Autechre Autechre - Oversteps (WARP210) [The MegaThread]

1. Draft/ Confield/Untilted / [Glasgow Art School]

2. Chiastic Slide / Envane / Cichlisuite / Gantz Graf / EP7 / Oversteps (not sure yet)

3. LP5 / Both Peel Sessions / Anti EP / Quaristice + Versions / Garbage / Anvil Vapre

4. Tri Rep / We R

5. Amber / Quadrange

6. Incunabula / Basscad EP

That's about as granular as I can make it, which is not very. No value attached to horizontal order. It would probably be totally different tomorrow. Everything down to level 4 inclusive is loved immensely, to the point the ordering feels artificial. 5 and 6 are great but seem objectively lower in quality.

Edit: Tri Rep should probably be @ 3, but what the fuck.

  On 2/14/2010 at 7:52 PM, thehauntingsoul said:

  On 2/14/2010 at 4:58 PM, k h o v said:

am i the only one here who thinks draft is a predictable (if not weak) album ?

after confield & its abstract/esoteric charms, i found draft pretty complicated & a bit boring. its not a bad record, it has its great moments, but when it came out, i really felt the gescom iss isa was better. to my ears, draft is nice but Untilted (or confield) seems more inspired/risky.

Predictable? WWWWTTFFFFFF???? Xylin Room? IV VV IV VV VIII? 61e.CR? Tapr? Surripere? Theme of sudden roundabout? VL AL 5? P.:ntil? V-Proc? Reniform Puls? All of these tracks have surprises and unpredictable stuff going on. I have no idea how you could call an Ae album predictable because one of the main purposes of Ae albums seems that they are unpredictable.

i truly find draft predictable & i dont say it to piss people off... i like the album, not as much as the other records. predictable regarding ae's discography at least : its not a big step after confield or gantz graf, not a surprise for any Ae follower. its not very melodious (unlike LP5, no Rae/acroyear2), not that experimental (unlike confield), not very warm (unlike amber), not very punchy or in your face(unlike Untilted). i also find it predictable regarding Xylin room (it really sound like VI scose pose, without the magic & the freshness of it) & surripere whose melody seems pretty simple, repetitive & not even experimental, neither trippy or groovy. what i love with ae is their magical groove & their insane/trippy sound & i dont find it with draft. no big deal.

  On 2/14/2010 at 8:10 PM, bardamu said:

draft is insane. i used to think that between untilted/draft/confield, confield was clearly the best, but then i realized each had its special charm. for me draft is way more textural than confield. i first got into it from a sound design perspective, then realized that there were melodies buried in draft just as beautiful as confield. a good litmus test is if youve noticed the "hidden" melodies in the end of vproc (the weird reverb tails that form a carnival like melody) or the first half of surripere (the slightly tonal wooden hits!).

 

(it was only a matter of time before this thread devolved into album ranking)

I wouldn't say that either of your examples are at all buried in the music. Both of them are pretty noticeable imo, but I've also listened to their entire discog many tens of times so I might be biased in my judgement.

  On 2/14/2010 at 9:12 PM, k h o v said:

i truly find draft predictable & i dont say it to piss people off... i like the album, not as much as the other records. predictable regarding ae's discography at least : its not a big step after confield or gantz graf, not a surprise for any Ae follower. its not very melodious (unlike LP5, no Rae/acroyear2), not that experimental (unlike confield), not very warm (unlike amber), not very punchy or in your face(unlike Untilted). i also find it predictable regarding Xylin room (it really sound like VI scose pose, without the magic & the freshness of it) & surripere whose melody seems pretty simple, repetitive & not even experimental, neither trippy or groovy. what i love with ae is their magical groove & their insane/trippy sound & i dont find it with draft. no big deal.

I can't see how you say Draft 7.30 isn't melodic. Compared to Confield and Untilted which surrounded it, It easily has more obvious up-front melodies than either of them. I'll pick a bunch of examples to show:

Spoiler for slightly in-depth possibly tl;dr argument involving the tracks:

Now I've gone into detail with Draft, so I won't get too specific with the comparison. Untilted is quite non-melodic, save for a few tracks. Confield is more melodic but still far less so than Draft 7.30.

