Mental Images Generated by Autechre

I've seen some pretty cool descriptions from people about what mental images they get from various Ae songs. Thought it'd be cool to consolidate some here / get some others.

Also - on an earlier post someone mentioned how Pen Expers reminded them of sunlight slowly coming through a heartless brutalist industrial structure. And then someone else said something to the effect of - "well no kidding a-hole, it's because the use of sidechain compression with a lowering cutoff threshold ties the melodic line to the beat and it gradually loosens up".

That's always been an interesting question to me in music - it's like - well, yeah, you can always ultimately tie the emotional effect of a piece of music back to some technical aspect of the music. In the simplest form, in pop music - oh, that A minor turned into an F...I feel a melancholy emotion. But knowing that - to me - doesn't cheapen or lessen the emotional effect. Knowing that Bach uses such-and-such technique doesn't mute the sense of almost religious awe his music generates in me.

What I like about Ae is that their music doesn't generate emotional effects so much as it causes these elaborate and byzantine mental images / edifices in my head. Anyways.

I have a couple right off the top of my head:

1. The PlclCpC - I get the image of some future-jalopy caroming down some robot road, sputtering and jittering in a misty morning.

2. Uviol - I get the image of being a tiny little creature at the feet of this towering, but sleeping giant, with this miasma of mysterious but kind of tempting and beautiful fog around it.

3. Surripere - I get the image of a long, slow camera pan onto an insect just kind of bumbling along, with an increasing urgency and sense of foreboding. Then, of course, at about 3:50, when that beat starts to gain some tension and then out of the blue it just gets bisected by the fat beat that comes in at a 90-degree angle, the insect just gets demolished by some Cordyceps-style fungus that blasts through its head.

I parsed the title incorrectly. Was disappointed.

Sorry if this is rude - but this idea of 'mental images' from listening to autechre - is very fucking annoying to me - you HAVE to have consumed some drug for this to happen - period, and no one out there is honestly going to say they get mental images - if you do - then you are either schizo or imagining shit that isn't there, in which case - get a fucking life. Some LSD and exai would be a mental combination though ;-D

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  On 9/23/2014 at 8:46 AM, sine nomine said:

Sorry if this is rude - but this idea of 'mental images' from listening to autechre - is very fucking annoying to me - you HAVE to have consumed some drug for this to happen - period, and no one out there is honestly going to say they get mental images - if you do - then you are either schizo or imagining shit that isn't there, in which case - get a fucking life. Some LSD and exai would be a mental combination though ;-D

 

 

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What the actual fuck are you talking about? Autechre conjures up mental imagery like no other music I am aware of.

I can get imagery from Autechre without any drugs just fine. WTH.

A few I can think of..

Uviol - A huge matte black spaceship slowly flying over a forest.

Arch Carrier - A maze of mediterranean style white walls, bridges and archways.

V-Proc - A barren planet/moon with metal towers that have huge horns on their sides.

Perlence Subrange 6-36 - A view from a hilltop on a cold, bright and starry night.

  On 9/23/2014 at 8:46 AM, sine nomine said:

Sorry if this is rude - but this idea of 'mental images' from listening to autechre - is very fucking annoying to me - you HAVE to have consumed some drug for this to happen - period, and no one out there is honestly going to say they get mental images - if you do - then you are either schizo or imagining shit that isn't there, in which case - get a fucking life. Some LSD and exai would be a mental combination though ;-D

 

 

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I'll admit to it. And I don't need drugs.

Chiastic Slide in particular conjures up all sorts of images. Hub is a futuristic city with impossibly tall towers, elevators whizzing up and down. No humans in sight, only machines. Recury is the city burning down.

Oversteps as an album conjures images of a civilization in the clouds. A race of humanoids with wings. Green structures that look like floating islands in the blue and white expanse.

Etc, etc...

Nothing wrong with imagining things while you listen to music mate. Doesn't mean you're schizo lol. Or maybe it was a joke post? I can't tell sometimes.

Hub is almost certainly a Stanford torus style space station in a very dilapidated state

Reniform Puls is the sleeping giant from Uviol waking up with some righteous farts from last night's kidney bean supper (edit while twitchy beanstalk tendrils burst out of his stomach)

i mostly get gantz graf type of visions, like constantly rearranging biomachinery

I'm sure in the AAA Sean said that John Berkey was one of his favourite artists. Imo, his inspiration comes through in Ae's tracks. These are the sorts of images I usually get from listening to their music:

oversteps is different

pt2ph8: vladimir kush

d-sho qub: beksinski

see on see: kush

uviol (not a mental image though but u can think of images generated in cat's head): http://coub.com/view/2z1ji

Yeah, I definitely agree with you on Oversteps xox. It seems to come fom a different place to their other works. A lighter more airy feel. More colourful too.

