WATMM's tribute to Autechre

  On 11/15/2013 at 8:17 PM, John Ehrlichman said:

sorry for the misquote, but i don't think that's true either. I'm probably one of the only ones on this forum obsessed with their actual sounds specifically, most people here are more curious about their methods of composition. But not many people try to recreate either when it comes to anything Untilted or after. There were hordes of AE imitators from before that era, I just think their new stuff is too 'weird' for people to even want to touch, which is why i'm hoping a lot of people on this comp don't go the Arovane route, because we've been down already

ups! i have nothing against you my friend, your obsession (how would u grow otherwise?) nor anybody else here, really. dont get me wrong, it is a good thing to learn from the best (i do the same thing) but ppl (more elsewhere than here) usually only prize their technical side trying to mimic their sound but dont think about why their music (the raw artistic part) is that good, what makes it so artistic, even genius at times.

second, of course not many ppl try to recreate untilted or the newer stuff cause it's too complicated technically and too deep artistically to understand it let alone recreate it.

i'm looking forward to hear this compilation. i'm gonna send a cover track.

I'd like to try covering an Autechre track for fun, but I'd be more tempted to submit an original if it came down to just one or the other. Is there a limit to how many tracks this comp will be? Or might it be comparable to the length of a watmm xmas comp if enough strong tracks are submitted?

The more I think about covering Gantz Graf, the more I think it's a bad idea... Sorry Goiter Sanchez!

  On 11/16/2013 at 6:27 AM, Zephyr_Nova said:

I'd like to try covering an Autechre track for fun, but I'd be more tempted to submit an original if it came down to just one or the other. Is there a limit to how many tracks this comp will be? Or might it be comparable to the length of a watmm xmas comp if enough strong tracks are submitted?

 

The more I think about covering Gantz Graf, the more I think it's a bad idea... Sorry Goiter Sanchez!

I'd like to get tracks from as many different people as i can, so even if i really like all your tracks (not just you in specific, but if anyone else submitted two or more too) I'm still only gonna pick one. but go ahead and submit more than one track if you can, just in case anothers track doesnt hold or if i end up not getting as many submissions as i would like. however, if i get a lot of submissions (since this seems to be pretty popular) and the album is much longer than expected then i might turn this into a two vol. release. then, for those that submitted more than one track might get on the second vol. as well as the first.

i dont have a limit on the albums length per se, but i dont want the comp to drag on for an unreasonable time (like 4 hours. lol). this is supposed to be like a thank you card, not a book. but i want as many people as i can to sign this thank you card.

  On 11/16/2013 at 1:35 AM, Jonah said:

 

I know no one's gonna read this - and you shouldn't i didn't proof read.;p at some point it became a nice place to get the thoughts in my head after reading 130+ pages of AAA out. YIKES. i shoulda turned those thoughts into tracks though...lesson learned.

  On 11/15/2013 at 1:58 AM, John Ehrlichman said:

I suspect the reason they stayed away from answering any specific questions about physical modeling is because they definitely do use it, and some of the actual physical modeling they use is very easily identifiable. They talk an awful lot about Max/msp but surprisingly a lot of these sounds are far more easy to obtain out of the box on several Reaktor ensembles, never heard anyone create these sounds on max/msp personally

 

fuckennn lol.

what is this anti exploratory nonsense?!

imo parallel to the point. d/l reaktor ens = fast to get sounds. reverse engineer/understand to reuse = slow to impossible. time it takes to build once isn't as much as the time it saves being able to extrapolate for infinity. man eating fish. chomp.

how about try building synths like this in max, especially with gen and listening? with an attitude like this who'd care to share?

in my reading, they (sean, i think?) absolutely answered the q about pys mod i.e. it's a by n large lazy/cheesy marketing term for techniques that folks have been going messing with for ages and tossed out some points to start.

