squarepusher Oversteps - Initial Reactions (for real this time)

And Granz Graf is 'avant-garde', surely? The title track, I mean.

  On 2/23/2010 at 8:53 PM, eugene said:

  On 2/23/2010 at 8:38 PM, jaderpansen said:

  On 2/23/2010 at 8:20 PM, Awepittance said:

it's funny how if someone has legit criticisms toward and album people get very defensive and try to paint the person as a 'hater'

grow some thicker skin guys.

 

but who decides what's "legit" in aesthetic choices?

i don't mind criticism at all, and god knows i don't think everything they've put out it is gold. but arguing they should have sticked to what they did 2001-2005 because that'd still be more "cutting edge" or something is just bull.

i think that's exactly what im NOT saying, at least trying to..

sticking to a particular sound is what autechre was all against, perhaps even unconsciously. putting confield, draft and untilted in the same bag is not knowing autechre well enough (not that im a super autechre geek, but i played the shit of those and chiastic slide and particular).

I don’t think confield, draft and untilted are of the same cloth at all, but i think we can agree that they are the holy trinity of complex beat programming in their catalogue, the one thing people keep mentioning is sorely missing on the last output, so i just threw them together to argue along those lines.

sure, the complexity of condraftled is awe-inspiring, but you can't just settle on that alone... it'd become a gimmick to please masses of fanbois screaming "amaze me, amaze me".

I’d agree their funk-sensibility is something special, but i’d still not talk about „avantgarde“ because of that.

(i think avantgarde is an early to mid 20th century phenomenon anyway and not applicable anymore to anything.

„Avant-garde represents a pushing of the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or the status quo, primarily in the cultural realm.“ Well if you just put it in a contextual way, you could say britney spears is avantgarde in the cultural realm of watmm. Also everything would be avantagarde somewhere so nothing would.)

Now i understand you’re not saying that, but awaited something you DIDN’T await. thing is, personally i feel oversteps IS a step beyond and not conservative at all. This album hadn’t been possible in this form in amber-times, no way! Also, is this disappointment not somehow what u wanted, then?

Also the step from quaristice to oversteps is bigger than from confield to draft, at least contrast between them is bigger, i think that’s quite obvious, but maybe you feel otherwise... i think in context of their own career it’s quite daring but still far from sucking up to the man (pop). Like i said in the other thread, it puts me places i never went before.

what's nice about gantz graf is that it is batshit insane yet it grooves quite well once you're used to the chaos. most tracks that sound try to sound anything like gantz graf end up being un-followable and not groovy. the fact that ae is mostly in 4/4 would be disappointing if their beats started to sound the same, but there are a lot of ways ae stretch and bend the groove from 4/4 and people won't lose it as often as any other time sig (other than 3s maybe)

  On 2/23/2010 at 9:13 PM, TwiddleBot said:

i would argue the exact opposite.. their drum programming is lush and detailed for sure, but still a good chunk of their rhythmic material is very metric and in four. and atonal music has been around for close to a century now, musique concrete has been around since the 50's.

 

i'm not dissing confield at all, just that it clearly draws from some particular musical traditions as well as idm. they simply have their own unique take on things, that's what makes them good artists, but it doesn't make them avant-garde

 

anyway funny how a good chunk of this little debate here revolves around what is commonly perceived as complexity in music.. as opposed to subtle things like phrasing, etc..

e-xac-tly

  On 2/23/2010 at 7:49 PM, eugene said:

it's stuffed full with amber-esque cheese

 

i don't deconstruct autechre to specific elements, their albums are all very different to me. i don't know how can you generalize like that, their past albums are full of melody and emotion and they don't necessarily have to come one with another, they just worked they melodies differently on older albums.

 

i always thought that "self-indulgent" is one of the best compliments for a musician

I agree that their past albums were full of melody and emotion, my point was that it's always been pretty well buried and it's now out in the open. Which I find disorienting but refreshing. I personally don't find it cheesy, though I could see how it could be taken that way. Oddly, I listened to Amber a lot over the last few months so maybe I've unwittingly primed myself for Oversteps.

