Autechre Why are they so intent on demystifying themselves?

  On 3/16/2010 at 10:09 AM, djimbe said:

the realisation that mixing horizontally can sound awesome (play sounds end to end, rather than over each other)

what do you mean by that?

is it about production or mastering?

Perhaps because there's not really any mystery to making music.

i think one of the things that really got me into autechre in the first place was the very minimal (or lack of) cover art.. the message i got from it was "this is entirely about the music".

(mixing horizontally instead of vertically, the secret to loud, clean, minimal techno)

  On 3/16/2010 at 12:56 PM, TwiddleBot said:

 

(mixing horizontally instead of vertically, the secret to loud, clean, minimal techno)

yeah I got that

what does it mean / how does it work?

play sounds end to end--as in back to back.. play sounds sequentially, rather than layering them.

do this with percussion tracks.. you're still going to perceive layers

it doesn't seem like sean and rob put on any sort of publicity hat for their interviews, they're just having a chat. this is why i like the interviews.

besides, if you're into ae for any reason other than the sound that comes out of your speakers....

  On 3/16/2010 at 1:39 PM, TwiddleBot said:

play sounds end to end--as in back to back.. play sounds sequentially, rather than layering them.

 

do this with percussion tracks.. you're still going to perceive layers

ah you are basically speaking about playing only one sound at a time?

why are they so intent on demystifying themselves? they've seen how the boc fanboys are.

  On 3/16/2010 at 1:56 PM, o00o said:

ah you are basically speaking about playing only one sound at a time?

Yeah, or at least that's how I interpreted it. It's an interesting exercise in regards to drums because you still build up some really interesting rhythms but each individual hit is perceived as super loud and punchy, and when looped, you still hear layers. Makes your sound more transportable too.. you aren't relying on having a good hifi venue where all the depth of your music is lost anyway

  On 3/16/2010 at 1:56 PM, azatoth said:

why are they so intent on demystifying themselves? they've seen how the boc fanboys are.

lol true just read that for example:

http://bocpages.org/wiki/The_Cosmic_Crofter

  On 3/16/2010 at 12:57 AM, Lianne said:

  On 3/16/2010 at 12:44 AM, Sam said:

Have you heard the 45 min interview with Sean that was floating around here from the Quaristice interviews? Seems like a sound bloke, and they chatted about a lot of interesting stuff. Try and track it down, it's definitely worth the listen.

 

Where could I hear this?

 

Would be very glad to hear this interview.

i have this 45 min long interview...don't know if it's the same one

27 min long interview

  On 3/16/2010 at 1:52 PM, theSun said:

it doesn't seem like sean and rob put on any sort of publicity hat for their interviews, they're just having a chat. this is why i like the interviews.

 

besides, if you're into ae for any reason other than the sound that comes out of your speakers....

Obviously it's the sound coming out of the speakers that has made us fans. Nothing else! It's just that the sound coming out is often so spectacular that I'm surprised it's spoken about in the way it is in some interviews (though there are exceptions, like the sound on sound interview, the BBC and Barcode ones with Rob Brown, and the Toazted interview from 2005... Though the 1998 Toazted interview is kind of opposite to the 2005 ones, and is EXACTLY the sort of interview approach that inspired my OP.)

Others have raised really great points here, despite my lopsided opener... And it doesn't matter that much I suppose.

xox - thanks for those links!

it's the whole thing that you can create something genius and not know exactly how to describe it in universal terms. like when they said they composed while thinking of a person or something. it's not like they're going to be like "oh yeah well pen expers is kind of like my cousin steve, that's really the main idea behind it" in an interview. plus, a lot of the magic of autechre is not knowing exactly how a sound was made, or wtf is going on at all. that's how they meant for you to interpret it, i think if they start dissecting their songs in interviews it will lead to conceiving their songs in pieces or patches or synths instead of the whole thing.

