Autechre Why do we love Autechre?

OP>

Wonderfully enlightening read that clarifies and articulates a lot of abstract ideas that have been floating around in my head lately. You certainly nailed why it is that Autechre is so entertaining and I fervently agree with everything in your long but engaging post, cheers and thanks for posting! I'll think of your post from now on whenever I have to explain to someone why I like Autechre.

  On 7/25/2010 at 4:09 AM, thehauntingsoul said:

OP>

 

Wonderfully enlightening read that clarifies and articulates a lot of abstract ideas that have been floating around in my head lately. You certainly nailed why it is that Autechre is so entertaining and I fervently agree with everything in your long but engaging post, cheers and thanks for posting! I'll think of your post from now on whenever I have to explain to someone why I like Autechre.

 

Glad to help!

Autechre is such amazing music, that it deserves in-depth analysis.

  On 7/24/2010 at 12:37 PM, lumpenprol said:

I love Autechre because I once told a girl I was Sean Booth and she sucked my cock. Thanks, Ae!

Was it the uni-brow that sold it?

  On 7/26/2010 at 12:12 AM, Spittal said:

  On 7/25/2010 at 4:09 AM, thehauntingsoul said:

OP>

 

Wonderfully enlightening read that clarifies and articulates a lot of abstract ideas that have been floating around in my head lately. You certainly nailed why it is that Autechre is so entertaining and I fervently agree with everything in your long but engaging post, cheers and thanks for posting! I'll think of your post from now on whenever I have to explain to someone why I like Autechre.

 

Glad to help!

 

Autechre is such amazing music, that it deserves in-depth analysis.

I had been doing this for about a year but eventually ran out of steam. Once I have a reason to be motivated again in my life I'll probably go back to posting long dissections like this. I think it was because I stopped taking Dexedrine.

  On 7/25/2010 at 2:35 AM, lumpenprol said:

  On 7/24/2010 at 2:22 PM, ruiagnelo said:

  On 7/24/2010 at 12:37 PM, lumpenprol said:

I love Autechre because I once told a girl I was Sean Booth and she sucked my cock. Thanks, Ae!

 

 

yeah her name was Mira something, I forget.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

not a good post, infact. - "you'll get kicking tonight"

Hi Mira

im not Chantelle but she'd kick ur ass, biatch lol

i like them because they don't have pseudonyms that harmlessly mystify themselves.

because i hate that

  On 7/26/2010 at 7:22 AM, Calx Sherbet said:

i like them because they don't have pseudonyms that harmlessly mystify themselves.

 

because i hate that

did u not hear about that ae 12" that came out last month?? 4 dance tracks... under a secret pseudonym... harmless tho.. :)

well then i'm out of the loop.

  On 7/23/2010 at 6:15 PM, crono3 said:

For me, I think one of the reasons I love ae so much is BECAUSE I have almost no understanding about how they make this stuff. I listen to other types of music and you can imagine the band members playing the instruments... you know where most of the sound is coming from, it's familiar. Just the opposite with ae... since their sounds are so unique & alien to me I can truly get lost in it. My imagination is free to conjure up far away worlds or even just shapes & colors relating to the sounds.

Agree 100%. I hate the fact that so much music is indelibly imprinted with mental images of the process by which it was made, but with Autechre it's all just sound.

  On 8/4/2010 at 8:31 AM, xxx said:

  On 7/23/2010 at 2:52 PM, beerwolf said:

In the last couple of weeks Untilted and Confield have 'clicked' with me. So this is just blowing my mind. Then I put on Move of Ten and I love that too.

 

Draft 7.30 has helped me dramatically in my "Move Of Ten" progression. It seems totally weird to talk about needing help to listen to music and many people would say "tha fuck?! " but to me, Autechre is now like a body of academic work where it is sometimes necessary to revisit earlier "permutations" and "Booth/Brown headspaces" to understand further developments. Just like how I have to revisit the inflammation cascade to understand a particular disease process that's new to me.

