squarepusher Oversteps - Initial Reactions (for real this time)

good

awesome sound/mastering much more polished than Quaristice

very fresh stylish tracks with more melody/harmony so i'm getting into it from the first listen

more thrillers than fillers

critical

slight overuse of glassy long decay polysounds

bit trashy in places

bit mix n match randomness here and there (nothing new for AE)

lacking that familiar dark AE vibe but I think this fresh flavour will grow on me

a classic AE album thats a natural progression from Quaristice

Ok, after three or four listens to the high quality album I can safely say this is awesome. Not my favourite album from Ae, but definitely tops Quaristice and Draft. Treale is also superb - played that loud in the car today and it's close to the physicality of Untilted in places.

See On See makes me want to cry with some kind of joy, it's so nice.

Known(1) is immense. That lead sound with the modulated decay/release is just awesome. When everything stops for those few clicks from that lead = OMG.

I just played the first 4 tracks on my short bicycle ride back from the running track. My bicycle route home goes over some farmers fields and it's gloomy, grey, windswept and raining at the moment. As r e ss started up, it struck me as the sound of getting sucked into a black hole. And the tunes afterward continue that theme for me. Then I realised the front cover, perhaps not a coincidence?

And for some strange reason I keep on thinking of Black Sabbath's album Master of Reality whenever I play this album. Children of the Grave, Into the Void and Lord of this World keep popping into my head. Fucking strange, but true. Either way this album is class.

  On 2/23/2010 at 4:15 AM, theSun said:

snare at 1:50 in treale is siiiiiiiiiiiiick

there is nothing significant or snary about 1:50 in treale. really nice track nonetheless. are you referring to the "carbon" leak or the real oversteps album?

  On 2/24/2010 at 6:40 PM, beerwolf said:

 

And for some strange reason I keep on thinking of Black Sabbath's album Master of Reality whenever I play this album. Children of the Grave, Into the Void and Lord of this World keep popping into my head. Fucking strange, but true. Either way this album is class.

lolwut

I guess that's no worse than my Brain Salad Surgery connection, though.

  On 2/24/2010 at 6:45 PM, l1fef0rm said:

  On 2/23/2010 at 4:15 AM, theSun said:

snare at 1:50 in treale is siiiiiiiiiiiiick

there is nothing significant or snary about 1:50 in treale. really nice track nonetheless. are you referring to the "carbon" leak or the real oversteps album?

if there is no killer snare at about 1:50 in treale, you might want to check your copy or your ears dude.

  On 2/24/2010 at 6:59 PM, phling said:

  On 2/24/2010 at 6:45 PM, l1fef0rm said:

  On 2/23/2010 at 4:15 AM, theSun said:

snare at 1:50 in treale is siiiiiiiiiiiiick

there is nothing significant or snary about 1:50 in treale. really nice track nonetheless. are you referring to the "carbon" leak or the real oversteps album?

if there is no killer snare at about 1:50 in treale, you might want to check your copy or your ears dude.

snare rush only available on 24-bit maximears- edition

  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.

It feels like it's all rhythmic melody, whereas Quaristice felt like it was all melodic rhythm.

Brother and sister?

Oversteps is like a hot chick you meet at a party. Youre a bit drunk and find her really attractive. Then when you go back to her place you start doubting her hotness, but you still give it a shot. After a week of meeting her every now and then you start feeling strangely connected to her but dont feel youre in love. For each day you learn to appreciate new sides of her and then after month you end up proposing. But the marriage doesnt last too long. You start looking at other hot chicks, start having affairs, even with some ex´s from way back. Then a couple of years after the divorce you suddenly bump into her at a mall and you realize how awesome she actually was.

This is at least how I feel. I dont have the same crush as I had with Untilted and LP5, but I really enjoy spending time with this album. Its not as conceptual or progressive as their previous releases were at the time, but its smooth, unpretentious and oozes of Autechre all at the same time.

