Bands you keep trying to like but can't get into

Autechre. My fling with these guys is firmly in the past! I forever respect their pace of production and their originality-quotient, but the problem for me is in that imo they are lacking in both the physical and spiritual/emotional departments. That’s the 3 departments of a human that music can (or not) address: the physical, the mental, and the spiritual-emotional. Maybe that’s four but whatever, I have made my point.

The mental is the physical is the spiritual, maaaan.

Oh I've never liked Autechre. I liked Dael (the first track on Tri Repetae) on first listen as a teenager, but I never subsequently enjoyed them. I always chalked it up to "the sound of FM synthesis" and "the sound of Max/MSP"-- there's nothing compositionally uninteresting about it, I just don't get immersed, it has the sonic world of a hospital hallway. (Similarly, I adore "Rifts" by Oneohtrix Point Never but haven't fallen in love with anything since.)

Funny, the only Oneohtrix I like is Replica, but I like that one a lot

Incredible String Band - read so many rapturous takes on these guys (eg Rob Young, Joe Boyd bio) and every time I put the music on I last a couple of minutes at best

Incredible String Band is def for this thread. I like them but their sound is you either get it or don't. They are so doing their own thing.

so true, I have really tried with them and LOVE some isolated tracks but have never clicked with a whole album

Same tbh. I do want to try again, though, to their credit.

exactly! there's a great bootleg series (6 volumes) called "God's Holiday" that has some really cool stuff, Wee Tam and Bug Huge are the ones I usually go back to

"Big Huge"

I like the guy with the high pitched voice’s songs better

My favourite ISB related things are the two COB albums that Clive Palmer made after leaving them early on - those records really knock me sideways emotionally (especially Spirit Of Love). Deep hippy folk stuff that's every bit as pure and joyful as Vashti Bunyan. Never quite made the same connection with ISB though

My horrified revulsion towards ISB is documented

‘Bands lj should like but doesn’t for some strange reason he will expound on at length itt’ should be a thread.

I mean I did that and everyone hated it

:(

If you’re referring to the ‘thread to diss hyped releases’, I’m an obvious fan.

LJ likes Blur and landfill indie he should not be liking ISB.

My favourite ISB related things are the two COB albums that Clive Palmer made after leaving them early on - those records really knock me sideways emotionally (especially Spirit Of Love)

I'll check that out.

Nah I got into it on an ISB thread! Not really the done thing

I think context is a huge thing with the Replacements. There's a whole vocabulary and mythos that surrounds them, and any discussion/thread about them. I usually find that helps me to get into something but it's a barrier here.

I can still remember the day I clicked with ISB after several abortive attempts; it was like a whole new vista opening up. It's cliched but 'A Very Cellular Song' was what done it.

bit of a soppy post: my dad used to sing ISB songs to us as lullabies so hearing the originals of eg the minotaur song or cellular don't sound at all right

I've noticed this phenomenon. Seems cool to me. I actually recall a euthanasia documentary wherein a group gathers to deliver their friend into the afterlife with ISB songs, post-barbiturate administration. ISB roolz.

Thanks for the C.O.B. tip. Will investigate.

With Autechre, it's always hard for me to explain how it is I feel about them. Actually agree with "sound of a hospital hallway" but there can be something fascinating in the sterility and coldness?

Not enough grime and human misery to match my experience of Montreal hospitals.

lol

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10pm (U.K. time)

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i do not associate autechre with hospital hallways or sterility and coldness. they are wayyyyy too fonky for that

Yeah, that's what I don't really get out of it.

for me even at their furthest out they have an undeniable sense of groove, always some rhythmic pocket their spiderwebs of percussion are weaving around, always the product of two people who seem to really love both boom bap and acid, and each album is like here is the latest unrecognizable collision/evolution of that

I enjoy the first two Autechre albums, for sure, and appreciate up through (but not including) Confield.

Autechre remind me of that Flying Lotus tweet, paraphrased: "I spent 10% of my time using Ableton to realize my ideas, and 90% of my time fighting Ableton to make it actually sound good". I appreciate the craft of what they're doing from Confield onward, but wish that the sound world wasn't so "sounding like Max/MSP" all the time.

I listened to the entire NTS collection and it was stuffed with interesting ideas, I was interested in it but never immersed. I was sitting there wishing there was some outboard device with the specific intention of replicating something like the Nord Modular but using analog circuitry-- could such a thing be designed to interface with what Max/MSP does? Something that would rely on outboard sound generation? idk.

All in all I find it more rewarding to listen to random Buchla improvisations on Youtube-- effectively the same deal, but sonically far more enriched.

Also, too-- I think of RDJ's "return to analog" Analord series, and how, although it was uneven, it functioned as an excellent "reset" and made me appreciate Syro that much more. I'd love to hear Autechre do something like that? but they seem generally to be in the business of doing their own thing ha

that pretty much sums up my take on Autechre as well, thanks!

great post, fgti

i still enjoy their new work a bunch, but i get where you're coming from for sure. it does seem hard to imagine autechre doing a Analord style "reset", not because they're incapable of it but because their MO very much seems to be iteration toward...the omniaudiosphere, or something

omniaudiosphere = automated generative always morphing endless, etc

i find their project kind of fascinating and they seem to be doubled-down on it when almost all of their IDM peers have reinvented themselves many times over. so i'm cool with seeing how far they can push it, at the expense of a new direction

Well, the “hey you guys realize we can just shit interesting sounds at this point” vibe of NTS was pretty illuminating— and mind-bogglingly impressive

But it somewhat reminds me of a similar vein-that-has-been-mined in music history: tone row-based serialism. I could, too, shit material with that process, and always find ways of making it “interesting”— it’s like, once a utopian form of autogeneration has been invented, it becomes obsolete— enduring music needs to overcome obstacles, not be factory-created?

At the same time, a close friend of mine started shaking and crying when he met Autechre and there is literally no other musician for whom he’d have that reaction

So maybe it’s just “not for me” heh

Do you mean integral serialism? Bc I don't think of regular 12-tone row-based music as factory-generated/autogenerative at all.

Whatever it's called, I always forget the specifics of the terms

Guys, take it on over to Rolling Music Theory Thread

Should have obscured that a bit, I'm off my game today.

I was actually just wondering what you meant fwiw. I write and play music with 12-tone rows - the rows are just repertoires of pitch material for me, like the notes and chords of a given key are in tonal music. Integral serialism, where every musical element is serialized, is another kettle of fish. There are def Boulez/Stockhausen/Babbitt pieces I love listening to but yeah, not something I play or write.

I am also baffled by ISB love. It goes like this: Critics compare them to bands and sounds I adore, I try for a while to get into them, find that I dislike everything that they do, and wonder what those critics here that I cannot.

Lol ridiculous misspellings in that post, apologies

to agree with points above, find ISB not my thing with a couple of exceptions but love COB

I consider myself an Incredible String Band fan, but sometimes the singing or the whimsy (or the whimsical singing) is totally off-putting.

I like ISB, but don’t play them often. Definitely have to be in the right mood. I’m actually a bigger fan of their latter-day stuff, play Hard Rope and Silken Twine way more often than Hangman’s.

What’s the problem with the International Submarine Band?

I can't stop misreading as "IBS".

Lol

Fair enough, that's what they sound like.

Emerson, Lake & Palmer and The Smiths and Morrissey and anything Bernard Sumner sings on and The Clash and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and New Order for starters!

That's a heavy list.

The one that many people find surprising, knowing me and my tastes, is my inability to get into The Fall. I just don't get it.