New Autechre interview

Thanks for sharing 

  On 10/20/2023 at 11:44 AM, phudoshin said:

whats hot encoder/hot fader mean?

I got what they meant: DJs performing with big gestures, pushing faders up and down with these fast movements that have only one purpose: To make their act look like it's all casual genius, "I'm in full control of this shit". But I didn't know why they called it "hot", until this morning when I suddenly got what the joke was: When DJs are sliding faders with these very fast movements, it looks a bit like the way you touch things when they are really hot: You try and touch them for as short as possible, so you don't burn yourself. Look at a superstar DJ and you'll often see these show elements, holding the fader between thumb and index finger, as if their hands were pincers, and then going for these fast slides all the time. This gave me a good chuckle. I don't know if this is a standard joke or if Sean and/or Rob came up with it, but it's pretty funny.

Meanwhile, Autechre look like they're playing Minecraft together: Completely absorbed, no time for showmanship.

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I just want to hear some mad shit

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turbo-autistic

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That tune Acid Eiffel, fuckin’ Acid Eiffel

  On 10/20/2023 at 11:44 AM, phudoshin said:

whats hot encoder/hot fader mean?

some hot encoder action. turbo-cringe

btw, in the last 4-5 seconds of this clip, she starts waving her right arm along to the off-beat synth, then the bass drum enters on the beat, and she realigns herself to it.

  On 10/20/2023 at 3:33 PM, decibal cooper said:

 

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that guys is great as the cult leader dude in The Leftovers.. which is also excellent imo. 

hot damn that was a great interview - and im glad that the author embedded the dublin live set early on, as it was the perfect soundtrack for reading the rest of it

  On 10/23/2023 at 12:44 AM, Summon Dot E X E said:

Peak performance aesthetic for IDM:

Another candidate would be the conclusion of this SND set:

  On 10/23/2023 at 12:44 AM, Summon Dot E X E said:

Meanwhile, Autechre look like they're playing Minecraft together: Completely absorbed, no time for showmanship.

I feel like I can say something about the whole axis (showmanship in electronic music to no showmanship) because I've tried both ends with my own music.

I only started performing as an adult, and coming from a history of anxiety and social phobia that needed a pile of therapy and medication, I felt I really needed to quantify myself to even get on stage. Psychologically, I couldn't have just got up and turned on a computer. I needed the feeling of visibility of making something. And I'm not someone who would ever showboat crap. The thing that showed me what I could do was Moldover's video on controllerism. You only have to watch the first mini-performance part to get the idea - live mixing, custom controls, ideas from turntablism.

That said, I was way more into composition than remixing. I worked out my own version of this kind of thing (I even bought the same controller seen in this video) with Reaktor and Live and ultimately I was really happy with how it got me performing.

The big problems that came up were how slow it was to reprogram things to change sets or tracks, or on the fly. General inflexibility. And track transitions (you see Autechre talking about problems with track transitions in the interview)

I worked with my rig for some time, but more and more, I just wanted to leave it for these reasons, plus psychologically I'd overcome my initial hurdle. My last Aeriae show I just used the computer and, yeah, I turned out the lights.

So I can say from experience, you can be doing stuff that looks 'hot encodery' and you're actually doing something sophisticated and difficult. But I doubt any of these DJs spinning records at festivals are.

  On 10/20/2023 at 12:54 PM, Key said:

Danny Rampling, showboating superstar DJ from the 90s. Hot faders is that kind of exaggerated fingering of the controls you see youtubers doing a lot (FMV's post^^)

  basically all the cheesey performative aspects of electronic music that ae are the antithesis of.

He was also one of the absolute leaders of the earliest days of acid house and balearic beat. If it wasn't for his club Shoom and his trying MDMA in Ibiza with Paul Oakenfold back when all this was new, the history of electronic music would have been very different. Not to say Rampling didn't also have that showboaty superstar bullshit side to him, that's irrefutable. And hot faders is some serious bullshit, 100%

Thanks @droid, this is a really interesting interview!

  On 10/24/2023 at 5:20 AM, NewSchoolScience said:

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so true tho.

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There’s a lot of trends in music production, where – I think I’ve talked about this before – where you’re supposed to have all your sounds upfront, which I find a little bit weird, because that’s not at all what life is like. Or if you were to consider all painting to be the same as graphic design, when they’re not the same thing at all. Graphic design is usually supposed to be communicating very quickly, a set of ideas or feelings to somebody. Whereas in art and painting you don’t have to do that at all – you can do that, but you don’t have to, there’s a lot of other things you can do. And with music, it’s the same sort of thing, especially with dance music, there’s a lot of things that you can do, that are not ‘that thing’, you know, where it sort of is an advert for itself.

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This resonates a lot with my thinking/philosophy of music, especially electronic music, as an artform. I often even use a painting analogy, filling out this space with different textures, frequencies, sounds, abrupt edges, smooth transitions, dull colors, bright colors, depth, shadow, contrast. Theres so much possibility but so many artists have a confined view of what electronic music means and what can be done with it, what is a "good" sound or correct mixing choice.

Sean: I used to like hanging out with David Moufang (Move D/Deep Space Network) a bit

this is an interesing part. Gescom - Motor EP was released on Source Records which was run by Move D

Great interview, and I found out about No Place Like Drone too which is quite enjoyable.  Been listening all afternoon.

Really enjoyed this; big up to all involved

  On 11/21/2023 at 7:18 PM, thejewk said:

Great interview, and I found out about No Place Like Drone too which is quite enjoyable.  Been listening all afternoon.

Ah! Thank you!

Rob: "We got on really well with Mark Bell (from LFO) as well because we had the Warp Leeds/Sheffield connection. He was also a massive hero of ours. We were big fans."

Contemporary witnesses here @ WATMM know, LFO were THE GODS. I wrote letters, I wrote fax msgs to WARP... "WHEN NEW RLS!!!!?!?!?!?!" - the time after Frequencies was unbearable. But well, they never reached the epic heights after "We are back" again, IMO. Played Mentok 1 a million times. Our house survived.

  On 11/20/2023 at 8:07 PM, Bubba69 said:

This resonates a lot with my thinking/philosophy of music, especially electronic music, as an artform. I often even use a painting analogy, filling out this space with different textures, frequencies, sounds, abrupt edges, smooth transitions, dull colors, bright colors, depth, shadow, contrast. Theres so much possibility but so many artists have a confined view of what electronic music means and what can be done with it, what is a "good" sound or correct mixing choice.

I find myself thinking in these terms, too, and painting is indeed a good analogy, exactly because both art forms are dissimilar. One thing that never ceases to amaze me about Autechre is the degree of detail in "placement" and relations between the individual parts of a track. There's so many tracks that I must have been listening to for +100 times until I suddenly realised "wait, what's that third melody there in the background??? Will wonders never cease...." This is exactly like suddenly finding a beautiful small detail in a painting you've been looking at many times before. This detail might just be very subtle variations in colour, or in figurative painting, a tiny detail in the far away background. Sometimes, these even feel placed like Easter eggs. Often, when listening to the tiny details in a track, I see it in my mind as something that is happening in the far distance. The amplitude of individual sounds becomes the "distance" from the viewer/listener. This is Autechre getting "spatial", not by corny ambisonic shenanigans, but simply by paying attention to how the individual elements all relate to one another.

There is great artistic confidence, instinct, autonomy,

in adding small details that are guaranteed to not catch your attention right away.

The opposite is made by peddlers who want you to hear every part of their track right away, where everything has to make sense immediately, it's completely one-dimensional.