I think I need a couple of years before I can look back and truly appreciate it.

  On 2/24/2010 at 10:21 PM, frits said:

Oversteps is like a hot chick you meet at a party. Youre a bit drunk and find her really attractive. Then when you go back to her place you start doubting her hotness, but you still give it a shot. After a week of meeting her every now and then you start feeling strangely connected to her but dont feel youre in love. For each day you learn to appreciate new sides of her and then after month you end up proposing. But the marriage doesnt last too long. You start looking at other hot chicks, start having affairs, even with some ex´s from way back. Then a couple of years after the divorce you suddenly bump into her at a mall and you realize how awesome she actually was.

 

This is at least how I feel. I dont have the same crush as I had with Untilted and LP5, but I really enjoy spending time with this album. Its not as conceptual or progressive as their previous releases were at the time, but its smooth, unpretentious and oozes of Autechre all at the same time.

I think I need a couple of years before I can look back and truly appreciate it.

did you divorce her because of her gaping black holes?

  On 2/24/2010 at 12:17 AM, Lianne said:

Who mastered Oversteps?

Noel Summerville

  On 2/24/2010 at 4:16 PM, futureimage said:

Ok, after three or four listens to the high quality album I can safely say this is awesome. Not my favourite album from Ae, but definitely tops Quaristice and Draft. Treale is also superb - played that loud in the car today and it's close to the physicality of Untilted in places.

 

See On See makes me want to cry with some kind of joy, it's so nice.

 

Known(1) is immense. That lead sound with the modulated decay/release is just awesome. When everything stops for those few clicks from that lead = OMG.

Yeah, this part makes me flip out too, it like quickly tears through the silence and back into the full blown lead.

  On 2/24/2010 at 6:59 PM, phling said:

  On 2/24/2010 at 6:45 PM, l1fef0rm said:

  On 2/23/2010 at 4:15 AM, theSun said:

snare at 1:50 in treale is siiiiiiiiiiiiick

there is nothing significant or snary about 1:50 in treale. really nice track nonetheless. are you referring to the "carbon" leak or the real oversteps album?

if there is no killer snare at about 1:50 in treale, you might want to check your copy or your ears dude.

you might hear it as a hand-clap sound - it's either a really munted snare or a distorted handclap.

  On 2/25/2010 at 4:10 AM, thehauntingsoul said:

Yeah, this part makes me flip out too, it like quickly tears through the silence and back into the full blown lead.

lol I read this as 'full blown load'

  On 2/25/2010 at 5:46 AM, ieafs said:

finally managed to download it (i preordered it)... listened twice now and i really really like it and i think it's only going to grow on me. a lot of the more obviously melodic things (with all the FM chimes) sounded quite weird at first... but it's almost like they're showing the innate alien-ness of that sound... not necessarily trying to go for any 80s type feeling... going for this latent plastic futurism that encoded in its DNA.

 

i like how it's decidedly less dark than previous albums, but there's still this ambiguity about it. the harmonies are always twisting into these mutant implied chords. it's deceptively simple i think - there's some quite obvious straight, pretty melodies there... but often there's 3 other melodic things going on at the same time that kind of colour that melody into something subtly weird. it's kind of similar to the way they've treated percussive things in the past.

 

it doesn't really feel like a throwback to anything they've done... other than possibly the chiminess of the melodies being a bit lp5-y (drane2-y). if i had to compare it to anything else it's more probably the previous two albums. all those massive grey reverb arcs and weird degradation from quaristice definitely.

 

i've got to say i like this type of sparse but still really textured percussion type stuff that they've got more into... it's similar to their older stuff but almost like they've taken out every extraneous 128th note and just left this skeleton that implies the same effect with half as many notes. the people who've said this sounds confident i think have hit this on the head.

