Autechre: Classic or Dud?

They’re a jam band now, I’m here for it

^^^

Perl Jam

There's a name for yer open mic algorave event.

L-drly W.n Be-HIND t_Counter na.Small 2wn

this works great for me cos i have no idea what stupid Pearl Jam songs anybody's riffing on

except "Even Flow", i knew that one

i don't want to know tho, not asking for clarification

#y.fXyMPh&dl.MM.tm

stop

Googled 'pearl jam autechre mashup', no relevant results. Kind of disappointed in the internet now tbh.

IDM? PUT A GONK ON IT

Appreciating on a somewhat nerdy tech level the transformations the blippy riff kn 'four of seven' goes through, ending up in some territory like Stephen Mallinder's 'Length Of Time.'

The plucky arpeggiated bass sound reminded me of 'Shari Vari' or 'M3000' by Mandre.

That one, 'l3 ctrl' and 'gonk steady one' are the keepers atm. Long tracks but there's some sick stuff in there.

yeah just got my ticket to see the guys at the DARK MOFO festival in June!

That festival looks pretty amazing, never been to Tassie either - would be a perfect excuse!

Looks great but... I'd need to get a flight to Tasmania.

I grew up here from age 10-30 - in my teens I could not wait to get away, we were the dog end of the earth and no music or art came here. And then around the time I moved back in 2008, a kid from the tough end of town grew up and got rich working the odds ratios of European track betting - legally - and used his enormous wealth to build a Bond villain style art gallery dug into the rock under a vineyard. And filled it with transgressive major art. And made it free admission for Tasmanians - any time, as often as you want. And every year has curators put together massive music and art festivals in summer and winter, but only fringe and oddball music. It's run 6 times and I have seen Fuck Buttons, Sunn O))), Earth, Mayhem, Tim Hecker, Swans, Ben Frost, Philip Glass, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Grouper, Klara Lewis, BORIS, Death Grips, The Necks, Flying Lotus, The Drones, Mogwai, etc., etc., etc. all in my little town of Hobart. And massive art installations in festival grounds, and so on. It turns the dog end of the earth into the centre of the earth for a week in the dead of the southern winter. And anytime I like I can load the kids in the car and drive 20 minutes to MONA and see incredible art, for free. The effect on the city and its feel has been unbelievable, it's almost too good to be true.
So yeah, this year Autechre, Merzbow, William Basinski, Alice Glass, Zola Jesus, Laurie Anderson, and on and on. Life's tough.

that's brilliant!

it is: https://www.theage.com.au/news/arts/the-collector/2007/04/12/1175971260216.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1

("This is how you should start the story," he says, "David Walsh is a rich wanker.")

unrelated but I recently discovered this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSyTVYsEYzU

I remember pointing that out in one of my many Autechre remix polls.

I remember when you could pick up that double pack all over (well, MVE & Reckless) for a couple of quids.

Bought the NTS MP3 bundle from Warp, and am about halfway through the first set. This is some of the most enjoyable stuff I've heard from them in a while. The opening track has an almost swingy boom-bap groove to it, and there's a compelling sense of playfulness to it.

I realise this isn't WATMM or Gearslutz, but anyone want to have a go at working out technically what's going on here? I know all their stuff is mostly Max/MSP but within that, what's happening? Sounds to me like they're rhythmically cutting between a lot of granular textures with some fast filter action? Feel free to ignore this if it's a nerd-out too far.

I'm sure the licensing issues would be far too complex to resolve, but it would nice to have some sort of comp of all those amazing mid-late-'90s Autechre remixes. The Beaumont H is new to me (I bought a few BH records at the time but missed this one... starting at £12 on Discogs for the CD single). Or maybe such a thing already exists. (Or perhaps there really were only a handful).

soulseek "Laxir Autechre Remixes" - someone organized them into a 7-disc set

xxp

Do you mean just that first track or on general with this set?

One thing about that track is there's a very definite transition point. It may well simply be an edit but it had me thinking of a setup where you could tag a number of parameters and then hit a morph or randomise button to have them all change at once or over a given period and within certain ranges.

Sort of meant in general. There's a couple of transition points throughout the whole set actually - didn't hear the original stream, so don't know if that's how it was or if it's been cleaned up for the album.

That's an interesting idea for a setup actually. Reaktor does snapshot morphing very well I believe. (I'm a total idiot when it comes to any of these programmes, but I'm a tiny bit more knowledgeable about Reaktor than I am Max).

Next set in one hour!

(Having got to the end of the NTS1 album, the ambient ending is glorious. The whole thing is a great listen.)

I've relistened and that middle section really slaps

(Or perhaps there really were only a handful)

more than a handful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autechre_discography#Autechre_remixes_of_other_artists

I was a completist up until 2007, looks like I'll have to get back onto the old slsk.

Boy, that list takes me back to the napster era, collecting the remixes and trying to weed out the falsies.

weren't Ae sort of infamous for having their albums "leak" ahead of time as some unknown's random glitch album

They were iirc. Though whole fake Boards of Canada albums took the cake. Wasted so many 14k4 mb's on that lol

haha, i made one of those fake BoC songs back in 2001 or something. it ended up on a few bootlegs

more successful than anything else I've ever done

best example is when Daft Punk's Human After All leaked months in advance and most of their fans immediately called it out for the obvious fake it actually wasn't

aphex twin got a compilation of remixes! they should release an autechre one

42 mins into the new set, they're screwing around with a sample of the iPhone 'message sent' tone.

