What Ae era was your favourite?

  On 2/6/2021 at 10:46 AM, eczem said:

This is a bit of rambling, but I think one thing that happened to me over the years is my taste in terms of sonic elements got readjusted such that lush/sweet melodies or sounds moved from occupying a central focus to to just one crayon in the crayon box if you will. More than any other work of music, deep listening sessions to Draft 7.30 many years ago helped to open up my expectations about sonic possibilities.

I'm ok with noisy music. I was more of an industrial fan before getting into IDM in the 90s.

The problem I have with a lot of Ae's more recent work is that it's harsh digital noise. It sounds like high mod FM that's been allowed to alias all over the place. I'm sure it's deliberate but I find it unpleasant to listen to.

  On 2/8/2021 at 5:28 AM, kuniklo said:

I'm ok with noisy music. I was more of an industrial fan before getting into IDM in the 90s.

The problem I have with a lot of Ae's more recent work is that it's harsh digital noise. It sounds like high mod FM that's been allowed to alias all over the place. I'm sure it's deliberate but I find it unpleasant to listen to.

wrong

  On 2/8/2021 at 5:41 AM, nikisoko said:

wrong

Care to elaborate?

mostly just joshin but also its odd you say that since their more fm-laden output was probably around lp5/ep7. more recent stuff sounds pretty heaving on the phymod/karplus strong techniques

  On 2/8/2021 at 6:58 AM, nikisoko said:

mostly just joshin but also its odd you say that since their more fm-laden output was probably around lp5/ep7. more recent stuff sounds pretty heaving on the phymod/karplus strong techniques

Yeah I'm just guessing at what their methods are but the sounds are harsh to my ears.

SIGN is sweeter and more melodic though which is why I'm liking it a lot. I'm hoping there's more to come in that vein.

Oversteps - Move Of Ten is Ae's weakest time for me. It feels they ditched 50% of the gear (Machinedrum, Monomachine) Just to focus on Nord Modular experiments and MPC samples. It got some very good tracks.. I always get chills when I hear the mighty intro of O=0

If you  listen to Oversteps and compare it with Untilted is like day and night really. 

I still reckon that run from Amber to EP7 was something else - changing up their sound every album, with a huge amount of supplementary EPs, remixes and gescom stuff thrown in.

There's been great stuff since then (Confield is crazily ahead of it's time, Exai could be my overall favourite, NTS is nuts and I still really rate Oversteps) but as a run that 5 years was incredible.

Id say 98-2001 with Lp5 - minidisc - ep7 - peel session 2 to confield, loving that move toward  abstract sounds yet very delicate + killer melodies here and then (Gelk, Rae). Great post techno times (BoC, Fennesz, Oval, Pan Sonic) also. 

Would be nice (or not) to clarify all the ae eras first, no? I think I've heard a guy on YouTube (the one from deep cuts if I remember well) saying there are like three different ones. Not sure if it's right neither if it's really what he said. It could be a French guy (still from YouTube) who said that in the end... I don't know anymore...

To me, elseq and the NTS Sessions are probably what I liked the most.

But right now I'm listening to the live recorded in Toronto in 2001 (which we can download here on WATMM) and it's so good.

Off topic (maybe one already exists) but what are your favorite bootlegs?

Chiastic Slide up to Gantz Graf was incredible. When the lines were blurry between their main output, Gescom, and the remixes. And the EPs and albums mirrored each other. And they were making futuristic sounds on what was probably pretty dated hardware at the time (RSD-10, DX-100, ASR-10).

Quaristice and the remixes around that time were also excellent. Same with Exai.

When NTS is good, it is very good. SIGN is still growing on me. I hope to hear new remixes very soon (I understand the SOPHIE one was actually 5+ years old?)

  On 2/8/2021 at 11:34 PM, sweepstakes said:

I hope to hear new remixes very soon (I understand the SOPHIE one was actually 5+ years old?)