I mostly agree about self-indulgence. Habit is something else, however, and while I have enjoyed the general Autechre sound as we know it from Confield to Quaristice, change is good.

Yeah, gantz graf is awesomely funky in spite of its chaos.

Would Oversteps really not have been possible in Amber times? Apart from a few of the tracks, I can't see why not. Not that this makes it bad... but it's definitely nostalgic and its got its dated, blatant synthy synth sounds. I'm no music expert, but as I think to albums that came out in 94 I can't see why at least half of Oversteps couldn't have been created then.

The question is: now that Autechre are also on a more nostalgic tip, will anyone on Warp quench our thirst for self indulgent, challenging lumps of sonic beauty anymore? Aphex Twin went down the acid road, Squarepusher is thumping away irritatingly on his bass guitar and making badly produced, light hearted funk/fusion dross, BoC's last album shed off most of the groups 'IDM' elements and could have come out in the 70s - even Clark's Totems Flare was much more populist than anything he'd put out since and including ETBOY.

I guess Warp artists aren't where that kind of thing's at any more.

I don't get the nostalgia criticism of these sounds. They're pretty fresh to my ears. I think Amber sounds like TRON to Oversteps' Avatar.

If autechre were to start their patches.. then douse their laptops with inflammables and light them on fire, continue to amplify the volume till the computers cracked and melted, then hurled the remnants at the audience, I'd be like.. 'oh! autechre's gone avant-garde!' (or possibly fluxus lol)

  On 2/23/2010 at 9:20 PM, jaderpansen said:

This album hadn’t been possible in this form in amber-times, no way!

The level of detail going on in the continuous shaping and phrasing of the synth work in this album.. back in the early 90's it would have been through the roof in terms of difficulty. (I suppose coil was doing some pretty crazy production around that time though..) Anyway it's very purdy. Up until now they were the drum programming masters, IMO now they're synth masters as well.

I just don't find the melodies all that interesting, kind of like Venetian Snares' melodies. I think their beats are more original and expressive, whereas their melodies on Oversteps sound like monkeys pounding away to trigger an arpeggiator. But maybe I'll get it upon more listens.

  On 2/23/2010 at 9:40 PM, sweepstakes said:

I don't get the nostalgia criticism of these sounds. They're pretty fresh to my ears. I think Amber sounds like TRON to Oversteps' Avatar.

Well, a lot of the tracks use FM synthesis.. O0 for example the main lead bell melody is a FM synth sound that any of us who grew up with a soundblaster pro or a sega genesis heard a LOT of times as both those machines had cheap home FM synths built into them

I found it quite hard to separate my association of some of these sounds with the 80s, early 90s for that reason ;)

  On 2/23/2010 at 9:34 PM, Lianne said:

 

Would Oversteps really not have been possible in Amber times? Apart from a few of the tracks, I can't see why not. Not that this makes it bad... but it's definitely nostalgic and its got its dated, blatant synthy synth sounds. I'm no music expert, but as I think to albums that came out in 94 I can't see why at least half of Oversteps couldn't have been created then.

 

granted, i'd have to be god to make that claim KNOWINGLY. let me put it more humbly: in my personal estimation this album couldn't have been made in amber times... BY AUTECHRE at least. why? because they only started using max on tri rep... lol, no.

seriously tho, as twiddlebot pointed out i too think it would have been a technical challende. but even more so i feel they gained alot of freedom in their understanding of melodic development... i mean just compare the two. amber is a lot more linear. and while there are melodic lines on oversteps that could be considered "traditional" they always seem to take turns at some point where at least i go "wth"... like i tried to talk about my perception of O=0... it's hard for me to describe these things but it has an emotional ambiguity to me that's just magical, while amber is mostly clearly major/minor (i think).