The latest one I got is from the Krakow liveset at 9:00

To me it sounded like rave or trance chords played through steam pipes, I got a clear vision of a steam pipe instrument on a mountanous alien planet.

Little green goblins dancing round the massive thing as the pipes moved up and down and steam came out.

M39 Diffain gave me an alien cave with explorers going down in to the cave on ropes, and an alien frog was trying to communicate something important to the explorese but they couldn't understand it and kept going lower.

Oh yeah the cave was mainly glassy.

Rediscovered Quarisitice recently, Outh9x is a desert with an ancienct alien artifact or structure, sandstorms blowing round obscuring it.

Also I thought of the desert levels in Mario 64, with those tall thin creatures.

Perlence Suns from Quadrange was distant slow motion explosions in space.

Wish I could remember more, I get great ones.

I meant 19:00 in Krakow.

  On 9/23/2014 at 8:46 AM, sine nomine said:

Sorry if this is rude - but this idea of 'mental images' from listening to autechre - is very fucking annoying to me - you HAVE to have consumed some drug for this to happen - period, and no one out there is honestly going to say they get mental images - if you do - then you are either schizo or imagining shit that isn't there, in which case - get a fucking life. Some LSD and exai would be a mental combination though ;-D

 

 

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You cant imagine shit that isnt there without drugs!? your brain must be broken. Autechres music genrates loads of mental images in my brain but they would be too difficult to describe!

Fucking nerd alert over here. Jesus. fine - go see all the images you want - wonder why the music makes you think of these images though - why not just enjoy the fucking music - again you all come across as real book worm types - I'm sure autechre would be quite amused by the imagination brought upon by their music which ofcourse is intended by them. Righhhhht.

And my brain is not 'broken' that makes no sense. At all.

Stop day dreaming boys - it's time to wake up.

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  On 9/24/2014 at 11:47 AM, sine nomine said:

Fucking nerd alert over here. Jesus. fine - go see all the images you want - wonder why the music makes you think of these images though - why not just enjoy the fucking music - again you all come across as real book worm types - I'm sure autechre would be quite amused by the imagination brought upon by their music which ofcourse is intended by them. Righhhhht.

And my brain is not 'broken' that makes no sense. At all.

Stop day dreaming boys - it's time to wake up.

 

 

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You're so fucking real i want to deepthroat suck your iphone

mostly i see a robotic or mechanical Golem

and possibly with one leg shorter than the other

  On 9/24/2014 at 11:47 AM, sine nomine said:

Fucking nerd alert over here. Jesus. fine - go see all the images you want - wonder why the music makes you think of these images though - why not just enjoy the fucking music - again you all come across as real book worm types - I'm sure autechre would be quite amused by the imagination brought upon by their music which ofcourse is intended by them. Righhhhht.

And my brain is not 'broken' that makes no sense. At all.

Stop day dreaming boys - it's time to wake up.

 

 

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I mean if you've ever read any interviews with Ae you'd know that it is intended, they mention visual imagery all of the time. You're either a troll or a complete moron.

perlence subrange 6-36: i see sine nomine staring at a uniformly grey wall, forever

  On 9/24/2014 at 6:43 PM, baph said:

perlence subrange 6-36: i see sine nomine staring at a uniformly grey wall, forever

lol

too many things to list and kind of too strange to describe properly. second track off of exai there was a moment when a wall of rocks that were vibrating violently, had knuckles and faces extruding from its surface only to decay and turn to rock. and repaet...

  On 9/23/2014 at 8:46 AM, sine nomine said:

Sorry if this is rude - but this idea of 'mental images' from listening to autechre - is very fucking annoying to me - you HAVE to have consumed some drug for this to happen - period, and no one out there is honestly going to say they get mental images - if you do - then you are either schizo or imagining shit that isn't there, in which case - get a fucking life. Some LSD and exai would be a mental combination though ;-D

 

 

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You can't be serious? Are you saying that you can't imagine things in your head that aren't there? How do you remember things? How do you visualize things in your head that you are going to build or create? Do you need drugs to do what every living human can do from birth? I guess you're too cool for that and only nerdy book worms imagine things. Books are for nerds, amirite guyz

Some of exai sounds like aliens (grays maybe?) having phone sex

Space, molecular growth, large-scale organic growth, futuristic factories, dark futuristic city scapes, synthetic drugs, nihilism