I don't mean to come off as a prick though, I just think that if you consider this album to be non-melodic then you should really give it a second shot.

i think my favorite autechre album changes too much.. i like them all and tend to rediscover them from time to time when i go through a phase of listening to them again. this week i pulled out tri repetae and untilted and listened to them both for the first time in a while, heard them both differently all over again.. great albums

i like the new autechre rhythms but i can't stand the drums that just created random chaos, i'm thinking of some draft tracks, they totally ruin it/.

disagree that it's 'not very experimental' sure confield started the whole off kilter AE beats programming thing but Draft imo is some of the best stuttering/drum melodies i've ever heard put to record.

it's experimental in the sense that they fucking nailed perfectly how to make beautiful sounding melodies completely out of their percussion and drum loops. if you can point me to a record that does this more inventively, creatively and as pleasurable i will personally pay you $1,000,000

Confield and Untilted feel like transitions into and out of the perfection that is Draft 7.30

  On 2/14/2010 at 10:47 PM, Awepittance said:

disagree that it's 'not very experimental' sure confield started the whole off kilter AE beats programming thing but Draft imo is some of the best stuttering/drum melodies i've ever heard put to record.

it's experimental in the sense that they fucking nailed perfectly how to make beautiful sounding melodies completely out of their percussion and drum loops. if you can point me to a record that does this more inventively, creatively and as pleasurable i will personally pay you $1,000,000

Confield and Untilted feel like transitions into and out of the perfection that is Draft 7.30

i agree with this pretty much. however, i find that i enjoy untilted and confield more than draft. even though draft is probably technically their best i find that i listen to untilted with much more regularity. i have a hard time with a lot of draft in short doses. untilted is great because it has an amazing amount of detailed programming but it can be listened to casually as well because most of the beats are just killer.

some of their older stuff sems to go on a bit too long, imo. stuff on tri rep or even chiastic, as awesiome as everything is, sometimes seem that the tracks are a bit too long. maybe im just being picky. i just have a thing for untilted i guess. i think if untilted was without fermium, id consider it my favorite record of theirs. although that does change every few months.

I want my melodies on a plate thanks, combined with the bolder aesthetic of the percussion, thats why Oversteps is fucking unreal. They just keep getting better.

ive never heard somebody so gracefully turn a bass drum sound into a bassline like this before, i mean people rarely try this but i'd be hard pressed to see it topped

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsNDajQMvYI&feature=PlayList&p=E61C7D6986A43F8A&index=7

i think the drum farting or stuttering or whatever you want to call it on this album puts pretty much every other electronic musician to shame

  On 2/14/2010 at 11:06 PM, jules said:

some of their older stuff sems to go on a bit too long, imo. stuff on tri rep or even chiastic, as awesiome as everything is, sometimes seem that the tracks are a bit too long. maybe im just being picky.

the only albums i get this off are amber and incunabula, really.

from garbage on, everything (mostly) 'sounds the right length'

in fact garbagemx used be my favourite ae track for a long time, and they could not accomplish what they did in that track in less time than it took, if you get me.

  On 2/14/2010 at 11:36 PM, kaini said:

  On 2/14/2010 at 11:06 PM, jules said:

some of their older stuff sems to go on a bit too long, imo. stuff on tri rep or even chiastic, as awesiome as everything is, sometimes seem that the tracks are a bit too long. maybe im just being picky.

 

the only albums i get this off are amber and incunabula, really.

from garbage on, everything (mostly) 'sounds the right length'

 

in fact garbagemx used be my favourite ae track for a long time, and they could not accomplish what they did in that track in less time than it took, if you get me.

as far as i am concerned, every track on garbage could be an hour long and i wouldn't mind. its more with chiastic i feel that. amber sometimes too, for sure. like i said, its just being super picky to try and gauge what my fav would be. its an impossible task and i cant rank them like people are doing, i was just trying to over analyze to myself.

i couldn't rank them either. because there's such development, a lot of the time it's like comparing oranges to the concept of pi.

all i can say is that oversteps, draft, and lp5 are near the top, and incunabula and amber are near the bottom

if you can point me to a record that does this more inventively, creatively and as pleasurable i will personally pay you $1,000,000

confield dude ! confield !

(the track you post is ace tho - i like some draft trx indeed)

is it still the oversteps' thread ?

looks more like a "best autechre album list" one.

Or a draft 7.30 glory one.

Which is fine, since draft is one of the best ones...

You know, Draft7.30 did grow on me a little bit. Comparing it to the emotionally moving epic journeys of Chiastic Slide, LP5 or Confield is laughable, but I realised a little while ago that there's really only 3 tracks that i absolutely despise, and they really ruin the album for me:

TAPR

THEME OF SUDDEN ROUNDABOUT

VL AL 5

I can't stand these. The melodies sound so arbritary, like they didn't care what they sounded like, as long as it changed pitch a bit. I just find them so incredibly annoying. TAPR I can almost handle, because even though it's really grating, it's at least a little bit strange (in a cheesy way but still). But the other two have no redeeming quality as far as I can tell. They just sound like generic IDM, trying desperately to be dark and spooky and failing miserably.