No, the request for a remix was old, the remix itself is rather fresh, tied to the recent system's reconfiguration judging by Sean Anthony's mixlr comments.

On the topic:

My feeling of "eras" suggest a roughly 7 year release cycle (1991-1997, 1998-2005, 2006-2011, 2013-2018 plus live recordings), inside that i distinctly prefer LP5 to Untilted run by vague memory and the recent one by less vague memory.

Yes when I say "eras"it  was a bit strange way to put it and it is different for anyone but it seems like almost everyone here get the point really good.

It is just a timestamp of their biography and that is something intresting with AE: Their music changes so much! 
Sean said in an interview pointing out "Lego Feet days" and that is what I call an era.. like 91-95 is consider their oldest stuff. 

Exai is pretty much a huge game changer! It totally destroys Oversteps in my world.
 

  On 2/8/2021 at 8:14 AM, cern said:

Oversteps - Move Of Ten is Ae's weakest time for me. It feels they ditched 50% of the gear (Machinedrum, Monomachine) Just to focus on Nord Modular experiments and MPC samples. It got some very good tracks.. I always get chills when I hear the mighty intro of O=0

If you  listen to Oversteps and compare it with Untilted is like day and night really. 

honestly I like Oversteps a lot more than Untilted. I get why others feel differently though. These albums sort of represent the two extremes of their style - Untilted is the dry and Oversteps is the wet. I tend to prefer the wet.

(though my favorite is when they take the wet and freeze it, resulting in the elusive "icy" sound, as heard on Confield)

I'll always stand up for Oversteps, had an amazing experience playing the whole thing while lying on my back watching the stars come out in the south of France.

Untilted comes out hard but the second half doesn't live up to the first, especially Fermium.

Exai is probably better than both IMO.

  On 2/9/2021 at 9:36 PM, danshoebridge said:

Untilted comes out hard but the second half doesn't live up to the first, especially Fermium.
 

ive never understood this

  On 2/9/2021 at 10:27 PM, xox said:

ive never understood this

At the time, Fermium was the preview track for Untilted on the Warp website, just playing a clip from the beginning of the track. So a lot of us played that clip a ton..? And then of course the rest of the album ended up sounding quite a bit different. I dunno, I think maybe that has something to do with all the hate Fermium gets 

I mean the beginning of the track is the weakest part. Cheesy chords, quite repetitive and minimal compared to the rest of Untilted. It's pretty misleading. It turns into a monster track but I think a lot of people just focus on the beginning (and the Warp clip contributed to that) 

it's true, untilted and oversteps represent the two opposite poles, yet they are the two albums apparently more dense with hidden ideas. Fermium, unlike the other Unt tracks, is perhaps a bit treacherous: he prepares this slow climb, moreover with fairly classic solutions, and then, where it could start playing hard, it simply ends. After the traveling in the absurd that augmatic is, the only piece that can stand up to it is sublimit. Oversteps ... probably the album I've listened to the most. Even now I can discover something new in the skein of fugues, and although each piece opens up a different scenario, the coherence and intensity is constant as I have never perceived in other albums. Last week I listened to Yim0 isolated from the rest, which has never happened before because it seemed more like an intermission before the finale (yuop), and I've never put in other playlists;  yet, despite having listened to it hundreds of times, only now i realized the elegance and the multiplicity of melodies that make up the carpet, and how there are sudden bursts that change the mood to the flow, raising the bar of unpredictability as I never suspected. As always, the least direct and flashy things are those that hide the most 

I love Oversteps as much as anything else. I think they said around that time that they were intentionally scaling back and exploring something new and different. Also there was the whole fiasco with the fake "leak" that was so crappy that we were mostly relieved to hear the real thing, even if it was such a departure and had several WTF moments (like Known(1)). It stands alone, apart from Move of Ten and occasional tracks that seem to use the same melody-generating system (like column thirteen maybe?), and is a cohesive sequence of really genuinely beautiful tracks. 

