Autechre Autechre - Oversteps (WARP210) [The MegaThread]

  On 2/9/2010 at 11:26 AM, modey said:

that said, there are a few tracks on this album (pt2ph8, redfall, krYlon and yuop seem a little noodly upon first, second and third listens) that i don't quite 'get' yet, though pretty much all of confield was like that for a while until i came back to it after not listening for a year and it all made sense. perhaps some of these noodly generative sounding melodies actually make more sense once you memorise them? i dunno.

it made "click" for me yesterday and i finally grasped the oversteps ending (redfall, krYlon and Yuop). i came back from the gym rinding on my bike in the dark and it suddenly hit me. as you said, you have to memorize the weirder parts to "get" them. this is definitely a grower.

this is something i noticed recently, so much idm these days is percussion based, and even when highly melodic there is still some type of drum work present. hence why most of my new electronic stuff is gonna be largely beatless (and not because of oversteps).

perhaps its related to my taste but there seems to be a trend in electronic/experimental music for drone or minimal music. some of my favorite recent electronic records were beatless : xerrox2, fennesz, sunno))),rehberg, ambarchi, bj nilsen. (alva noto is probably not a good exemple as some of his records are full of beats.)

  On 2/9/2010 at 11:42 AM, k h o v said:

this is something i noticed recently, so much idm these days is percussion based, and even when highly melodic there is still some type of drum work present. hence why most of my new electronic stuff is gonna be largely beatless (and not because of oversteps).

 

perhaps its related to my taste but there seems to be a trend in electronic/experimental music for drone or minimal music. some of my favorite recent electronic records were beatless : xerrox2, fennesz, sunno))),rehberg, ambarchi, bj nilsen. (alva noto is probably not a good exemple as some of his records are full of beats.)

If you want more ambient/experimental music without beats then check out my group Tetra: http://www.myspace.com/tetraau

there is definitly a trend for drone/minimal and ambient music in electronic music

but there is very little beatless stuff that does not fall into either 3 of those categories. I can only think of a handful of examples of people doing stuff today. coincidentally and possibly shameless self promotionally, Sote's Dastgaah CD can be described this way. It's purely synthsizers, with no beats, very melodic but also not ambient or drone

thanks for the link. the first track reminds me of the sakamoto/willits collab.

  On 2/9/2010 at 11:56 AM, k h o v said:

thanks for the link. the first track reminds me of the sakamoto/willits collab.

My pleasure. Yeah Ryuichi is the man. Love his shit with David Sylvian, been breaking up constant Overstepping with it actually :)

percussion work on ilanders reminds me of Sensachre 10 Mix (Autechre Remix) from Sensational meets Kouhei

Yeah but the stutter/snap combo on Sensachre is unbeatable :)

i should probably mentionstrange life records, unlike Ghostbox recordings they don't specialize in that BBC radiophonic workshop/library sound. It's s little more open ended and lots of throwbacks to 70s TV and film synthesizer music. I think fans of OVersteps will dig that record in particualr

  On 2/9/2010 at 11:32 AM, Awepittance said:

al ot of the melodies in Treale sound generative and kind of noodly but they get a really cohesive point at parts in the song where you are just like holy shit. it sonds like capture a magical 4 bar melody out of an algorithmic midi mpatch and decided to harnass it as the lead repeating line

yeah, that's what i thought about see on see. i find it interesting how much hate it's getting actually, i really love that main high melody in the 'chorus'.

hi everybody.

i am kind of puzzled. as a long time autechre fan the altered carbon fake leak was obvious for me. with this new oversteps promo m4a it seems more difficult and i do not want to judge it, as i have always experienced that a new autechre album seems odd at first and starts to grow over time. this is actually why they are so fantastic i think. they provide a learning curve. i can get more and more out of their music with repeated listenings. thank you ae.

so whats puzzling me: a few weeks ago i found three tracks on slsk:

Treale - 5:42

redfall - 7:12

d-sho qub - 4:24

they sounded completely legit to me. and as they were not in the altered carbon fake i was sure they could be on the new album. or maybe i am just stupid :)

well, now, if this new m4a is the real thing then somebody convinced me totally with these 3 tracks i have to admit. and i would certainly enjoy knowing who made these 3 tracks.

Treale is really bouncing, extremely funky, and has that kind of trademark beat structure we all know so well. very beat heavy and has some kind of metallic sounding pad/string thing going on in the back along with strange ambient acoustics and from 2:20 there is another pad coming in. great atmosphere over all.

redfall is completely beatless and has a very simple chimey melody running throughout, but the surrounding haunting resonant structures give it a really weird feel, which i didn't get at first but after repeated listenings makes sense totally. the kind of autechre harmonies you really have to hear more than once to get into them. definitely no well tempered scale. natural harmonics.

d-sho qub here is the one where i was the least convinced. starts with a synth pad and then a rather simple beat drops in. at maybe 0:50 a very simple plucked double bass sound comes in for the bassline. and the synths become very lush. there is a kind of cutup atmosphere in the back. and the snare is really loud on this one. beat drops out for a while and comes back in at 2:30.

then later there is a synth sound really similar to the aesthetics of

well, whoever made this or knows what i am talking about, please tell me.

so... don't kill your brains too much before the time of a release. i know it's hard. the music industry formulates certain rules of conduct for artists and release schedules.

we as fans should respect i think, cause the artists we like choose this or that specific label as a means of releasing their music.

and what a pleasure it is to have the final release in our hands. i know, i may sound a bit oldschool for some of you who grew up in the digital age. but well, that's just what i am.

best regards to everybody and let's look forward to another mind blowing autechre live tour.

cheers

znshn, care to upload for us?

ps. man, this album would be absolutely amazing while tripping. krYlon is starting to make sense.. especially the key change just over halfway through

  On 2/9/2010 at 11:09 AM, Awepittance said:

os veix is where it goes down hill for me , so basically i really do like most if not all of the first 7 tracks , its the 2nd half that seems lacking to me, much more sketchish

do you prefer the first or 2nd half of quaristice?

