is Confield AE's best album?

February 19, 2013

On 2/12/2013 at 11:30 PM, Friendly Foil said:
Confield is hella deep.

Exactly. It has the highest level of abstraction.

That's why it's still my favorite.

lumpenprol · February 19, 2013

On 2/17/2013 at 11:45 AM, the anonymous forumite said:

On 2/7/2013 at 9:49 AM, Awepittance said:

does anyone agree with lump about Autechre becoming exponentially more famous when Confield came out?

and does anyone believe that this is around the same time Aphex was de-throned the king of idm because of the very mixed reaction to Drukqs, at that point the expectations were so high i don't see how he could have kept the crown. Then this caused a sort of Autechre > Aphex dynamic among idm fans. Even though Analord is quite an effort, and impressive in it's own right i don't think the IDM super nerds really saw it with the same value they continued to see Autechre's post confield output. I know i didn't

This is how the story happened and yes, lump is right. As I see it, Ae got more famous at the time of Confield because there was that IDM (warp?) golden age going on: Music has the right to Children, Richard D.james Album, Come to Daddy, Go Plastic as far as the main players were concerned. Warp was the exciting label it had been, relasing the abovementionned masterpieces. Many people like myself discovered these artists at the time, and would listen to every Warp release with favorable attention. Confield is the first AE record I liked. The dynamic AE > AFX happened over time, with afx releasing disposable records.

worth mentioning though that Tri Rep got a lot of attention when it came out. I remember buying both it and I Care Because You Do at this boutique record shop in Santa Cruz. Both RDJ and Ae were getting a lot of press, it seemed. But the hype for ae seemed to die off abruptly with Chiastic. They had stateside distribution problems iirc and everyone seemed to write them off. So Confield was a "second peak" of sorts. I'd be curious to see their sales figures for each album.