But other than that, I quite like the rest. Definitely not as much as the older stuff but still, I feel like I'd miss V-PROC and SURRIPERE especially if I didn't have this CD.

draft has the most overt hip-hop influence of any of their albums, i think. some places are like an awkwardly constructed robot b-boy made from mismatched parts with one leg longer than the other trying to get crunk. i painted my bathroom completely white once whilst listening to draft REALLY FUCKING LOUD. that was the day i fell in love with that particular album.

now back to your regularly scheduled arguing about oversteps

MAWAWHAWHaWHaWH

the thread cycles topics, it's like a hamburger,

Well now I gotta give Draft another chance. I bought the album on CD right when I first started getting into electronic music, and I think it was at the time too much for my mind to handle, so I put it to the side. Later I swear I remember people on WATMM criticizing the album as well, saying it wasn't very good. But it appears this may not be this case.

i'm surprised at all the love for Untilted, I guess for many of you that was your first Ae album.

I really think Chiastic was their best, some of the tracks do go on "too long", but I think that adds to the hypnotic vibe. That whole album has a very special feel to it imo. LP5 hit me like a shotgun blast to the face the first time I heard it, but it's a bit accessible compared to other Ae so I think it grows familiar too quickly. Nevertheless, I think it's probably tied for their best album. Confield is a very powerful album but I think it loses points for not having any vulnerability. It's monolithic and intense and fucks with your head, but those aren't the only things I'm looking for. Draft is mainly about the attention to detail and sound design, as far as the actual "songs" they are a bit weak imo. It is a good album but sort of hard for me to enjoy. And to this day I don't get people gushing over Surripere, I think I'm never going to "get" the second half.

Draft puts me in a weird place. It's a much harder listen for me than Confield; part of that is because Draft approaches your expectations a little asymptotically, and ultimately just subverts them. Whereas Confield primes you for abstraction early and stays in that mode. Confield is less frustrating in that sense. Lentic Catachresis should be more disturbing than Reniform Puls, but Reniform Puls makes me much more uneasy.

Large parts of Draft also seem to move in the opposite direction of Untilted. Draft moves from relatively straightforward to epic fragmentation. Untilted kind of gathers fragmented pieces together and ends in a more traditional/cohesive place. It's a more listener-friendly development. They both have tracks that deviate from that formula, but the contrast between the two feels pretty deliberate to me.

For example, Surripere seems to be a very deliberate microcosm of the Draft idea of development and deconstruction. Augmatic Disport kind of represents the opposite movement (compare the first minute to the last minute). And something like Bine represents the Confield idea of total, immediate immersion into the alien for the duration.

None of that renders Draft less brilliant (and, arguably, it might render it more so). It's just a tricky one to handle. Requires a delicate balance between active listening and just getting carried along. I'm not surprised its placement on ae-preference lists is so variable.

Edit: Then again, Confield was my first ae album, around 2001. So maybe that's why it seems more digestible to me.

Uhh, OVERSTEPS.

i introduced a good mate of mine to autechre through the oversteps promo on friday. he instantly fell in love, having not heard a minute's autechre before that (i knew he would, though. he owns a couple of shortwave radios so he can listen to numbers stations ). then i sent him a youtube link to bine, and he didn't like it at all - but i wasn't expecting him to. and today i sent him lp5, which i just know he's going to fucking love.

  On 2/15/2010 at 1:01 AM, kaini said:

i introduced a good mate of mine to autechre through the oversteps promo on friday. he instantly fell in love, having not heard a minute's autechre before that (i knew he would, though. he owns a couple of shortwave radios so he can listen to numbers stations ). then i sent him a youtube link to bine, and he didn't like it at all - but i wasn't expecting him to. and today i sent him lp5, which i just know he's going to fucking love.

Oversteps is the album I have been waiting for Autechre to make I feel. It just kind of completes the puzzle for me... now all I want to do is sink myself into their discography for a few years.

  On 2/15/2010 at 1:10 AM, karmakramer said:

Oversteps is the album I have been waiting for Autechre to make I feel. It just kind of completes the puzzle for me...

coincidentally the title of the message i sent the chap was 'the next piece of the puzzle'. high five.

agreed. oversteps is somehow a good "summation" album. Also I have to admit I really dig how accessible and emotional it is. There are some really lovely spots on the album.