Dont believe the hype.

Dont not believe the hype.

If you like it, you like it, no matter whodunnit.

Autechre have admitted to releasing 'fake leaks' themselves before, and let's be honest they aren't daft or inexperienced so even if the leak is by them it doesn't guarantee that it 'is' Oversteps.

  On 2/9/2010 at 6:46 AM, Mesh Gear Fox said:

  On 2/9/2010 at 6:44 AM, bubbhasdance said:

never mind, I have it (no i don't, just following rules) so don't (do) send if you have it

use spoiler tags, mods never check.

Ok.... I'm not one to listen to leaks and stuff but I've been having a lot of fun getting caught up in the hype this time so I thought "why not".

Besides, since Draft7.30 came out, I've only been disappointed with everything Autechre have done, and I think I would have been doubly disappointed if I bought anything of theirs now without listening first. I listened to Quaristice in bits before finally buying it quite recently and actually found myself enjoying some of it.

So anyway, here's my initial thoughts:

*It's not that great. It's not bad either but I have a slew of better, similar sounding albums that I got for free from people on this forum or net labels. That said, a lot of that free music I would happily pay money for because I think it's nice to listen sometimes. But I haven't really been into generic IDM for a couple of years now. And that's exactly what this is.

*More melodic... hmmm... that's an interesting way to describe it. I'm not sure this is what I'd call melodies as much as a bunch of unrelated synth sounds bubbling one after the other in rapid succession. This is about as melodic as throwing a bunch of bouncy balls on a keyboard, just taping down some of the notes so it all stays in key.

*I think the album actually works best when there are beats. The melodies aren't anywhere near strong enough to hold their own cos they're just semi random twinkly sounds. However, with a nice rhythm going along with them, they suddenly transform into warm, drone-like atmospheres. Someone mentioned Gridlock, only heard a few of their tracks and I agree with the comparrison, I think that's a good thing.

*It's hard to comment on production and sound design on something so low quality but I can at least comment on some of the really obvious sound choices. Everything between Anvil Vapre and Confield had amazing sound design. The sounds were all earthy... in a mechanical way... if that makes sense... what I mean is that it sounded like the product of some kind of machine, or some kind of robot or in the case of Confield, something completely alien. Even Gantz Graf has a nice girttiness to it that sort of gives it this quality. Then Draft came out and that and everythign afterwards just sounded like a bunch of synths and drum machines to me. This might appeal to some but to me they've lost something. Oversteps seems to take this aesthetic the the extreme, almost in a way that I find a little more easier to swallow... very raw, unpolished synth sounds. They're boring but at the same time really nostalgic. Sometimes I'm in the mood for that.

*Every track on this album SOUNDS EXACTLY THE SAME. I think I could grow to appreciate the subtle differences (often I have to give pop/rock albums a lot of time to sink in for this reason) but again... variation is something Autechre do so well. Quaristice might have pushed this a bit too far but at least it kept me from getting bored. This album took me 3 sittings to get through, every 20 minutes I got soooo bored!

So yeah... this is only from one listen... I think I want to hear the final thing before I give it any further listens. Overall, it's got a nostalgic feel to it. It actually reminds me more of Incunabula to be honest, cos that album I find terribly boring and samey, I rarely listen to it. But when I do, it feels kinda heart warming... reminds me of when I first started listening to IDM. And so does Oversteps.

treale is definitely the keeper for me as well. the crackly electric synth==

it's funny, i played this album for a friend yesterday and right after we popped on quaristice, and suddenly quaristice sounded comparatively flat and muffled. there's a nice sheen to this album and a sense of depth that i haven't heard in their mixes in like a decade

i think i like this one as much as quaristice. for quaristice it was the first ~40mins or so of the album that really did it for me, then it tapered off (at home the first lp gets played a lot, the second, not as much). except with this album the listening curve is more spread out.

anyway i'm going to put this away for a bit now because there are particular aspects of this album sonically that i'm liking, aspects i find rather curious as well, and i want to wait till the final version is in my hands to find out if having a proper .wav file or lp changes these things

It seems like ae have channeled their random algorithmic side out of the beats and into the melodies which takes some getting used to. Its a bit like free jazz insofar as you have to mentally tune out a lot of the smoke and mirrors and concentrate on only segments of them. Its like theyre playing all the notes around the actual melody as well as the melody itsself, which has a very bloated uneasy effect on the listener which I expect will diminish given time and familiarity.

...and Awepittance I remember you pretty much slated Quaristice on here when it came out so Im surprised to see you holding it up as some kind of benchmark now. Im not saying youre being some kind of devils advocate ass and you'll slowly come around to Oversteps, but surely you must acknowledge that even someone as well versed in theory and production as you will not get all of its intricacies in just a few days.

you just have to listen to quaristice with very good speakers to really understand that its far from the simple in your face structure you hear at first

Quaristice is ace (though only if you consider the whole package) and it received equally as much hate if not more, both here and on xlt as Oversteps does now.

[here i wrote something lengthy about how the meandering of these algorithmic melodies have to be deliberate and are actually efficient and most of all nice, but then decided to erase it cause it was utter wank ]

i hate his face so much

when you write algorithmic music, you design the algorithms, listen to their results, use this feedback process to modify the algorithms, etc. and you select the final results you are going to use. it's still composing in a way, just a different way of going about it. so yes, deliberate is the correct word, deliberate choice.

i imagine they're interested in it for the same reason a lot of us are.. ever changing patches and beats, great for live electronic shows that are never exactly the same twice.