Inspired by this really interesting, long-long-long interview with Autechre by Droid, I thought I might give them boys another go....
Would be the third time of trying, if we count the initial back-in-the-day listening.
Got rid of nearly all the CDs years ago - where shall I start? Tips, playlists, beginner's guide to , all very much welcomed.
Bear in mind, though, my entrenched position is 1/ no grooves 2/ no tunes 3/ no discernible emotions or even moods.... so evidence proffered to the contrary is unlikely to be persuasive...
Much more likely to be swayed by extremes of abstraction.... absolute unhuman inhospitable uninhabitable inclemency... the kind of unreachable alienness gestured at in the devastating denouement to Stanislaw Lem's Fiasco...
I do remember being quite impressed by Confield, for instance...
Did I quite-like Oversteps?
Thing is, I can't remember. And that is the main issue, I just find their stuff resolutely evades memory. There's no element in it, on any level, that sticks.
Woebot had a great description of Autechre's inutility and extraneousness - something like "a pipesmoking breakdancer"
That momentarily made me think, "something I'd like to see-hear!"
Any group that could inspire this degree of precision-loathing eloquence has got to have something going for it...
32 comments:
The most recent two studio albums "Sign" and "Plus" represent a return to their more melodic side. Outside that, their 90s albums (up to LP5 in 1998) are all pretty enjoyable - if a bit bog-standard Warp IDM(tm) at times.
They get 'difficult' around the notorious, music-as-algebraic-function 'Confield' (2001) and it's a bit treacherous from there on (though "Quastrice" and "Oversteps" are generally well-regarded) - certainly the 5 hour(!) 'elseq' and nearly-equally-as-absurd 'NTS sessions' are strictly for the hardcore.
Is this a crisis you’re going to have every ten years? I remember a similar post back in 2013 when Exai came out!
I couldn’t call myself a super-fan; I’ve been buying their stuff since 1995, but I couldn’t point to a single entry point, or a single really consistent album to start with [though their EPs collection - much like Substance or the Cocteau Twins EPs comps give you a good overview of where they were at year on year; and Tri Repetae is really solid]. I find there’s good bits and bad bits throughout. Very much a playlist act.
But…
They have done stuff with melody and beats -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13ZJ4_y30Ok
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjApnd3pl9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZU9z9Jyhfs
And this is lovely -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ssd7IDttdww
This one is good hip-hop -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7CHB6_75e0
Good reworking of a bleep classic [they do seem to have done remixes of a few bleep classics, but this is the best] -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAeKbElIGaQ
And this is nice -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGN90Phb5mQ
This doesn’t outstay its welcome -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzn9m28cR6w
Most of my choices are pretty old, but if you wanted to give their later stuff a listen then the NTS Sessions are a good bet. Though I wish they’d edited them down into more digestible tracks: some really great sounds and grooves set up that just meander for 10-15 minutes [or more].
Hope that helps!
RE-POSTED TO SORT OUT FORMATTING GLITCH - sorry:
Is this a crisis you’re going to have every ten years? I remember a similar post back in 2013 when Exai came out!
I couldn’t call myself a super-fan; I’ve been buying their stuff since 1995, but I couldn’t point to a single entry point, or a single really consistent album to start with [though their EPs collection - much like Substance or the Cocteau Twins EPs comps give you a good overview of where they were at year on year; and Tri Repetae is really solid]. I find there’s good bits and bad bits throughout. Very much a playlist act.
But…
They have done stuff with melody and beats -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13ZJ4_y30Ok
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjApnd3pl9c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZU9z9Jyhfs
And this is lovely -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ssd7IDttdww
This one is good hip-hop -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7CHB6_75e0
Good reworking of a bleep classic [they do seem to have done remixes of a few bleep classics, but this is the best] -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAeKbElIGaQ
And this is nice -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGN90Phb5mQ
This doesn’t outstay its welcome -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzn9m28cR6w
Most of my choices are pretty old, but if you wanted to give their later stuff a listen then the NTS Sessions are a good bet. Though I wish they’d edited them down into more digestible tracks: some really great sounds and grooves set up that just meander for 10-15 minutes [or more].
Hope that helps!
I wouldn't call it a "crisis", more like a relenting, or kind of indirect peer-pressure, twinge of doubt.