 

OP--You're barking up the wrong tree trying to find a science to the love of Autechre because, while we are certainly bound by the material experience--put the track on, ear conduction sends impulses to parietal cortices, an improbably complex set of neural pathways generate the "chemicals of love" and the hair stands on your neck and you think of your first pussy or you're just unbelievably hyped.

 

But, you're getting into the "non-material" and science just cannot arrive at answers in those domains. Psychology comes the closest because it does its best to codify and index previously unexplorable things like "feelings", turn them into data, and use things like analysis of variance and what Autechre means to some but not others but you will never get at that "je n'sais quoi" other than Jaderpansen's answer . Besides, the reductionist and deductive nature of science would just help you understand why anyone enjoys any music because scientific pursuit is about universal hypotheses and restricting it to just Autechre has already blown your "pure investigative" intent.

 

This is controversial and is gonna piss people off but I believe to be a complex function of intelligence and personality. On one dimension, you have a group of people who appreciate complexity and challenge but that's nothing new--it's called "brains", "smarts", "Aspie"--derogatorily Take a poll on here of those in the sciences (aye), Charles Nelson Reily is a fucking Doctoral chemical engineer, LOLAlzado an attorney--if I left anyone out, forgive me because there are some smart fucking people on here. And the old "birds of a feather flock together" is all the reason you need--no scientific explanation needed but at best, it would be a correlational deal. What are the correlational analyses you run into with level of education and number of Autechre releases owned, eh?

 

The second, personality, is very easy. We're all familiar with Jungian/Myers-Briggs dimensions i.e. some people are very conscientious, some people are Berney Madoff, etc. The dimension "openness to experience" is one that gets a lot of attention. I have been a card carrying Ae listener since 1994. Now, I've grumpled lately with the new stuff but I think that reflects the aging and "crystallizing" of my brain--things get...."odd" in the the 30's I'm finding. Anyway, I also love knowing every language I can fit in my head, I love kim chee and masala dosai and anything from Led Zeppelin to Alva Noto and treasure my trip to Berlin, Germany as one of the best times in my life + on + on.

 

I love to be turned on by a lot of shit and so do Sean and Rob--non-music, breakbeats, broken hip-hop, synthesis experimentation--nothing is out of bounds and every new release will be a delicious challenge that we're ready to meet head on. NOW, think of those milquetoasts in your life that eat the same things, watch the same inane sitcoms, take the exact same holidays, etc. There is nothing wrong with these people--in fact, I envy them. Things are so much more simple. I go into manias and bankruptcy chasing new things to get my brain dick off, it's very tiring and that's also why I think "Move Of Ten" has been so hard because...this old horse is slowing down . Booth and Brown--by dint of their likely quite expansive wealth and constant use of marijuana--have more open cognitive space to keep being "audionauts" but the fact that I've had to struggle on a mortgage, go to college for so long, etc.--I'll never be able to be where they are cognitively. Think about it. They get paid exorbitant fees to actually build their new albums via live touring. We're all plinking on our Monomachines and Nords but no one's paying $35 a ticket to watch it happen HAHAHA

 

And, I'm kind of off track here but.....

 

Yeah!

 

 

  On 7/23/2010 at 3:53 PM, jaderpansen said:

shit's good, y'know.

i was the best at my school in my year at maths, but i feel like a retard a lot of the time. adhd.

i like autechre cause naturally i lose focus a lot with my ridiculously short attention span, and so shit seems so blurred to me a lot of the time, and i dont know what the fuck is going on and i have a million thoughts going through my head at once, and autechre kind of like, suits that, i dont know, it can seem like a complete mess, and it can be hard to follow, but i'm used to that anyway, but i dont really know what i'm trying to say, they do a lot of things for me, i just enjoy their music on many levels, and their music is so interesting, and i can listen to it when i'm trying to sleep.

  On 8/4/2010 at 8:31 AM, xxx said:

Take a poll on here of those in the sciences (aye)

Physics PhD over here.

