Autechre - Amber

it's not going to sound exactly the same as autechre any more than leonard cohen sounds exactly like bob dylan but in terms of beat construction + synth deployment + production tricks amber is pretty much standard stuff

if anything i would argue that autechre are really best at creating and maintaining a distinctive "mood" that sets them apart from other acts

ty, frogbs. i've a mate who's pretty well-versed in early days Rephlex / Warp / Artificial Intelligence comp. -type stuff, and he's mentioned Black Dog a few times.. figure i should've followed up on it by now. Some of Cylob's latter day material reminds me a lot of Autechre -- stuff like the first couple Ambient News albums, as well as older Cylob in general.

yea it's sonically similar to something like Tengo n' Vectif but I feel like even then Ae were big into screwing with the nuts n bolts of a track more than their contemporaries. if that makes sense

Saw them live Circa draft and they played one snatch of second bad Vibel admist a fully improv set

Amber is actually pretty unique, there is/was a lot of stuff around that sounds like Incunabula (Black Dog indeed), and again a lot of IDM that sounds like the later stuff, but Amber (and largely, Tri Repetae) hits a sweet spot in between that hasn't really been imitated that much.

Garbage has the best melody ever in ae history

While I get that Autechre have long since moved away from this album artistically, I still think very highly of this record and still enjoy the hell out of it. While I'm listening to it, I don't think "meh, this is old shit and it sucks that it's not more like Exai", I enjoy it for what it is. It's where their heads were at at the time and they did a great job of it.

Otm

i actually have a lot of work to do today but how many youtubes would it take to convince people amber is not unique among its contemporaries in 1994 ambient electronica

years back, somebody on ILX talked about this album - https://www.discogs.com/Phthalocyanine-Navy-Warship/release/11956 , by Pthalocyanine.. it's pretty singular-sounding, though it def shares some qualities with Ae's music.

Lowell is a quality poster imo

idk did another group release an album called amber under the name autechre

*Phthalocyanine

the goal was not to show that somebody released the exact same album but to show that autechre was not particularly "advanced"

Fwiw, I don't care about advanced. What impressed me most about this period of Ae was how overwhelmingly emotional something like Yulquen or garbage or bronchsvnmx or GoSheep could be.

The Beatles made records that were more advanced than Please Please Me but I still enjoy that album for what it is, and it makes very little difference in 2018 as to how Please Please Me compared to more advanced music being made in 1963.

It's a similar deal for me with Amber. I don't give a shiny shite how "advanced" or "unadvanced" it is in comparison to other electronica albums put out in the same year - it's not relevant because everyone knows Autechre went onto make more "advanced" records and the fact that people still enjoy listening to Amber as well as appreciating it as an artistic stepping stone for Autechre basically justifies its existence.

xp yeah i agree that that's what they're good at

i would not agree that autechre went on to make more "advanced" records

This surfaced several years ago, and it's great. https://youtu.be/7uTUnTGb15c - Autechre - Kalpol Introl (Live) 1994 (apologies, OT)

I don't know man, I was pretty heavily into all this stuff back in 1994 and Amber immediately stood out amongst the likes of Joey Beltram, FSOL, Luke Slater, FAX etc - much more than Incunabula which fit right in there.

Whether or not they went on to go more "advanced" is a bit of a misnomer anyway - "abrasive" yes, with new plugins yes.

I was also pretty heavily into this stuff in 1994

here's a joey beltram track from the same year as amber that i think sounds more like amber and less like incunabula

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6v6BVkRYMQ

Idm it’s for the intelligent.

those ones aren't so bad. take out the "mx" and the numbers (which correspond to the % of the EP they take up) and you have a fairly normal tracklisting..."Garbage", "PIOB", "Bronchus Seven", and "VLetr"

And "Bronchus 7" refers to the seventh mix of "Bronchus," and in fact, I know of 3 other "Bronchus" mixes that've been released, which means of course we'll need to poll them.

Whether or not they went on to go more "advanced" is a bit of a misnomer anyway - "abrasive" yes, with new plugins yes.

― Siegbran, Friday, May 4, 2018 10:16 AM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i agree with this but i don't know how to broach without incurring the wrath of all the autechre fanboyz here

if youre looking for more early autechre type stuff, the late 90s/early 00s saw a TON of copyists.. check the Merck label for example... or like the first Arovane album?

I think I get where Vahid is coming from on this. If you take a synchronic slice of "electronic music" at any given point in time in the nineties then Autechre seem to be "on trend" more than out on their own. I don't think this is actually more true of Amber than the later material, it's just that Amber (and certainly Incunabula) can be more easily situated within a 'scene', whereas by Tri Repetae what had been ambient techno was going in a bunch of different directions - but that doesn't mean the latter album doesn't basically sound like the beat construction of Orbital's "Sad But True" crossed with the sound of LFO circa "Tied Up" and the mood of FSOL's ISDN.

None of which is to detract from how great an album Tri Repetae is - as with Amber, part of its greatness stems from how Autechre were exploring so many possible directions in tandem with a lot of different producers and carving out their own distinct sound within what was a dense field of innovation and cross-pollination.

