Confield is 10 years old

^ True story

I only discovered Parhelic Triangle two weeks ago with the unsettling ae thread, that was definately impressive

the best ae album and of course the most criticized... whit this album they have invented a new aesthetic, no one else has gone so far. PEN EXPERS is still the best dance\electronic track i have danced.

Not a daylight summer album though. I attempted to play it today but I stopped it after a few seconds, just wasn't working.

i think my impression was "prefered incunabula / tri repete " but i'll need to give it a listen.

i'm not much of a fan of the recent stuff, i prefer easier beats and melodies than stuff i feel is generated by code..i listened to a lot of spectrum games loading in my time.

i'm still a fan of theirs and i'm interested in what they produce, and im sure theyd be bored if they were still doing the same music as incunubula era.tempted to buy the boxset but ive got it all previously , somewhere.

endless praise is not enough for confield.

i had a child once. i sacrificed him to confield. by the time uviol came on i had cut off both his arms, and yet he lay still respectfully silent, understanding the depth of the situation. he died at the very end of lentic catachresis. the next day i was invited to join the intergalactic illuminated explorers' club. it worked!

confield works.

This release has just clicked with me in the last two weeks or so, after four years of Autechre listening. VI Scose Poise is absolutely beautiful the melody in Pen Expers is stunning.

Jesus christ you're right

  On 5/5/2011 at 7:34 PM, Boxus said:

endless praise is not enough for confield.

 

i had a child once. i sacrificed him to confield. by the time uviol came on i had cut off both his arms, and yet he lay still respectfully silent, understanding the depth of the situation. he died at the very end of lentic catachresis. the next day i was invited to join the intergalactic illuminated explorers' club. it worked!

 

confield works.

Oh so morbid you are! I know you joke (i hope)

It does seem many people view this album as especially cold, distant and alien. However, the thing I like about Autechre is that no matter how "cold, distant, dark, obscure, alien" etc etc it seems to get, it never actually crosses over into anything straight up vicious or dark. There's always a playfulness to it. A comforting twinkle in the eye to every deranged turn they take.

Even with the likes of Sim Gishel, which despite its claustrophobic insectoid crush, has a very funky shuffle to it. The faux movie-punch beats in Parhelic Triangle detract a little from the hot sweaty cult rite theme and make it comic violence. For me it's this margin of menacing/merry they constantly dance along that makes them really great and always refreshing to listen to.

but yeh. It works!

  On 5/5/2011 at 10:08 PM, AJW said:

  On 5/5/2011 at 7:34 PM, Boxus said:

endless praise is not enough for confield.

 

i had a child once. i sacrificed him to confield. by the time uviol came on i had cut off both his arms, and yet he lay still respectfully silent, understanding the depth of the situation. he died at the very end of lentic catachresis. the next day i was invited to join the intergalactic illuminated explorers' club. it worked!

 

confield works.

 

 

Oh so morbid you are! I know you joke (i hope)

 

It does seem many people view this album as especially cold, distant and alien. However, the thing I like about Autechre is that no matter how "cold, distant, dark, obscure, alien" etc etc it seems to get, it never actually crosses over into anything straight up vicious or dark. There's always a playfulness to it. A comforting twinkle in the eye to every deranged turn they take.

Even with the likes of Sim Gishel, which despite its claustrophobic insectoid crush, has a very funky shuffle to it. The faux movie-punch beats in Parhelic Triangle detract a little from the hot sweaty cult rite theme and make it comic violence. For me it's this margin of menacing/merry they constantly dance along that makes them really great and always refreshing to listen to.

 

but yeh. It works!

you're right about that. i was listening to untilted today and it clicked with me a little more when i realized how playful it is. especially ipacial section. i like to think of confield as more of a dark cinematic album, but it's playful and fun too. eidetic casein sounds like the confield universe getting drunk and telling you jokes.

  On 5/5/2011 at 7:34 PM, Boxus said:

endless praise is not enough for confield.

 

i had a child once. i sacrificed him to confield. by the time uviol came on i had cut off both his arms, and yet he lay still respectfully silent, understanding the depth of the situation. he died at the very end of lentic catachresis. the next day i was invited to join the intergalactic illuminated explorers' club. it worked!

