Are Ae getting better as they age?

to be clear, this is amongst my fav ae ever. the first half of all these sets are very challenging though. they have been opening up a lot with repeated listens in different states of mind. I'm also in a very very weird personal space lately and these have provided a much welcomed distraction.

plus 9 hours is a lot to process!

  On 12/15/2015 at 4:01 AM, jules said:

to be clear, this is amongst my fav ae ever.

 

crystal clear and I wouldn't argue with you, I don't think any one else would either

Ae have certainly come far since Cavity Job.

Maybe they are indeed getting better or it's just we who are getting worse.

 

- Arthur Schopenhauer

I don't know if they're getting better but they are staying consistent which is better than a lot of bands. Although my favorite output period from them was their late 90s work, they're still putting out interesting stuff even if I feel like I generally appreciate the new stuff intellectually more than in an emotional/frisson way. There's still consistently at least a few tracks per album I really dig and the Exai live show was great.

I would agree that these live sets are some of my favourite Ae ever, along with the highlights of Exai. It would be nice though to have some of the standout compositions from these sets in a standalone 'final' track format.

^ dat GIF

  On 12/16/2015 at 8:32 PM, TheTransitionary said:

I would agree that these live sets are some of my favourite Ae ever, along with the highlights of Exai. It would be nice though to have some of the standout compositions from these sets in a standalone 'final' track format.

 

seems like they're not songs, they're patches, or something

Edited December 16, 2015 by very honest

well i like exai like a thousand more times than i did before, the live stuff tho im still not really into. ill keep giving it a try

Don't try too hard.

We welcome John McClane into the subforum, guns blazing. Yippie ki yay, muddafucka

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eGjlMs4_6o

Yippie ki yaaaayyyyyyy

Yes. How old are they, anyway?

  On 11/13/2017 at 5:04 AM, clarktrent said:

Yes. How old are they, anyway?

man, like 5 billion years old

As far as autechre is concerned I catch up with them pretty slow.

They're still my favourite 'band' by a far margin, even though I find more daily enjoyment listening to acoustic music (jazz, blues, classical...) and other electronic (60s/70s/80s/90s, synths, drones and ambients)

As a youngster I've been blown away by their Incunabula, Amber, TriRep, Chiastic style.

Then the LPs and EPs and Confields and Untilteds came about and it was like an opening of a chakra.

Today, i find Autechre more like a special occasion- like an equinox, or solstice.

The biggest festival for me were always the live sets, but the 2017 set was kind of chaotic for me I was trying to find something to hold on to, but it didn't let me...

I listened to Exai only a couple of times. It's currently ageing like wine in my cellar.

Quaristice however... whoa!

Oversteps is maybe a bit of a deviation which will definitely find it's space and time somewhere in the future.

When listening to Lego Feet I feel they were even more ahead of their time but then were told to tone it down and make it more marketable. But maybe if they had just gone straight to the direction where Lego Feet was already pointing to there would be something missing from today's Autechre. Or they might have been lost in the history of electronic music as a too experimental act to have any wider appeal. I don't know, just speculation. 

 

Anyway, I feel like they are in this infinite recursive loop where they deconstruct their past music while mixing in new ingredients taking the whole thing deeper on each round. Although there might have been some sidesteps from this loop (Oversteps/MoT, Quaristice to some degree)

 

Just listened through the whole of elseqs last Sunday, again. Now playing tri repetae.

  On 11/14/2017 at 1:05 AM, Stickfigger said:

quaristice from untitled didn't seem like a step forward ..

wat.

  On 11/14/2017 at 1:47 AM, Stickfigger said:

 

  On 11/14/2017 at 1:11 AM, sweepstakes said:

 

  On 11/14/2017 at 1:05 AM, Stickfigger said:

quaristice from untitled didn't seem like a step forward ..

wat.

The intricacy of the detail in Untilted is not found in Quaristice imo due to the way which it was produced. Editing down live jams does not product ipacial section

There is a fuckton more detail in Quaristice - apparently, you just can't hear it. Ipacial Section is one of the corniest tracks on one of their corniest albums.

  On 11/13/2017 at 8:40 PM, mokz said:

I feel like they are in this infinite recursive loop where they deconstruct their past music while mixing in new ingredients taking the whole thing deeper on each round.

There was an interview on that now-defunct Russian fan site that had a great Sean quote: "New tricks on old gear, old tricks on new gear." And now they build their own virtual gear, so the cross-referencing and even cross-modulating must be orders of magnitude deeper.

  On 11/14/2017 at 2:16 AM, sweepstakes said:

 

  On 11/14/2017 at 1:47 AM, Stickfigger said:

 

  On 11/14/2017 at 1:11 AM, sweepstakes said:

 

  On 11/14/2017 at 1:05 AM, Stickfigger said:

quaristice from untitled didn't seem like a step forward ..

wat.

The intricacy of the detail in Untilted is not found in Quaristice imo due to the way which it was produced. Editing down live jams does not product ipacial section

There is a fuckton more detail in Quaristice - apparently, you just can't hear it. Ipacial Section is one of the corniest tracks on one of their corniest albums.

Whoa whoa whoa, I think it's time to calm down now ;)

 

Quaristice/Quadrange/etc. has some detailed sounds and tracks, but I don't know that there's anything that AE have ever done that's as detailed as Sublimit. I mean this may have to do with different perspectives on the word detailed in regards to music, but I dunno man...Quaristice is one of their least detailed albums, imo.

I feel like you guys have a much different definition of "detail" from mine.

 

Sublimit is pretty cool, though.

Sorry if I was rude but if you poop on my fave AE I'm gonna poop on yours, it's only fair.

I dunno if you were being rude, I was just being funny.

 

I'd be honestly curious to hear what you think 'detailed' means in music and how it relates to Untilted vs Quaristice.

  On 11/14/2017 at 3:06 AM, auxien said:

I dunno if you were being rude, I was just being funny.

 

I'd be honestly curious to hear what you think 'detailed' means in music and how it relates to Untilted vs Quaristice.

Well I think Untilted had more discrete "events" as far as MIDI notes or whatever, and it may have even had more layers per track. But Quaristice had so much more nuance and atmosphere and subtle changes of color and light, and there was so much elegance and style. Untilted is sleeker and slicker, I think "sporty" is a good word. But Quaristice is so much more aesthetically sophisticated and psychedelic.

 

Take the reverb on the lead in The Plc for example. It starts out small and then it unfurls in such an organic way, then it turns into a snarl before it collapses back in on itself. And it does this subtly and musically, it's not just showing off, there's visceral feeling in it. It's not flashy drum fireworks but it sounds so lush and alive and alien. I think it sounds more like the mindbending contortions of their recent live material and elseq than anything they did in the interim years.

 

Then you have stuff like fol3 which I hated when I first heard it, skipped it every time, but I went back and started getting those weird concrète melodies stuck in my head. Maybe there aren't, like, objectively more details, but the ones that are there are so carefully curated. It all feels like the kind of dreamlike movie that lingers in your mind for weeks. Things don't appear to make sense at first but you start to see the internal logic of it all and then you can't imagine it any other way.

 

Also not to pick on the other feller but I resent the notion that live jams are somehow inferior to megalomaniacal musical planning. I don't trust a knob twiddler who always trusts his brain over his fingers.

Yes, AE are getting better as they age

 

elseq and AE_LIVE are the greatest electronic music I've ever heard