Fwiw, I can remember back in the dark days of ilx starting a thread that was "tearjerking techno" top 100 or some such. And started off with Microlovr and Dexter and then people started posting things that were not techno and were "tearjerking" because they had sad lyrics, which wasn't my intention for the thread at all. My intention was to think about very emotional techno (without lyrics/vocals) and I remember the late great getting annoyed about that. I was too, actually. It's quite tangential but I do think that Ae in this stage were making sometimes "tearjerking techno" and I still yearn for more of that. Maybe that's what tlg is getting at. I think, maybe it is.

It's what I still yearn for. I wouldn't find it with the current iteration of Ae though.

Not that I want to project what tlg is getting at

garbage is supremely sad

It is.

latentcall from elseq gives me a similar feeling and has jerked a tear or two from me.

it's so crazy to think it's been 24 years since amber. that's equivalent to 1974-1998!

None of which is to detract from how great an album Tri Repetae is - as with Amber, part of its greatness stems from how Autechre were exploring so many possible directions in tandem with a lot of different producers and carving out their own distinct sound within what was a dense field of innovation and cross-pollination.

― Tim F, Friday, May 4, 2018 4:54 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tim otm

it’s not necessarily that i think autechre were “advanced” at this point in their career as much as amber as a whole accesses a v specific mood for me. it’s definitely connected to other contemporaneous dance music but it’s special via the particular approach

This was my favorite AE album and in some ways probably still is. These days the old FM patches grate a little and I wonder why nobody else points out that a lot of the tracks don’t “go” anywhere but that’s probably more about how I’ve changed and not about this record.

going places is overrated

Also how come someone on this thread is asking for other IDM albums from this time frame that sound like this and nobody said B12

“Nine” is basically straight off Time Tourist ffs

true but i didn’t bring it up because time tourist was two years after amber

i’m listening to rihanna needed me at the taco shop and it sounds like she’s singing over autechre

if you want a straightfaced recommendation for “sounds just like amber” it’s not going to be 100% easy because they nicely carved out a niche for themselves - there’s a lot of darker ambient electro from the era that dhares the atmospheres and synths but not the beats, there’s plenty of stuff with the intricate beats but the atmospherics are different (b12 would fit here). the closest i can think of is higher intelligence agency but that doesn’t have the steel grey aesthetic ... so yeah, reiterating my sense that the most special thing about autechre is their manipulation of mood and atmosphere

dhares = has

torta fingers

if you want a straightfaced recommendation for “sounds just like amber” it’s not going to be 100% easy because they nicely carved out a niche for themselves

hm sounds pretty advanced

Whether or not they went on to go more "advanced" is a bit of a misnomer anyway - "abrasive" yes, with new plugins yes.

― Siegbran, Friday, May 4, 2018 10:16 AM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i agree with this but i don't know how to broach without incurring the wrath of all the autechre fanboyz here

it wasn't so much new plugins as it was gradually moving to max/msp and an object-oriented programming approach to composition though, right? at least that's how i always think of their transition from more conventionally arranged music of the amber era to their amoebic morphing (but always readily identifiable as autechre) recent music.

I haven't heard torta fingers fwiw but I trust you.

ah yes i forgot that these two guys making syncopated industrial with delay units are such an important totem that bringing up other artists not named Richard is just silly I mean why bother

dhares = has Was a banger tho.

The niche was carved in Tri Repetae / Garbage / Anvil Vapre - Amber is not as special for its time as some people are making it out to be

i don’t really think we’re making it out to be special

unless oh damn, these dudes aren’t special!!!

Ccec iis the only thing I can think of with an "MC" on it.

Funkstorung are kind of "Autechre with MCs", right?

East Flatbush Project - Tried by 12 (Autechre mix) (which basically dissolves into ccec); The Bug - Skeng (Autechre Remix); the microphone fiend 'remix' (mashed up with blifil live)...

but yeah, more would be great.

"Goz Quarter" from Envane samples Kool Keith rapping

Them collaborating with Tricky in the 90s is one of the big missed opportunities I think. He was going into dark electronica territory on Pre-Millennium Tension which would have married with ae's aesthetic quite well I think. They could have bonded over a shared love of 'Microphone Fiend'.

I always thought their remix of Tortoise was an odd match. They never remixed or worked with NIN, did they? That's surprising, all things considered.

YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO @ the madonna combo

Heh, yeah always makes me laugh. It was a genuine double take on my part - the Madonna album was out on a shelf one day and in the corner of my eye I thought I saw Amber. Some of the detailing and how they may have up is uncanny

https://www.stonesthrow.com/app/uploads/2020/06/beauty-and-the-beast-1024x518.jpg

Just read that was a thing

I dreamt that there was a suite of videos for the whole album that somehow I'd never discovered - drone flybys of landscapes like the one on the cover, manipulated with 2d and 3d digital effects, fitting the music perfectly and talking it to another level (though I think in the dream the music was actually my own subconscious creation!)

Feel like I need a full-library Autechre session soon, it's been a while since I've listened to any of their albums which is stupid because they are perfect for losing myself in sandbox video game worlds and late night hacking