  Quote

Booth and Brown--by dint of their likely quite expansive wealth

Perhaps they were just being modest, but in an interview I read around the time Quaristice came out one of them said that they make enough money to live on from their music, and the exact wording (which I forget) seemed to be strongly implying that they don't make a great deal more than that. Which brings me to something I've wondered about: Autechre is a band which inspires almost religious levels of devotion among its many fans, there are loads of people who preorder every one of their releases on multiple formats as soon as they're announced, and they can somehow afford to do extravagant things like having their CDs come in opaque jewel cases with the band's name embossed on the cover. But their records consistently fail to break the UK top 100. Does anybody else find that weird? It's not like they're super-obscure or anything.

i think about this almost every day. why am i so intrigued and amazed by this music that most people would outright ignore and label.. as was stated, just 'noise' or silly 'techno' sounds? there's one open-minded friend who actually understood a lot of idm from the start of me introducing it.. which was quite surprising. him, and my old friend from childhood whom i started this electronic music journey with, are the only people i can relate it to. that, in itself, is depressing. so i post random songs on facebook, just to kind of jolly peoples' minds, even though i know none of them will actually take the time to listen to it.. like, look.. there's something else out there that is seriously pushing the boundaries of this artform. open-mindedness , and/or the willingness to challenge and explore your own tastes, has a lot to do with it.

  On 8/5/2010 at 4:37 AM, mafted said:

i think about this almost every day. why am i so intrigued and amazed by this music that most people would outright ignore and label.. as was stated, just 'noise' or silly 'techno' sounds? there's one open-minded friend who actually understood a lot of idm from the start of me introducing it.. which was quite surprising. him, and my old friend from childhood whom i started this electronic music journey with, are the only people i can relate it to. that, in itself, is depressing. so i post random songs on facebook, just to kind of jolly peoples' minds, even though i know none of them will actually take the time to listen to it.. like, look.. there's something else out there that is seriously pushing the boundaries of this artform. open-mindedness , and/or the willingness to challenge and explore your own tastes, has a lot to do with it.

that's pretty similar to me, it's pretty lonely.

  On 7/26/2010 at 7:22 AM, Calx Sherbet said:

because i hate that

aye. It can become very confusing.

Read these books (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism_and_Schizophrenia) and you'll "crack the ae code". Nop, your own code.

It makes good sense to me why more people [in general] don't listen to stuff like Autechre, solely from its obscurity and the lack of avenues to discover and enjoy this music, at least in American culture.

What I DON'T get is.. why friends I introduce this music to don't seem to find the same connections to it that I do. When I first got into electronic music, hearing my first Aphex and Autechre and the like, it was like igniting a dormant fire, and I just had to seek out more of the amazing sounds I was hearing. But when I introduce it to others, even in settings and states of mind very conducive to the music, it never results in the same drive. They often say they love it, and make statements like "you listen to the coolest music".. but none of them develop that deep passion to seek out more on their own.

I may be going out on a limb here, but has anyone ever proposed a kind of global purification, whereby we exterminate the normies, so that the remaining Braindancers can share the world and foster new generations together?

...I can't see how that could possibly go wrong!

  On 8/5/2010 at 11:03 PM, Root5 said:

I may be going out on a limb here, but has anyone ever proposed a kind of global purification, whereby we exterminate the normies, so that the remaining Braindancers can share the world and foster new generations together?

There would be like 327 nerdy guys and 36 women. Shit would be dire.

  On 8/5/2010 at 9:43 PM, Marked x 0ne said:

It makes good sense to me why more people [in general] don't listen to stuff like Autechre, solely from its obscurity and the lack of avenues to discover and enjoy this music, at least in American culture.