  On 3/15/2010 at 8:44 PM, Lianne said:

I've spent far too much time reading lots of Autechre interviews (and interviews with loads of other artists), and one thing that's always puzzled me is their desire to make the whole thing seem as un-magical and and flippant and "it's just a laugh, innit" as possible. With the exception of a few interviews with Rob Brown alone, and perhaps a few moments in other interviews, it seems - when not being standoffish or minimal in their responses - the lads are intent on reducing what they do to nothing more than a minor extension of their graffiti and mix taping days, or something.

 

I'm not a snob. I'm absolutely cool with them not being boffins in white coats but Northern lads who have spoked a lot of weed and had some fun with bending the rules of music. In fact, some artists with the most to say, in the most eloquent ways of saying it, produce the most shitty, dull, academic wank you've ever heard. But you can be yourself and you can be from whatever background and still seem imaginative and open and keen on expanding what you're doing musically in words. For example, I'm not a big fan of Burial, really, but I've read a really cool interview with him likening his music to various experiences and images. It wasn't a philosophical treatise, but it did make me want to listen to his music.

 

If they were bad with words or shy or whatever, that's fine. Plenty of directors and musicians make cool shit and don't know how to talk about it. But their approach to interviews seems to be directly and deliberately opposed to the actual music they are making, and I don't know why they bother most of the time. It'd definitely not make me want to listen to them if I'd never heard of them before, and it doesn't really reveal anything new to people who are already fans of theirs, except maybe that we care too much about their music and they don't give a shit about us.

Would you prefer they be faux-mysterious, like the Daft Punk guys?

i actually prefer Autechre spend most of their time developing movie quality cylon costumes and a lighted up pyramid for their stage show rather than focus on music making, this way they can drop an EP with a bunch of barely altered funk song loops to reach the charts. imagine how much better AE would be

Draft 7.30 Punk

  On 3/16/2010 at 7:56 PM, Awepittance said:

i actually prefer Autechre spend most of their time developing movie quality cylon costumes and a lighted up pyramid for their stage show rather than focus on music making, this way they can drop an EP with a bunch of barely altered funk song loops to reach the charts. imagine how much better AE would be

yeah that would be awesome they could also start singing with vocoders and making shitty art like movies driving around with no sense at all

  On 3/16/2010 at 11:50 AM, o00o said:

  On 3/16/2010 at 10:09 AM, djimbe said:

the realisation that mixing horizontally can sound awesome (play sounds end to end, rather than over each other)

 

what do you mean by that?

 

is it about production or mastering?

Definitely production, followed up by reasonably open mastering to preserve the transients and dynamic range. As others posted after your question, the basic idea is 'play one sound at a time'. The fewer individual sounds are playing at once, the less frequency bandwidth they must fight over, the louder they can be relative to the ceiling of the track. Sounds that don't have to share bandwidth also require less EQing, which preserves more of their source character.

Oversteps, being less beat hectic than most recent Autechre, makes the technique very clear to the ear. Here's a couple of the most apparent examples:

1. In qplay - in all of the percussion section, you'll notice each sound entirely cancels the previous percussion sound.

2. In Treale, when the snare/basskick alternating combo comes in, notice how if the bass hits close after the snare, the snare is entirely cancelled, including its reverb. The two sounds get entirely out of each other's way.

But it's actually when they do use it in really hectic material that I think its power for their style is more evident. Things like 'Pen Expers' give the impression of a superfast assult of texture and slivers of melody all coming at once, and listening carefully, you'll notice mostly that it's very horizontal - a pile of beats slam after each other, then they duck aside and you hear a microscopic chip of the melody, then that ducks and it's the beats, etc. You don't actually get them on top of each other, they just hit after each other so fast it creates the impression that it's all happening simultaneously.

Obviously in stuff like Pen Expers, software helps to duck the streams of material automatically following rules, but I've noticed some Autechre tracks, without ducking anything at all by software plugins, it's become a part of their way to compose. In most dance music, nobody would think to have a hole in the 4 on the floor beats, but Autechre often just toss one beat out of a pattern entirely to place something else there, a chord, a different sound entirely, and the two then don't have to share bandwidth.

This makes sense.

I'm reading this and wondering how it can assimilated in various environments.