 

favourites would probably be d-sho qub (had a massive grin on my face when that one hit), qplay and os viex3... but i really like the whole thing in it's entirety. more than any other album this feels more one big piece of music than a collection of different tracks. things like see on see kind of serve the same function as the concrete stuff inbetween the tracks on lp5 - kind of the component parts of the album drifting around and then coelescing into things like treale (that end melody in treale is driving me mad in what it reminds me of - i think it's an boc track of all things?)

 

i dunno, i can see why people who dug ae mainly for their rhythmic invention might not like it as much... but i'm not really specifically into their melodies either. it's more the component atmosphere of their stuff that i like most and this album really caters to that i think. it's less dark or moody than things like confield or draft... but it's still alien and weird. it's just in a subtle way that i think might catch people offguard.

well said

the only part i specifcally disagree with is this part

  Quote

i've got to say i like this type of sparse but still really textured percussion type stuff that they've got more into... it's similar to their older stuff but almost like they've taken out every extraneous 128th note and just left this skeleton that implies the same effect with half as many notes. the people who've said this sounds confident i think have hit this on the head.

to me the tracks that have percussion but sound more like skeletons where the beats feel very sparse sound weaker and less confident than the melodic only ones. It's hard to explain but something about them reminds me of the type of stuff on early FAX records that i wasn't that into where the beats feel held back and 'chilloutish' to be more atmospheric but it just comes off as a little unsatisfying.

but i pretty much agree with everything else you've said

I'm still really impressed with how ae have managed to reinvent themselves this time without it sounding too forced. I thought Quaristice was a very forced sounding album, despite the fact that it apparently came from jam sessions.

Anyway r ess is a current fave, very nice opening track

they were forced into a series of jam sessions

i suspect they were, after viewing their bank statement

I am really starting to think this is one of their more ground breaking albums. Maybe not technically, but musically I haven't experience something like this before. I mean we all knew that this was going to be amberish, so I don't understand what some people were expecting, but this certainly surpassed my expectations. I would have been happy with Amber 2.0, but this is its own thing entirely I think

the big comparison to amber that i keep making is that the melodies in both albums, especially the barer beatless tracks recall some sort of deja vu like lost memory feeling for me. I feel like it's a melody i've heard perhaps in my childhood or in a dream but it's vague ie : Nine, Yulquen. Oversteps has been having a similar effect on me lately with tracks like See on See, Treale , o=0.

  On 2/25/2010 at 12:08 PM, Awepittance said:

the big comparison to amber that i keep making is that the melodies in both albums, especially the barer beatless tracks recall some sort of deja vu like lost memory feeling for me. I feel like it's a melody i've heard perhaps in my childhood or in a dream but it's vague ie : Nine, Yulquen. Oversteps has been having a similar effect on me lately with tracks like See on See, Treale , o=0.

i agree some tracks do resemble amber melodies, however on my first impression when it leaked was not amberish at all. in fact it was the melody driven tracks that threw me off the most, because the first two tracks certainly had me basically convinced it was legit. but overall I think this album sounds very different then amber, its doesn't have that deep atmospheric mood that amber carried imo. this is much more specific and emotive to me, and so much more expressive and sophisticated. it has the charm of complex ae rhythms and a similarly complex use of synths, creating some really progressive melodies. and the mastering imo is brilliant cause it doesn't stretch the two complexities too far apart... it brings them together to this grainy equilibrium

It's funny how nobody seems to be saying they're blown away by it - I'm still not either - but it's very beguiling. I haven't really listened to any music for over a year, believe it or not, apart from some online samples. My music lobe withered or something. I probably listened to Quaristice 7 times total. But this is holding my interest.

i was pretty blown away with it. first listen i got halfway and was so overwhelmed, i really wanted to listen to all the tracks i had just listened to. so i stopped halfway and started again :P

first 2 days of havnig the album i squeezed in about 5 listens :D

reminds me more of draft7.30 than amber. amber comparision makes sense .. but nah.. it's more like an ambient draft7.30 ye?