 

What I DON'T get is.. why friends I introduce this music to don't seem to find the same connections to it that I do. When I first got into electronic music, hearing my first Aphex and Autechre and the like, it was like igniting a dormant fire, and I just had to seek out more of the amazing sounds I was hearing. But when I introduce it to others, even in settings and states of mind very conducive to the music, it never results in the same drive. They often say they love it, and make statements like "you listen to the coolest music".. but none of them develop that deep passion to seek out more on their own.

haha, exactly, so why don't they buy any albums? that's what it's all about. that innate drive to explore what music is, beyond what popular culture has made it out to be.

  On 8/5/2010 at 9:43 PM, Marked x 0ne said:

It makes good sense to me why more people [in general] don't listen to stuff like Autechre, solely from its obscurity and the lack of avenues to discover and enjoy this music, at least in American culture.

 

What I DON'T get is.. why friends I introduce this music to don't seem to find the same connections to it that I do. When I first got into electronic music, hearing my first Aphex and Autechre and the like, it was like igniting a dormant fire, and I just had to seek out more of the amazing sounds I was hearing. But when I introduce it to others, even in settings and states of mind very conducive to the music, it never results in the same drive. They often say they love it, and make statements like "you listen to the coolest music".. but none of them develop that deep passion to seek out more on their own.

hear hear, couldn't have said it better myself. I say it's a language you have to lend your ears and soul generously to, I say it's easy to lock onto the lovleliness; just knuckle down and catch onto a chosen groove, that groove will lead you to wonderful things, i tell them it's only dwarves bearded and friendly that are rewiring your senses slightly, you trust them. I say it is distantly linked to glowing strains of classical music but only layered a tad, I say smile and let it mesmerize you slowly but surely. When they ask me "what is your favourite language" I always answer "Autechre"

The textures and rhythms are fantastic. And besides that it just has a real special feel to it that is hard to get it down to a simple soundbyte.

My theory:

The average pop track contains only a few variables as far as melody, rhythm and structure are concerned; which indicates that generally a pop composer can "get away" with making a few less creative decisions than an artist in another, more involved, genre.

The formulaic nature of it is such that with a sufficiently powerful computer you could even write whole pop songs from a few simple rules, or mash them together from old hits.

This predictability is of course the exact quality that makes pop music accessible to the casual listener.

I find it ironic when people I discuss music with call pop more "natural" than other forms of music, since it's in fact extremely rigidly codified.

Here's where Autechre enters:

From the perspective of a person listening to Autechre for the first time, the music seems odd, harsh, inhuman, autistic etc because it's unlike most other music there and it's slightly confrontational in that unique way that experimental music is.

This + Autechre's (deserved or not) reputation as a hardcore "computer" band puts across the suggestion that their music is "inhuman" or "unnatural".

Returning to my point about pop music:

In the same way that pop music is formulaic and predictable and "unnatural" in my opinion - experimental music like Autechre is extremely natural.

Experimental music is based more on the whims of the composer than any musical rules. Maybe this is why we struggle to describe why we enjoy certain aspects of Autechre's music - because there is no precedent for them.

I can't really quantify why I think the manipulations on Perlence range3 sound really fucking cool.

I don't really know what it is about the scratchy drawn out sample in the beginning of Xylin Room that I like.

I've never heard anything like the strobing textures on Sim Gishel but I consider them to be absolutely perfect and beautiful.

This is why I believe Autechre is an immensely natural form of music.

Everything about their sound pays no attention to any musical rulebook, and so when you finally "get" a track, or a piece of a track, the feeling is that of having communicated with the artist on a deep level.

You could never build a computer program to replicate Autechre's style because every parameter of the music relies so heavily upon human decisionmaking. The initial "unnatural" feeling is in fact a reflection of the deep naturalness of their music.

Maybe this is why we love Autechre? That at first they seem confrontational and frightening and inhuman, but once we truly understand their music it seems to us to be extremely deeply fingerprinted with Rob and Sean's musical vision. This means we undergo more of a journey as we listen to the band more and more and come to understand aspects of their sound; and maybe this feeling of discovering beauty in what previously seemed inhuman is particularly pleasureable to us.

I hope that all made sense.