But yes you are right, the last time ("the second go-round") was exactly ten years ago.
Cheers for these tips, the both of yous. I'm going to pile them into a mega-playlist. But I'll start with Confield as I remember liking that, or being impressed by its severity. Quastrice also rings a bell as getting a grudging nod of respect. But it's all blurry, I don't have a fix on their uuuuuurv - it's too large and it does have this amnesiac effect.
I do know that the idea of a return to past "melodic strength" is both unconvincing and untempting. Never been their forte. I mean, when the competition is Aphex Twin... and BoC...
"Uviol" is rather pretty.
But earlier on Confield, "Pen Expers" is typical of Autechre's way with rhythm. The beats are imposing and inventive but they never resolve into anything that resembles a groove - it doesn't pull at your body, even in the way that the most jagged footwork or explosive-implosive rinse-out jungle still pulls at your body.
Those kinds of music insist that you become some kind of drastically improved, superhumanized dancer, to do justice to the rhythms. Which is what the footworkers actually became. But Autechre seem to deliberately frustrate the terpsichorean impulses.
As I said the last go-round, Autechre's relation to electro and B-boyism reminds me of Req, the artist on Skint - even the name Req (via "wreck" via I assume world class wreckin' cru or some similar old skool outfit- abstracted ciphered twist on B-boyism) resembles an Autechre track or album title.
But in both cases it doesn't have that thing that's in Droppin' Science or DJ Hype or Hyper-On Experience where there is still in the music a kind of after-image of a breakdancer, an actual moving 'n' grooving human
From the title on down, "Lentic Catachresis" is self-parodic.
I mean, come on. Who hasn't got better things to do than this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duPQ87JLO8s&ab_channel=Autechre-Topic
Totally relate to this post. Although I don't have anything intellectual to add to your comments.
Have loved some of Autechres mixes of other people's music. Amongst the best.
But never found a route into their own material that piqued my interest. Even saw them live at a festival and it didn't help!
they're right about the development of electro. Something like dj hype or a droppin science isn't a further development and intensification of electro, as much as it will have memories of a breakdancers body, (witness A) the white euro ravers horror at jazz jungle, and B) the way most jungle producers got lost when it came to using drum machines instead of breakbeats.) Electro pushed to its limit precisely necessitates the anti-groove abstraction you're railing against. 2step subverts this by taking out the downbeat on the 1-3, but it's still house, quintessentially so, and hence has more in common with the one bar loop of techstep that people tend to elide. Techstep is basically 2step without the sexy swing, without the flava. But 2step producers didn't reactivate 93-95, that was the choppage scene.
I'm not sure though why tunes are even necessary. Noone listens to Parmegiani or Stockhausen for tunes. Even though they participate in a tradition that puts an overwhelming emphasis on composition, and is in fact even behind in some respects to eastern classical traditions which give more room to modal improvisation. The arid nature of AE, the idea that you have to work for it to stick in the memory is the point, surely. In fact, isn't that the whole appeal of Basic Channel? You can't really hum a basic channel tune after the fact, you can just remember its cold texture.
same with footwork, there are electro influences, for sure, but it's chassy is mid 90s chi town ghetto house, always has been.
Perhaps the argument you want to make is that electro has nothing left to offer after its 80s hayday? If so, I don't agree, but would like to read your take on that.
The Basic Channel / Chain Reaction totally grooves though, it's got that pulse.... and there are micro-melodies, the vamps, the pulse-riffs. But yeah it's about that monolithic yet undulant pulse and the immersive sound-bath of texture.
Electro - I was kind of picking on something mvuent said on the dissensus thread, words to the effect of "imagine if Mantronix had just carried on after Music Madness getting weirder and weirder'. Which is definitely worth imagining - except Mantronix would never, ever leave behind the rock-a-body aspect of electro. Even at his most jagged, like "Breakin Bells" for T La Rock, it's always danceable.
I did like some of the neo-electro at the end of the '90s - things by Ectomorph and artists on the Schematic label. One track in particular by Phoenicia ets really convoluted but it still has an undulant thing wriggling away in there https://youtu.be/VxXCfrMLw4Q?si=CxNGGSZfQXd_R2h3 Whereas the track on Confield I was talking about, it's just wilfully obtuse. It aims to throw you off, to make dancing impossible. While still taking the outward appearance of dance music.