I wonder if it is intentional that Oversteps was '10 and SIGN was '20, both albums that saw stripped-down percussion and more focus on harmony and melody and general lushness, and both with accompanying EPs that had more beats alongside outtake-y sounding tracks, both in '0 years. 

[EDIT: "accompanying EPs" isn't really the right term for it since they are whole albums; MOT is considered an EP I think, but it's long enough to be an album, and PLUS was marketed as a proper album.]

it could be that Ovesteps has opened the tradition of marking the beginning of each new decade with a transcendent act ... we have to wait ten years to verify it ... the substantial difference between Ovesteps and Sign, apart from the general atmosphere (Overs : glacial , Sign : warm), it seems to me that it is in the approach: the first was maximalist (there was talk of a return to the origins but I found the opposite: ok, Ovesteps is not aggressive but more things happen there than in gantz graf... it's an endless movement) while Sign works in subtraction.

Strange the disappointment for know (1), that rough crepitating solo that dominates the "harpsichord", screamed against the creation, seems to me to be autechre to the maximum degree

  On 2/10/2021 at 1:21 AM, toaoaoad said:

I wonder if it is intentional that Oversteps was '10 and SIGN was '20, both albums that saw stripped-down percussion and more focus on harmony and melody and general lushness, and both with accompanying EPs that had more beats alongside outtake-y sounding tracks, both in '0 years. 

I definitely believe that there's some intentional symmetry between them. Especially with the similarities in cover art - they all feature circular designs and Oversteps and MoT have green/orange colors on their inner sleeves.

  On 2/10/2021 at 3:36 AM, Boxus said:

I definitely believe that there's some intentional symmetry between them. Especially with the similarities in cover art - they all feature circular designs and Oversteps and MoT have green/orange colors on their inner sleeves.

I also believe that the intentionality of the bridge between the two is made evident by the graphics and format, in fact we are inclined to talk about the - huge - differences they have, which for the other albums is not necessary because it's radically explicit

  On 2/10/2021 at 2:00 AM, Draft78 said:

Strange the disappointment for know (1), that rough crepitating solo that dominates the "harpsichord", screamed against the creation, seems to me to be autechre to the maximum degree

Yes I think you definitely hit something here. I don't think the reaction to Known(1) was disappointment so much as WTF. It's really in-your face and has this brazen, raw sound. So in the wake of a rather convincing but shitty fake album, I think we were skeptical that this could be the real thing or another fake: it's so Autechre could it really be Autechre? Like is it them being ballsy or is it someone out there taking the piss with a weird track because we could be that easily convinced? Anyway, as it's the real thing, it has become kind of a classic Ae track, one for the true fans lol

i reckon V5.x is going to be a great era. 

Very nice, I believe it. 

Slightly off topic, but I've been listening to Dreams Are Not Enough a lot lately. It's on the pop side but resonates with me.

  On 2/10/2021 at 12:37 AM, Draft78 said:

it's true, untilted and oversteps represent the two opposite poles, yet they are the two albums apparently more dense with hidden ideas. Fermium, unlike the other Unt tracks, is perhaps a bit treacherous: he prepares this slow climb, moreover with fairly classic solutions, and then, where it could start playing hard, it simply ends. After the traveling in the absurd that augmatic is, the only piece that can stand up to it is sublimit. Oversteps ... probably the album I've listened to the most. Even now I can discover something new in the skein of fugues, and although each piece opens up a different scenario, the coherence and intensity is constant as I have never perceived in other albums. Last week I listened to Yim0 isolated from the rest, which has never happened before because it seemed more like an intermission before the finale (yuop), and I've never put in other playlists;  yet, despite having listened to it hundreds of times, only now i realized the elegance and the multiplicity of melodies that make up the carpet, and how there are sudden bursts that change the mood to the flow, raising the bar of unpredictability as I never suspected. As always, the least direct and flashy things are those that hide the most 

Expand  

...the fact is that Ylm0 is on MOT not Overs... welcome senility!