface, maybe that's what you mean by errrrr the 'r' word.

LCC is amazing fuiud

Have any major online publications tried reviewing this yet? I know springing albums out of nowhere fucks with their "release day or bust" strategy but I don't know how anyone can write a coherent review at this point

elseq 3 aka "Autechre and chill"

I'm kinda happy that reviews aren't appearing yet, this can't be absorbed in a day or five