(nothing against amber btw... tho i prefer incunubula for 444 alone... any album with that track on it would be a winner to me)

and why would you consider oversteps less self indulgent than anything else they've done?!

  On 2/23/2010 at 9:13 PM, TwiddleBot said:

i would argue the exact opposite.. their drum programming is lush and detailed for sure, but still a good chunk of their rhythmic material is very metric and in four. and atonal music has been around for close to a century now, musique concrete has been around since the 50's.

 

i'm not dissing confield at all, just that it clearly draws from some particular musical traditions as well as idm. they simply have their own unique take on things, that's what makes them good artists, but it doesn't make them avant-garde

you're speaking in very purist terms here, but i understand where you're coming from. Most musique concrete and serialist composition effects very little people on an emotional level. I think it takes someone truly avant-garde (not just in theory and concept but also in practice and execution) to pull off what Autechre does. Something can be in 4/4 and still be extremely creative and taking it in a new direction. Something can be using an entirely new time signature and be based on a whole new method of composition but if the result is unable to reach anybody on an emotional level it's just going to sound like a bunch of noises that in the listeners mind sounds not too different from a whole slew of other 20th century composers. I think this is an important point to make because too many people are stuck in a linear tunnel vision of academic music and what it means to be 'avant-garde' forgetting that art still needs to go to the core of someones emotions.

I always think back to the Stockhausen interview where he was played aphex twin songs because the interviewer thought they were experimental, Stockhausen distilled the music to being a bunch of 'repetitive african drum rhythms' I think this is what actually happens when you stick your head to far up your own ass, and i don't think Autechre ever went that far, they always skated the line for me, right on the extreme edges of tradtional musical structure

  Quote

I think their beats are more original and expressive, whereas their melodies on Oversteps sound like monkeys pounding away to trigger an arpeggiator.

I think that it's possible to imagine character behind some of the melodies, squeezing in the chance elements in the algorhythms or whatever.

Arguing about what is/isn't "avant-garde" is a little useless without strictly defining the term. The term has been pretty much robbed of all meaning anyway. In the classic usage, something like "flutter" is probably ae's most avant-garde recording, since there is a deliberate anti-institutional element (which the boys seem to deliberately eschew in most other cases.) On the other hand, it's pretty populist.

The concept is also pretty messy since avant-garde is largely a modernist movement rather than a postmodernist movement, and that's a seriously rotten can of worms full of even more poorly defined terms and false dichotomies.

edit:

  Quote

I always think back to the Stockhausen interview where he was played aphex twin songs because the interviewer thought they were experimental, Stockhausen distilled the music to being a bunch of 'repetitive african drum rhythms' I think this is what actually happens when you stick your head to far up your own ass, and i don't think Autechre ever went that far, they always skated the line for me, right on the extreme edges of tradtional musical structure

I really wish they had played some mid-late period Ae for the old curmudgeon. lol, @ his "post-African repetition" critique.

  On 2/23/2010 at 10:06 PM, jaderpansen said:

i mean just compare the two. amber is a lot more linear.

I agree.. the melodic work in amber is very restrained.. almost the entire album consists of playing notes in one key/mode (dorian) from start to finish, which pretty much after that became a staple of the spinoffs. I don't really see any comparison either. Actually, I'm having trouble thinking of albums where they've so blatantly used lengthy chord progressions and changes in key before.. or polytonality (like in treale)

  On 2/23/2010 at 10:12 PM, Awepittance said:

I think it takes someone truly avant-garde (not just in theory and concept but also in practice and execution) to pull off what Autechre does...

Fair enough.. I guess I am a purist with the way I use that word

  On 2/23/2010 at 9:50 PM, TwiddleBot said:

  On 2/23/2010 at 9:40 PM, sweepstakes said:

I don't get the nostalgia criticism of these sounds. They're pretty fresh to my ears. I think Amber sounds like TRON to Oversteps' Avatar.