I'm not sure where one draws the line between possible and impossible dancing. Technically, by your criterion, free jazz is 'wrong music' because it has the outward appearance of dance music but it makes dancing impossible?
I also don't buy this being a fair comparison, given that dancing to electronic music is rarely if ever choreographed, and even more damningly (one could say) lacks the embodied collectivity of folk dancing, which by nature necessitates observation of period metre and rhythm. Especially in the anatolian varieties of folk dances where congregating and unison is the very point of the folk dance. Even hip hop body popping is very much individualised.
Does it then really matter if an individual is elegant or inelegant?
Raving, for instance, taken as general post-acid phenomenon, is not really dancing in the traditional sense. I mean, there are periodic rhythmic jerks of the body, but it is totally not dance as collective cultural ritual or memory. The communication of the content can be pretty non-specific (this is a modernist strength, surely?) and also one of choice, which say, you don't get in halay, dabhki or all sorts of wedding dances. Which must by necessity be non-initiates sound and cannot really be experimental, as we would typically conceive it (although certain zurna players can be experimental within this stringent folk idiom.)
If rave was about dancing in this sense, then we wouldn't be talking about the modernism of the hardcore continuum, it's futurism, etc etc. there are Mnemonic devices in nuum musics, but often they are flava, and often do get jettisoned when a certain tendancy comes to dominate.
btw the only reason why I'm mentioning middle eastern folk dances is its because what I know. I could opine on African folk dances but I don't have an in depth knowledge to comment on their participatory aspects.
I also think certain forms of dance music proper aren't very danceable for extended periods of time. certain forms of Gabba, trance, certain ends of minimal tech house, organ house, y2k disco house, etc. The rhythm is too steady, too unchanging, too simple in other terms. all you can do is the oompa loompa, but you can do that to Autechre or any music with a pulse, really.
Which isn't to say I dislike these genres on principle, I obviously don't, but I'm well aware of their limitations.
Even something like Alex Reece's pulp fiction was rated so much by the jungle scene because of its recalibration of the dialectic between abandon and restraint. But then, one has to ask: if you're listening to autechre in album format, why would you want an album to be functional club music? I have never understood this. DJ mixes suffice, surely?
(deleted and reposted bc of my habit of not writing intelligible sentences)
"Electro - I was kind of picking on something mvuent said on the dissensus thread, words to the effect of "imagine if Mantronix had just carried on after Music Madness getting weirder and weirder'. Which is definitely worth imagining - except Mantronix would never, ever leave behind the rock-a-body aspect of electro. Even at his most jagged, like "Breakin Bells" for T La Rock, it's always danceable."
There was a time when I would've said the exact same thing about the album I was talking about, Untitled. I found the album really stupid and annoying because I felt that they wanted to be Stockhausen but weren't creative enough to shed dance music influences entirely, that the "beat" aspects of the music were completely vestigial. Which I think is more or less what Woebot thinks. But after listening a million more times I've done a 180 on it. I have to be really "in" to hear it but the rock-a-body pull is there.
I think the frustrating about talking about Autechre for some of us ...converts? ...cult members? is trying to convey the sort of magic eye puzzle experiences we've had with them that made us annoying hyperbolic fans who won't shut up about them in the first place. It can be like excitedly running up to someone and saying, "Hey, I've been looking at this for ages and the coolest thing happened, it started to form this amazing picture that I didn't see at first!" and having them just stare at you for a second and then go "Anyways, as I was saying, obviously the interesting aspect is that there's no picture..." You feel like, wait, isn't the fact that my impression of this thing's so different than yours, after I've looked at it for 1000000 hours, at least a little bit of a... complication? Can it really be brushed off so easily? But in the end it's just Autechre innit, to each their own etc. etc.
A good example of the "magic eye" effect:
If you look through the reviews section on their Discogs page, there's a very lengthy and elaborate review theorizing about how their music is totally unpleasurable and random, but intriguingly so because it is "a reflection of the drifting into entropy and meaninglessness of our entire culture"—pretty insightful, without making any ridiculous claims about their being danceable like Third, Droid, or I would make, right?