 

confield works.

That's the best post I have read on Watmm as in describing an album. You nailed it. It's how Kurtz would describe Confield to Willard.

Confield. The Never Ending Heart of Darkness

  On 10/6/2007 at 3:34 PM, Rook said:

Ok, here is the deal people. This thread is about confield discuss everything from generative techniques and what the hell that means to what you think about the tracks, and why it is or is not the greatest album evar.

 

Though Confield was my favorite album on my first listen, I can wholly understand how it isn't for most people or how it takes many listens. Here is why. Confield doesn't appeal to readily accessible human emotions. I mean lets take LP5 for example. Songs like Rae and Corc are just flat out beautiful, those songs wear their hearts on their sleeve and can easily be recognized as saddening beauty. Or Under Boac and Acroyear play to our sense of fast adventure. Arch Carrier is straight up gangsta.

 

Confield on the other hand isn't beautiful the way you find your cut little depressed indie crush to be, or how you find the Italian super model to be beautiful. Confield asks you to find beauty in pain and abstraction. Each song on confield is so visual that you could write a thousand page book on each.

 

Vi Scose Poise is separatation. You aren't sure where you are. Just that it is raining. Metallic atmosphere surrounds you. You relax.

 

Cfern is the drunken knowledge of torture by mother nature. You suddenly realize why you are hear. When the bass comes in the tension starts. It is maddeningly slow and incremental. As if army ant pinchers are slowly slicing you while drops of water slowly land on your forehead. Yet the pounding and resistive bass lets tells us that your will is unwavering. Your eyes squinting, your face scowling, nothing can stop you.

 

Unfortunately, as we all know, nothing defeats mother nature. Pen Expers comes in and demolishes you. A seemingly never ending treatment of your body as only the hands of the abstraction of torture could do. But there is one thing that mother nature did not count on, for she cannot. Human will. Through your gray-black clouds of tears you begin to smile regardless of the pain. You see yellow and white light. Something not of this world has aided you, you for several minutes you experience enlightenment. You do not care about the physical world. The physical world is not real, it is not everlasting. You cry in pleasure as you have never experienced beauty before.

 

But wait, though the physical world is not everlasting, you are still alive in it, mother nature has not relented. You are released from enlightenment, each man must suffer the pain coming to him. You are again thrown into darkness. Pounded, for an agonizingly long minute.

 

Then the real sickness starts.

 

 

With Sim Gishel, mother nature smiles her most evil smile and begins. She inserts creatures in your ears, not meant to cause direct pain but instead ever so slight pressure, slowly increasing. All the while the natural weapon of claustrophobia works against you. The black-red-dark gray closes in on you. Your sternum is periodically pressed inward. Your lungs grasp for breath.

 

Than it is over. At this point you are tired, the fifteen seconds of dead time nearly allows you to lose yourself and go under. You feel sudden relief. But mother nature is not always merciful.

 

The loud, repetitive bass of Parhelic Triangle appears from nothingness. This sort of pain is not physical. Instead purely psychological. You begin to see fear as you have never seen it before. Suddenly fear is no longer an emotion, it is a tangible entity. Your eyes roll back in their sockets, your brain expands, white hot beads of torturous sweat emit from every pour of your sickening body. But something keeps you from giving in. What could it be? It is the realization. You realize that fear is just an emotion. Your reason seems thousands of miles away, but you notice it none the less. Mother nature sees the momentary strength of your resolve. THis angers her greatly. She fights you with Bine.

 

Bine is the irrational anger of mother nature. She lost the control and logic she had with her previous assaults. Significant, because Bine can be fought. Bine can be resisted. Bine can be understood, since irrationality is a human trait. Bine ends.

 

Eidetic Casein is the realization and actualization of assault. For the first time you physically see your opponent. Mother nature fights with perversion. She takes childish things and uses them in only a way that the most disgusting of men could. Eidetic Casein is mother natures rapists, pedophiles, murderers, psychotic, perverted. Waves of vomit like yellow and green lines caress your body. You are disgusted. This disgust wakes you up in a way that you were not before.