(my own take is that it's a presumptuous name and places physical as an end point. what is a physical instrument trying to model? why are pianos? why are kazoos? like, think about sympathetic resonance and the effect it has on the brain, across a wide variety of instruments....! now, i'm not saying it's all brain either, but psychoacoustics. )

PWM for vox yeah, yeah! try, VOISM or dc offset, etc. reading isn't as good as doing but: http://sid.kubarth.com/articles/the_c64_digi.txt http://www.clavia.com/nordmodular/Modularzone/VOSIM.html

play around with inserting shit (hardware, software, wetware) in the feedback path of karplus. granular synths + bandpass filters..hmm... (gen overcomes single-sample, opens up worlds, but you can use anything) a delay is a grain of a different scale.

that's really all you need to get started. yeah you can pick up some nice prebuilt solutions, but you're probably gonna sound more like ae if you get freaky with it. imo it's easier to level up from simple implementations than it is to drill down from high level ones, ymmv.

for me, the title "stop look listen" sums it up nicely, why get so hung up the destination as to miss out on what you've discovered/where you're at? they sound like autechre because they try not to sound like the autechre of the past, but of the right now. the qna was very illuminating on that point, yet supremely obvious in retrospect.

imo they're brave n crazy n present/aware and as long as you stick with that you're making a good tribute that sounds like ae regardless of what it sounds like as vibrations.

@xox

right on about the composition! refressshing to read a similar perspective. it's the gestalt, yo! but then you lose me... you sound mad that people make shit music with elektron boxes or max or SC? people make shit with everything..and nothing! :)

and I think there are other musicians that do use similar and as "complex" sounds as ae, but the composition is different enough that we have (falsely) lumped them into different genres . i have issues with the term complex cause it implies a ime false objectivity to something that's subjective.

it's about scale and perspective, yeah? like the sound of a lake(water + wind + an infinite # of other things) is way more complex than i can understand, i mean, weather patterns what. but if i record it? boring! simple! easy! what if i made an indistinguishable computer simulation? i don't know if people would perceive it as complex?

on the other hand, if i slowed my simulation down so much that you could hear the water lapping as discrete moments, bird and bug wing flaps become drones, it becomes simple enough to be processed by the brain as something complex.

Then let's say i use some of these slowed sonifications of waves and map them to a funky break and quantize the wind to scale? And use time * wind direction + wave hitting shore to apply a filter and wave height to determine filter type. Oh fcuk, now it's getting even more familiar/simple, making it more complex conceptually because it's breaking our pre-recorded perceptions of musical forms and that takes more effort to parse.

our brain tosses a lot of stuff out for good reason, like attention and sanity. :)

now it could still be shit music, but my theory is you have to wait for any interesting forms to filter down to a less perceptible level before you can judge. many old tunes that used to break my brain in the most delightful way don't any more.

i suspect experimental academic music generally doesn't age as well vs dedicated weirdoes and has different events and conditions that spur it's development because it has more of an interest in theory and will continue down avenues that aren't musically interesting, but satisfy a social need. kinda like the bizarro version of manufactured pop music!

for me, with ae it's not the sound as much as the bravery (or madness :) ) and dedication to largely not using external rubrics to judge their musical output. if people have/want to call it complexity, whatev, but I call what sounds good to me soul. a label extremely explicit in it's subjectivity.

 

I dunno, maybe I've been too gullible but I thought there actually was a form of synthesis based on calculating the results of a physical simulation of (for example) air passing through certain bodies in certain ways, rather than series of bandpass filters and the like...

That said, Ehrlichmann absolutely loves physical modelling doesn't he?

  On 11/16/2013 at 8:43 PM, poblequadrat said:

 

I dunno, maybe I've been too gullible but I thought there actually was a form of synthesis based on calculating the results of a physical simulation of (for example) air passing through certain bodies in certain ways, rather than series of bandpass filters and the like...

 

That said, Ehrlichmann absolutely loves physical modelling doesn't he?

 

there absolutely is. There are however math equations and formulas that 'emulate' these physics in terms of sound propagation. And Sean is right that there is sort of a gradient between certain types of even analog subtractive synthesis that can actually get into physical modeling territory.

If you're curious about the different kinds go check out Modal synthesis, Waveguide synthesis.

Waveguide seems to work really well for virtual wind instruments, reeds, brass, flutes.

Modal is more geared towards percussive things like bells, gongs, cymbals, xylophone, chimes.

what's nice about modal is you can get extremely realistic 'beating' of the different competing harmonics.

and yes i do love it. I think Autechre feels most comfortable speaking about max/msp because it still leaves the whole 'mystery box' angle intact of their music. If they spoke about reaktor ensembles they liked it would be too much of a giveaway or too obvious perhaps of how the sounds are being used. It's actually been discovered and admitted though that Autechre on occasion do use out of the box VST instrument software sounds, one example being microtonic on Move of Ten. The programmer of the plugin recognized it, posed the question and got a confirmation from either sean or rob. A lot of people in that discussion thread expressed their disappointment that Autechre would use a sound that they didn't painstakingly hand-craft but instead was based off a preset they were all familiar with.