 

Well, a lot of the tracks use FM synthesis.. O0 for example the main lead bell melody is a FM synth sound that any of us who grew up with a soundblaster pro or a sega genesis heard a LOT of times as both those machines had cheap home FM synths built into them

 

I found it quite hard to separate my association of some of these sounds with the 80s, early 90s for that reason ;)

Ah, OK. I could see that. There's lots of not-so-obvious FM too, like on some of the basses. I've got tones out of my TX81Z similar to some of the harsh but plasticky, sawtooth-like basses.

  On 2/23/2010 at 10:12 PM, Awepittance said:

Stockhausen distilled the music to being a bunch of 'repetitive african drum rhythms'

Yeah, he was pretty dismissive. But I found that interview pretty funny as well as Stockhausen has a very strange and somewhat singular idea of rhythm.

Anyway as I quickly discovered, much of modern academia seems to suffer from a phobia of metric rhythm, which is really too bad ;) (Although I have heard a few dissenting works from back in the 70's and 80's, radical, brilliant and forward-thinking stuff.)

Does anyone else find Oversteps a bit bass-shy and slightly tinny sounding in comparison to other Ae albums? I listened to a fair bit of Quaristice on headphones just now, (wrongly) expecting it to sound flat after having indulged in the new one so much, but I found the opposite. It's warmer, punchier, bassier, and has a lot more presence - even on the ambient tracks. Who mastered Oversteps?

Quaristice is bassier but that seems to be because of the compositions in Quaristice rather than the mastering per se. Quaristice is all about deep and dark.

The tonal palette for Oversteps is brighter (and there's less sub-bass anchoring), but it doesn't seem improperly mastered to me. There's a lot of dynamic range and really clear transients that I don't really hear on Quaristice.

also, while stockhausen has made some great music, a lot of his "compositions" are shite sounding academic explorations of ideas. people get too wrapped up with the complexity of it all! ae loves fm synths, we all know this. i think this was a huge leap forward for them, musically. i will be listening to this one a lot -- no other ae album has really hit me this quickly. also, to respond to a previous comment: i think their beats are incredible but not necessarily as expressive as the beats afx throws together. when i listen to one of afx's hyper programmed tracks, the drums tell a story and lead the track as much as any non-percussive element. in ae's music, the beats can be incredibly complex and integral to the song, but they play the role of setting the stage for me more than anything else. there are obviously exceptions to all these rules, and i love ae's beats as much as rdj's, but they seem to sit in very different areas in my heart. to me, in my definition of expressiveness, afx puts together expressive beats, while ae uses them as a part of a crazy, constantly changing whole.

Why do people get so hung up on having melodies anyway? What's the point? There are only, what, fifty million artists out there writing music with fuckin melodies and we get pissed that Autechre don't always fall in with that? What's the point??

At least the melodic stuff on this record is always swathed in counterpoint so there's a little somethin going on to keep it interesting. A lot of their more melody oriented stuff (LP5 especially) from the past gets pretty boring to my ears at least. I won't even get started on Incunabula.

the thing I like most about this album is it feels confident to me. Hard to describe, but I haven't felt that from an Ae album since confield. Sounds like they had a clear idea and stuck to it.

For me this is an autechre pop album, but at least i can enjoy some songs, unlike with LP5 and EP7.

  On 2/24/2010 at 8:54 AM, Robot9000 said:

For me this is an autechre pop album, but at least i can enjoy some songs, unlike with LP5 and EP7.

edit: also st epreo sounds kind of like iera's epilogue or something

i have to recant some of my previous thoughts about the album. listened to it loud, 24bit wavs... there really is more going on there. more subtle layering of melodies and texture work than i had hiterto noticed. it does feel like a real successor to the recent albums, but boy is it subtle. its subtlety is hidden by the obviousness (confidence? as someone said) of some of the melodies, i think. somewhat sad to join the walking-cliche-brigade of ae fans rabidly disliking, then rabidly liking any new album, but... yeah... it has happened.

i also got krYlon and Yuop for the first time. also, did anyone else SEE the enso at the end of yuop? genius.