 

God takes pity on you.

 

You are thrown again into abstraction. Uviol is floating in eternity. Dark purple and black clouds protect you. The torture that once was is not apparent. You know it is there, but it is not. Where are you? God is showing you unsettling beauty. He knows that you must inevitably return for a final battle, but rewards your resolve as he has rewarded none others. The impending end creeps in through the abstraction. You walk on ambiguity, but are suddenly thrown back by unknown force. You walk again anyway. You are throw back again by unknown force. White noise looks like black noise, and sees you. The end has come.

 

Lentic Catachresis is the monster that confield is. It grows and grows. You stand unwaveringly. You are not afraid. As it erratically rises, you stare at it, it stares at you. For a long while. The battle begins. It is obvious that you will lose. You fight anyway. The monster strikes you down, you don't get up. The monster keeps striking you anyway. It has no notion of honor. It strikes you faster, faster, faster.

 

You are dead.

 

 

 

 

I love Saturdays.

^I have that Rook post in my bookmarks. I used to keep it in the ID3 tags of my MP3 copy of Confield. Absolutely fucking awesome stuff.

does anyone have encey's super detailed review/description of confield?

pen expers has aged like wine. when my mind is connecting with it properly it sounds like something God would have made. or like a direct communicating of nature and space time.

that melody is the main thing about it. it somehow circles around on itself without you noticing. but when you are paying attention to it it's shocking.

Confield was and still is ahead of its time. You cannot praise it enough. Yeah, it's the subtle melody thing with Pen Expers, same as in Gantz Graf. But still, Lentic Catachresis is the one.

If I may geek out for a moment, for a long time I thought of Confield as a sort of vast field, with different distinct sections, and the listener sorta flows through them with each track being one patch of the field, since all the tracks were so distinct and separate in sound / idea to me. Well today I checked wiktionary randomly after seeing this thread about the prefix 'con' and saw this:

"used with certain words to add a notion similar to those conveyed by with, together, or joint" and thought hmm yeah, all the distinct sections are together on the cd and this imaginary landscape so we can journey through it. but i feel this with all ae cds, they all have their own spaces which feel like they can be built upon and are vast outside the specific tracks. in this sense not a single ae release has disappointed me, because it may take a little time, but once i grow into the world its all gravy from there on out. i could probably write many paragraphs about the colors or images or emotions i get from specific tracks, but who cares about them but me really?! /fanboyism (such a bad word:( )

Yeah I've always imagined the album as describing landscapes/environments, and travelling through them, like just walking in a straight path, unrelenting.

VI Scose Poise is in the snow

Cfern is in an ancient temple covered in vines and moss

Pen Expers is a field of dense, murky, dirty yellow clouds, with beams of golden sunlight bursting through them

Sim Gishel is underground, basically seen from the perspective of an earthworm

Parhelic Triangle is... well... Norfair from Super Metroid :P

Bine is a vast barren desert under a dark green sky

Eidetic Casein is a continuation of that, but with strange, half-formed cartoon characters floating about like that little floating sparkly things in your eyes that appear when you feel faint

Uviol is travelling though an icey cave/tunnel

Lentic Catachresis is viewing this world from space, and seeing that above it's murky green atmosphere are red lighting bolts and broken rocks flying all around it.

Overall I've never seen the album as cold, I see it as very organic. Their MOST organic. It's alien, definitely, but not in a robotic way.

Bine is still the heaviest track for me on this album. It's my least favourite, maybe it hasn't clicked for me properly yet.

Its dense darkness makes Eidetic Casein sound extra bouncy though.

  On 6/14/2011 at 12:02 AM, AJW said:

Bine is still the heaviest track for me on this album. It's my least favourite, maybe it hasn't clicked for me properly yet.

 

Its dense darkness makes Eidetic Casein sound extra bouncy though.

it's growing on me. it's like autechre doing really crazy, progressive black metal.

bine is one of those awesome noise tracks where you think there is a beat somewhere, and there probably is.

but there's so much going on, it's like wading upstream in the niagara river. or something

Love it

i just realized I've been listening to the fake confield the entire time.

lol