  On 3/17/2010 at 1:54 AM, djimbe said:

  On 3/16/2010 at 11:50 AM, o00o said:

  On 3/16/2010 at 10:09 AM, djimbe said:

the realisation that mixing horizontally can sound awesome (play sounds end to end, rather than over each other)

 

what do you mean by that?

 

is it about production or mastering?

 

Definitely production, followed up by reasonably open mastering to preserve the transients and dynamic range. As others posted after your question, the basic idea is 'play one sound at a time'. The fewer individual sounds are playing at once, the less frequency bandwidth they must fight over, the louder they can be relative to the ceiling of the track. Sounds that don't have to share bandwidth also require less EQing, which preserves more of their source character.

 

Oversteps, being less beat hectic than most recent Autechre, makes the technique very clear to the ear. Here's a couple of the most apparent examples:

 

1. In qplay - in all of the percussion section, you'll notice each sound entirely cancels the previous percussion sound.

 

2. In Treale, when the snare/basskick alternating combo comes in, notice how if the bass hits close after the snare, the snare is entirely cancelled, including its reverb. The two sounds get entirely out of each other's way.

 

But it's actually when they do use it in really hectic material that I think its power for their style is more evident. Things like 'Pen Expers' give the impression of a superfast assult of texture and slivers of melody all coming at once, and listening carefully, you'll notice mostly that it's very horizontal - a pile of beats slam after each other, then they duck aside and you hear a microscopic chip of the melody, then that ducks and it's the beats, etc. You don't actually get them on top of each other, they just hit after each other so fast it creates the impression that it's all happening simultaneously.

 

Obviously in stuff like Pen Expers, software helps to duck the streams of material automatically following rules, but I've noticed some Autechre tracks, without ducking anything at all by software plugins, it's become a part of their way to compose. In most dance music, nobody would think to have a hole in the 4 on the floor beats, but Autechre often just toss one beat out of a pattern entirely to place something else there, a chord, a different sound entirely, and the two then don't have to share bandwidth.

This is the most awful description of master buss compression i've ever read in my life.

edit: FLOL at the daft punk hate in this thread, you fucking nerds.

  On 3/16/2010 at 8:24 PM, xxx said:

  On 3/16/2010 at 10:26 AM, lumpenprol said:

  On 3/16/2010 at 7:01 AM, xxx said:

 

and my favorite, when Sean was asked about his influences and how they were all just blurring together but one thing was for sure:

"I don’t own a single record that sounds like ‘Oversteps’.”

 

we should keep telling him it sounds like Plaid until he kills himself.

 

Dead shitting LOL. There's not enough beef in IDM e.g. Biggie v. 2Pac, Jay-Z v. Nas, etc. I'd kill to witness a Nord-off--Team Booth/Brown v. Team Turner/Handley--in parachute pants and silk shirts. A referee with a crossfader would time the 1 minute allowed before panning left or right for the call-response.

This is the single best idea I've ever read.

  On 3/17/2010 at 2:28 AM, Lube Saibot said:

[This is the most awful description of master buss compression i've ever read in my life.

 

edit: FLOL at the daft punk hate in this thread, you fucking nerds.

If you read my post and decided it was just about MASTER BUS COMPRESSION!, and believe that MASTER BUS COMPRESSION! is the answer to everything, you should probably see someone about that.

What the hell is master bus compression?

I think I understood what djimbe was saying about their mixing until that came up...

I was having a laugh. Djimbe's post, that i had a go at, served as an attempt to mystify Autechre more than they could possibly demystify themselves, so i guess that fulfills your cravings Lianne.

Have nothing but love for Autechre and nothing but respect for their methods, but all that "mixing horizontally" blabber is just a holier-than-thou and frankly homosexual (not that there's anything wrong with that :george constanza:) way of saying "they mix good, they don't like clutter, they're great composers, they drive the signal hard into the mastering chain" which certainly can't be applied solely to Ae and certainly isn't that big a deal.

Though i guess i am posting in the Autechre subforum, i guess i should garnish all my observations with reverie and esotericism.

Poot.

edit: here you go lianne http://lmgtfy.com/?q=master+buss+compression