So I'm not saying that Autechre doesn't heavily use max/msp and gen and the more esoteric customizable DSP software techniques. They obviously do, but I think it's inaccurate to think that using something like Reaktor or a more easy to use and user library centric modular environment would be beneath them. We already know they heavily use Nord.

It's also kind of laughable to hear anyone say that using a Reaktor patch is lazy or would somehow make the process less 'real' compared to building something off Max/msp using gen. What matters is the result and who's hands are using it. Max/msp users often have this odd superiority complex over people who use things like Buzz or Reaktor, but I highly doubt any of the impressive musicians working in MAx/msp would ever discount the power and potential dsp power of something like a pre-built reaktor ensemble simply because they didn't build it.

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(my own take is that it's a presumptuous name and places physical as an end point. what is a physical instrument trying to model?

instead of getting hung up on the description and the semantics maybe focus on the potential power of the technology and how it actually sounds used in different applications?

seems weird to me to have such a narrow view or to worry at all about how it was originally marketed as a concept.

I don't think I am going to have time to do this now.

Just a little bump. hows everyones tracks coming along?

  On 12/1/2013 at 11:08 PM, Frankie5fingers said:

Just a little bump. hows everyones tracks coming along?

any dead line? sorry...have no much time atm but all i need is a one day off to finish it. i hope the track will be ready before the coming weekend.

  On 12/2/2013 at 6:53 PM, xox said:

 

  On 12/1/2013 at 11:08 PM, Frankie5fingers said:

Just a little bump. hows everyones tracks coming along?

 

any dead line? sorry...have no much time atm but all i need is a one day off to finish it. i hope the track will be ready before the coming weekend.

 

deadline is January 18th.

I'm in, cool idea,
I already did a remix of 'second bad vilbel' ages ago using amiga 500, sampler and 4 channel tracker :-)

Cool I'm in! Already have something nice going here..

Bunch of piledrivers in front of my house hammering out a lot of asynchronous beats, trying to make the best of it + it's like instant autechre :)

I'm still definitely in too... got a gig next week which has been occupying most of my time but once I get that out of the way I'll be getting cracking on this. Weirdly, I sort of stumbled on the chords from the intro to Qplay when I was noodling about on the piano (well, a Kontakt sampled one) - through an appropriately heavy handed and lush reverb it was just great sounding. No idea how much time I lost to just cycling through those chords.

Finally actually doing something. I think I got a hang of some of the sound palette in Quaristice.

The main problem I see is that Autechre tracks are way differently composed to what I'm used to do. But let's see. Maybe I should try generative composing or just jamming.

This is actually pretty good practice even if nothing of worth comes out.

Someone should do an olsa for n parody track. Lots of ideas floating around for that one in the olsa for n thread.

  On 12/9/2013 at 9:40 PM, Zephyr_Nova said:

Someone should do an olsa for n parody track. Lots of ideas floating around for that one in the olsa for n thread.

If i remember correctly osla for n is that song in which we hear a fart sound all over the 8 minutes.

I happen to really like that track. But never the less, lots of paerody potential.

  On 12/9/2013 at 8:31 PM, mokz said:

This is actually pretty good practice even if nothing of worth comes out.

That's how I'm approaching it too. I've never made anything too similar to Autechre, especially their later stuff. So it's been fun.

Is the deadline still Jan 18th?

  On 12/4/2013 at 8:55 AM, uphorm said:

I'm in, cool idea,

I already did a remix of 'second bad vilbel' ages ago using amiga 500, sampler and 4 channel tracker :-)

AWESOME

  On 12/18/2013 at 2:54 AM, Hanratty said:

Is the deadline still Jan 18th?

yes

  On 12/19/2013 at 3:50 AM, Mesh Gear Fox said:

hm what sort of vibe have the tracks been so far? i have a dark drum n bassy synth fest, an lp5-ish max piece and a lot of chirpy acid synth pop that is not so experimental and alien..

we've received hip-hop, ambient, and experimental tracks so far. it would be great if we can get an even wider variety of tracks.

I'll try and do something too, over the break.

Any chance to listen to some of the contributed tracks?

  On 12/20/2013 at 3:11 PM, MarinaStewart said:

Any chance to listen to some of the contributed tracks?

nope. You're just gonna have to wait until release.

i will say this, so far the tracks have been pretty awesome.

I need to remember to do this.