Damnit DL, I could've been the proud owner of some dusty mp3s of your finest work! ;-)

I'll admit I tried it myself, was screwing around with trackers and my Juno60 back in the day. No-one took the bait ;_;

The beat that's playing live on the stream right now is SICK. I'm on the west coast so this is a curiously wonderful way to wake up and commute. Mulling over whether to just buy the digital release or go all out for the box set. Why didn't they do that for Elseq?!

This (presumably) closing passage sounds very very similar to Steve Roach, oddly enough.

on a side note, when are they gonna reissue Chiastic Slide, LP5 and EP7 on vinyl? it would make my year

so this new set is:

elyc9 7hres
six of eight (midst)
xflood
gonk tuf hi
dummy casual pt2
violvoic
sinistrailAB air
wetgelis casual interval
e0
peal MA
9 chr0
turbile epic casual, stpl idle

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/0/0b/Captain_EO_poster.jpg/250px-Captain_EO_poster.jpg

i am overwhelmed by autechre. the onslaught of music from them is beyond my capability to sift through. sometimes i give it a shot, taking a little notes of the passages i liked, but then when i look back the next day i have an incomprehensible and useless autechre.txt full of seemingly random numbers and letters.

i'm sure at some point in this thread this has come up, but is part of Autechre's present M.O. to just obliterate traditional means of listening and enjoying music? clearly with these new epic releases - some of which seem to drift between their own music, others, and their remixes of others, often without a tracklist or any sense of progression - we're not meant to listen to it in the same way as you might listen to, say, Amber or Tri Repetae or even Confield. Confield was bewildering in its own way, but at least i knew how to put it on at the beginning and start to make sense of it. all of this new stuff...i hate to say it but they have leveled up way beyond my capabilities, they are operating on another plane and i can't even find a way in anymore.

but am i right to think they're purposefully overwhelming in order to change the way that their music is listened to? conceptually i am really intrigued by what they're doing, in the same way that i love reading john cage about his approach to making music, but often don't like listening to the actual music.

I was saying something similar upthread. Totally agree with it all - I know it's all great stuff but I have FOMO knowing I just won't get round to listening to it properly because I'm too much of a caveman who needs a set number of tracks, preferably with titles, to get it.

i suppose you could look at these sets a bit like a bunch of old skool hip hop mixtapes

they showed an willingness early on to deconstruct the role of musician and music with their Max/MSP approach, defining algorithms and sifting through the results, letting algorithms make algorithms, provoking the obvious "are they even the composers at this point?" kinds of questions. have they been taking this to the next level with the way they're collecting and presenting their music these days? it seems like the end goal is for autechre to have a catalog of 1 trillion songs, all of which can be recognized as autechre-like but difficult to define in terms of when it was actually released and how, pumping throughout the world in hidden speakers, like the music is just called "autechre" and no one really remembers where it came from, or something

xpost

I have FOMO knowing I just won't get round to listening to it properly because I'm too much of a caveman who needs a set number of tracks, preferably with titles, to get it.

yeah, exactly! i'm a caveman, too. i just can't even figure out what the hell is going on or how to approach them. like the NTS sets - i started listening and was digging it and i was about 20 minutes in. but i just stopped because i couldn't imagine myself playing this same NTS set over and over again, or having to jot down the timestamps of the parts that i really liked and skipping to them. and even if i did all that for one of them, would i then do it for all of them? i feel like i'm trying to stick a CD in a VCR or something

(sorry for too many longposts, i'm just amped up on coffee)

i'm reading underworld right now, and i'm still early on. but there was a chapter where it seemed like every paragraph completely changed subjects and POV, but yet the whole chapter made sense because it kept jumping between recognizable settings and characters and themes from previous chapters. so even though delillo would be talking about looking outside of a corporate skyscraper in one paragraph and then a deadbeat father leaving his family in the next, i could still follow it and make sense of it all in the end. is that sort of what autechre has evolved into, just this endless drift of recurring themes? i don't know wtf i'm talking about, sorry

it's like listening to a live improvisational performance, you just kind of let it wash over you

with the released tracks, you can do the same and then favorite the individual tracks and make a playlist or something

as loathe as I am to admit it, I read a pretty wicked burn the other day: "autechre is like phish for linux users."

it's the same dilemma you have if you listen to a lot of dj sets, which is even easier now when you can load them up as podcasts: if this section in the middle is something really appealing, and it turns out my love is not for a track that was played but some transition point between two completely different songs, how do you quantify that or capture it?

the answer is you don't, it's an ephemeral point that doesn't necessarily work outside of the context.

it's very seldom that you get that in an album unless there's an intentional transition, but there are definitely albums where I don't necessarily like song A or B, but the experience of listening to A blend to B is what I love

i just stopped because i couldn't imagine myself playing this same NTS set over and over again

thinking of musical experiences as something that need to be reproducible or even enjoyable more than once is pretty limiting! honestly, I listened to their first NTS show a few times and it benefits from the looping structure. just tune in at any random time, listen if you like it, if not.. come back later

that's how people used to experience movies in many theaters ("this is where I came in!") and it's foreign to us now, when we think of arriving at the beginning and leaving at the end having had a discrete piece of art delivered for our consumption