Autechre Why do we love Autechre?

  On 8/12/2010 at 4:58 PM, xxx said:

  On 8/4/2010 at 8:41 PM, Rotwang said:

Physics PhD over here.

 

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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.

Well, as a physics professor/engineer/whatever you do with your Doctorate,

Unemployed person.

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But, they must surely be dealing in millions of quid in kit alone

Really? This surprises me, but I don't know anything about how they make music or how much hard/software costs, so I'll take your word for it.

  On 8/12/2010 at 6:20 PM, Astroturf said:

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.

tl;dr - people are afraid of things that are strange and different

  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?

oh please god no

  On 8/4/2010 at 8:41 PM, Rotwang said:

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.

This is correct. I remember them pointing out they needed to tour to keep afloat financially. I would interpret 'keep afloat' as meaning to stay in the financial range where they are able to work exclusively on music and need no other income source.

  On 8/4/2010 at 8:41 PM, Rotwang said:

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.

As a proportion of the population and music sales, the hardcore Autechre fanbase is still tiny compared to any kind of pop fanbase. Autechre's fanbase may be extraordinarily reliable - you can count on every member of the fanbase buying an item they release, but its ceiling remains relatively low compared to fanbases of more mainstream genres and bands. To release an Autechre item will always gain money for Warp and Autechre, but I doubt the amount varies or increases much.

Considering this issue of a financial margin which probably doesn't move, that may explain the behaviour it seems people on this board have confirmed concerning a bit of price gouging by Warp when they release Autechre collectables - EG the limited edition Quaristice. It turned out to be less limited than they indicated, and they charged a lot for it, and stockists had order issues with the item.

from wikipedia...

Stockhausen vs. The Technocrats

In November 1995, The Wire published an article titled "Advice to Clever Children". In the process of producing the interview, a package of tapes containing music from several artists, including Aphex Twin, was sent to Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Stockhausen commented:

“ I heard the piece Aphex Twin of Richard James carefully: I think it would be very helpful if he listens to my work "Song of the Youth," which is electronic music, and a young boy's voice singing with himself. Because he would then immediately stop with all these post-African repetitions, and he would look for changing tempi and changing rhythms, and he would not allow to repeat any rhythm if it varied to some extent and if it did not have a direction in its sequence of variations.[44] ”

Aphex Twin responded: "I thought he should listen to a couple of tracks of mine: "Digeridoo", then he'd stop making abstract, random patterns you can't dance to".[44]

i first heard them in 2005 with a random transferred copy of EP7 from my good friend at Ithaca College. after a short “learning period” i would begin to include them in my top five “bands” of all time.

to me, i think it has always been about the interplay between a complex mood/atmosphere created through bizarre sound and the classic joy of dance/hip hop beats. plus, i've been a drummer since i was young, and autechre has incredibly rhythmic ideas.

Yeah I'm not sure I can support the idea that Ae is the "most natural form of music" or that it is THE most abstract music out there and therefore hard for mainstream audiences to appreciate. Musique concrete composers like Xenakis, Scelsi, Stockhausen, Shoenberg, certainly pushed the "rules" of music further than Ae, and in some pieces never followed them at all. They truly tried to create music that was utterly unique. What makes Ae truly great is their ability to adhere to the rules and conventions of repetition and melodic resolution, while creating those "favorite autechre moments" we all know and love, where at some point, the pattern is broken, an abnormality is introduced, something unique and unpredictable occurred. Without the repetition, music of just those pattern-breaking unique moments, would be far less interesting and engaging.

There was a thread a couple years back that discussed Ae's time signatures, and I think the consensus was that with a couple notable exceptions (Drane, Cichli, Eutow, some others) B+B usually adhere to the bog standard 4/4. Some members were disappointed in that fact, wanting Ae to be the most advanced, the most complex music they heard, as if it was a competition. So why is that with such a boring 4/4 in most of the tracks, do they always sound so original? Well that's precisely why we think they are so great. Our music-listening minds have become attuned to 4/4, and so while our minds are being ripped to shreds by assault of rhythms and timbres of Gantz Graf, we are still able to hang on to the 4 beats in-between each chord hit. Without that element, signaling that the track is still in 4/4, I think people would not find it as entertaining or engrossing; it would sound like literally just 3 minutes of random noise.

As to why more people don't enjoy Ae, well, from my observations, most people listen to music in a very different way than WATMM. And most of WATMM listens to music probably differently than the freaks that hang out in the Ae subforum. Not everyone cares when B+B moved one bass kick one beat forward than the last 100 times it happened, or when the click in Sim Gishel changed from 16th notes to triplets. Most people don't listen with that level of attentiveness and that's why Ae isn't for them. I do however get irritated when my friends talk about how complex Dilla or DJ Shadow gets with their beats, and how incredible they are at adding all these detailed elements to the construction. They have no idea. No idea. Haven't we all had this moment?

Ae's melodic sense also holds the music back from more potential fans I feel. Their melodies aren't as conventional as BOC or AFX, and definitely take a back seat to the rhythmic and timbrel experimentation. I would hazard to say that their general melodic sense is just not as good as RDJ's, but it might be that what my understanding of a "good" melody is one that observes traditional western musical conventions. And because especially in pop music now, a catchy melody is key to success. I personally think melody is completely overrated in a song, which is probably why I'm such an Ae fan in the first place.

this is an interesting discussion that could be brought way beyond just Autechre and into the realm of neurological reactions to music in general.

the way I've looked at it is- there are two types of people, those who "get it" and those who don't. and as the OP said, sometimes I wonder if the former has some sort of mental difference to the latter, as in some sort of mutation which makes it possible for the music to "click" with them (like it has with many people here).

regardless of that, i've always thought of it as something more than just understanding a form of music that other people can not,

for example the first time i had that rush of understanding and bliss from listening to "idm" or what have you was with Venetian Snares, an artist not quite as diverse and abstract as Autechre but still falls under that same category, of non-linear complexity which is harsh noise to most and mastery of sound to others.

it's something i'd compare to the opening of the Third Eye.

an example comes to mind

which was showing the song Yuop by Autechre to a friend.

to me, that song is cacophonous and full of emotion, from the sound design/melody/strange time signatures/rhythm alone.

to them it was indecipherable static.

and that inspired me to try to listen to autechre from that headspace, the one i had before it clicked.

and i felt i understood, that there is a validity and lucid difference between simply hearing it, and having it fit perfectly into your psyche like a puzzle piece.

from then on I've always belived that the enjoyment of this type of music comes from something greater and VASTLY more complex than simply musical taste, something biomechanic and deeply rooted in brain chemistry.

something that in my opinion should be studied and observed as it may hold secrets to discovering new things about human reaction to stimuli.

^ that was a good read.

I've said most of my thoughts about Autechre on here in the past, so suffice to say thank fuck for Ae!

  On 8/19/2010 at 7:33 PM, dr lopez said:

I do however get irritated when my friends talk about how complex Dilla or DJ Shadow gets with their beats, and how incredible they are at adding all these detailed elements to the construction. They have no idea. No idea. Haven't we all had this moment?

Holy fuck yeah, I have a friend who goes on about Deadmau5 and shit like it's the most amazingly intricate music. wtf.