BUT WAIT... they updated in their perspective in a second review two years later, saying:
"Back then I had apparently not had sufficient time to get accustomed to their work so I missed out on the fantastic MUSICAL quality that is actually inherent to it. I herewith revoke anything I said about their work being "anti-music"."
I actually remember talking to a discogs head about trance in a gabber forum, and he said something to the effect of paraphrasing from memory but funk is kind of not about the rush, and that's exactly it isn't it. When you think of 91-92 ardkore, it's really not funky. It has the breakbeat, sure, but it is manic, way too jittery to be strictly in the pocket, too many samples, too much of the space is crammed with raging mentasms, italo vamps, pitched up hip hop samples, even sometimes sorta trancey/euro synths. Of course, this is great, but it just isn't funk, not like the way the nimble minimalism of jungle was.
You kind of say you want tunes and grooves, but to me they are sort of in tension with each other. obviously there is a lot of acoustic dance music which is groovy and tuneful, but things sit in a symbiosis. With electronics you have the capability to lean heavily into one aspect of that ratio.
The funk in this, for instance, is utterly absurd, but I could probably agree that it isn't a choon. And there is def a rock-a-body aspect to it, albeit an expanded cyborgs mechanical body, mechanical intelligences.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl5oc6UW_Io
this i would say has the syncopation of funk, but is not *funky per se.*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=higc77l4-z4
which again is a compliment in this sense, absolutely farkin mental chooon etc.
whereas this ghostly minimal workout from DJ Die is pure post-funk.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcRDCKfkRuo
Just to backtrack a little bit…
“ The beats are imposing and inventive but they never resolve into anything that resembles a groove - it doesn't pull at your body, even in the way that the most jagged footwork or explosive-implosive rinse-out jungle still pulls at your body.”
One of the ways I enjoy Autechre’s music - well, except the deliberately chaotic stuff - is to keep the beat in my head. A lot of their best tracks start off with a clear, decipherable rhythm and then change the beats until it’s ducking in and around the basic metronomic pulse. If you concentrate and keep track of the beat internally it can be quite fun. It’s like listening to jazz drumming.
No, it doesn’t have that danceable immediacy, but that’s not what they’re going for. Again, I say this as a non-obsessive who actually prefers their more conventional tracks. It’s a handy route in.
Their shiny metallic palate of sounds has something to be said for it, no?
Also: Confield was not a great place to start. They were being deliberately obtuse on that one. Their most recent ‘Plus’ is pretty good.
"No, it doesn’t have that danceable immediacy, but that’s not what they’re going for."
Their expressed intent can be interesting though, because in the interview above they outright say that they're making dance music! I agree though, it's by no means instantly recognizable as such. Great description of the listening process.
Also I have no idea how you can say Pen Expers isn't a groove, it's basically just a jazz beat with a load of reversing going on as an additional rhythmic layer. the bass drum is very hard bop, actually.
Which is in comparison to aphex's drill and bass, which is a mess really, it has nothing steady to ground it, it's just (pardon the ableist term) spazz.
Or 99% of Squarepusher. As someone once put it to me, his stuff is ‘just crash bang wallop’.
I think it would be helpful to start with the earlier stuff and work through the material somewhat chronologically. I always felt that Ae had a natural progression through the years, and it could be beneficial to start with the more approachable material of the early days; then you grow and learn with them as they start to make stuff that might be perceived as more abstract.
There are plenty of tracks from the mid-90's that work extremely well in a club. I've witnessed people dancing to "Inhake 2", "Basscadet", "Eutow", "Clipper". Hell, I even saw Objket mix out of Sleng Teng into "Dael" and the whole club at Tresor was jumping up and down going mad.
From their recent series of live albums recorded last year, LONDON B is a real standout. Maybe they were doing something similar on the NTS sessions (which I haven't heard), but LONDON B really works as an hour-long composition that seems to drift but builds and shifts carefully. They're not making collages of fragments in different time signatures. By their standards, it's pretty conventional rhythmically, and the final 15 minute show their roots in old school hip-hop.
I was at that gig - the hip hop bit was great!
Curious if you came around to them at all on your retour? Or do you still feel the same way as you had previously?
Me too.
Reconfirmed, sadly!
I did listen to a lot of the recommendations but at a certain point, I ran out of patience
Oh well. Maybe in 2033.
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