Biggest shock hearing an Ae song for the first time?

Which song do you remember feeling the most surprised about when you heard it for the first time? For me it's either known(1) or bnc Castl, both sounded so different from anything I had ever heard from them before (which says a lot). 

For me possibly r ess combined with ilanders as the openers to Oversteps. I'd been so used to their albums heading towards crunchy technical shenanigans that when the huge ambience and melodic twangs of these first two tracks came on I knew the album would be a very different beast indeed.

(It also didn't help that my headphones weren't plugged in properly and I was just getting the 'side' information rather than anything in the mid channel for the first few minutes !)

My introduction to autechre was only a few years ago with Exai lol. Had only heard a few remixes of theirs before that. (I know, its unbelievable lol). 

Me and the waifu went into the album blind, on mushrooms. With no point of reference for autechre trax other than the 2 tracks preceding it (which were also pretty nuts), prac-f came on.

fook me was that ever trippy.

Album was so good we invited my brother over to repeat the process the following weekend.

Didn't mean for that to read like a trip report lol sorry. I just remember prac-f being particularly shocking as it was like nothing I'd ever heard before.

untilted - quaristice - oversteps certainly was the most wtfucked sequence of releases to me, each for very different reasons. representative tracks? prolly fermium, ending of plc, known(1).

sure, unpredictability is one of ae's defining (and most cherished) features anyway but yeah those i saw coming the least i think.

Gantz Graf for me. I'm pretty sure the first time I heard it was also watching the video, and it was a hell of a sensory overload. Even with their music often tending towards that rapid groove and harsher sound, they really went somewhere else with that track they'd not really gone before imo: it's succinctness and clarity was (and still is) really engaging, but with the 'coordinated' visuals and punch of it all together, it was a hell of a first impression.

Not just song, but album. In which case I'm talking about EP7. I was still fairly new to Ae at the time, and I'd previously only heard Incunabula, Amber, and Tri Repetae++. It took me a day or two to realize it was the same guys.

This was in May 1999, and I was accustomed to the impression that Ae were strictly into spacious, ambient grooves. And at the time EP7 was like an evil computer virus to me. But then when I first heard Chiastic Slide and LP5 the following year, those were the missing puzzle pieces. And then things made more sense.

my first time with VLetrmx :

We made love and me brain cummed so hard

my first time with VLetrmx and MDMA :

Jupiter and beyond the infinite

friend of mine who knew i was big into breakcore recommended gantz graf & draft to me, which i now love. they described it as very cold and alien, but even expecting that it still pulled my brain to shreds.

ipacial section on big system. pure fire!

i was around 14 and baked as hell at a friends house and we where all listening to Confield i think, my mind couldnt comprehend the music but it was very pleasant , i felt like an autist.

 

I think it was 2003, a friend burned me a cd: discordance axis before and ep7 sfter. I already well knew discordance axis, but I never heard of these Autechre. I was speechless. Then I found out that the cd was defective: it interrupted the autechre's tracks with seconds of net silence. I was very disappointed to find that those cuts of silence were not authentic: you have no idea how Rpeg was abstract and innovative with those absurd pauses. Despite this, with or without silences, I soon realized that those two british dudes played exactly what my brain always asked for, without knowing it. Unfortunately I have been ill of this, and still today I barely can not hear anything else. Someone help me get out please. 

  On 11/11/2017 at 12:37 AM, AE35unit said:

I think it was 2003, a friend burned me a cd: discordance axis before and ep7 sfter.

sounds like a good friend to have.

I think that would be a tie between the first time I heard Chiastic Slide (esp track 3), and Confield. I like most of their stuff since then of course, but both those albums took such a departure from anything they had done before--Chiastic Slide was the move from ambient synth minimalism into hyper detailed percussion madness, Confield into algorithmic and atonal weirdness.

Hitting play on Foil, with the first pair nice headphones (grados) i'd bought, was instantly transportative.

I remember being rather "shocked" by the sonic quality of see on see, in fact much of oversteps took a while to get used to the strange sonic pallate but I soon came to adore it.

2015 AE_LIVE tour show, first 12 minutes in particular. Absolute sonic mastery, had the biggest smile on my face hearing it live for the first time.

Incunabila, £11.99 from Virgin Record stores. Press play, Kalpol Introl starts.

...

"I paid £12 for this?"

Lol

I was most impressed by that well introduced pitch falldown halfway into Stop Look Listen. That was something very unusual back in the days.

Today it is not unusual. For us.

Not song, but album, and that would go for both Chiastic Slide and Quaristice. In both cases I was floored by how cohesive and consistently great they were and they instantly filled an emotional/aesthetic niche for me. Just, like, really? Can an album be THAT good?

By the time I heard Chiastic in 2000 I had already been listening to them for 4 years. I enjoyed all their other stuff, but I always felt like I was sort of hanging out at someone else's place - shoes off, don't leave your jacket on the chair, ask before you grab a drink out of the fridge. But those two albums and I were very fast friends, they just burrowed right into my mind, made themselves right at home, and they're still my faves.

Corc.

I’d only dabbled in a few ae albums previously, LP5 hit me hard, Corc especially.

Lentic Catachresis when it turns into chaos in the second half I was like damn. I was obsessed with that song for a while.

  On 12/10/2017 at 8:38 AM, morktoast said:

Lentic Catachresis when it turns into chaos in the second half I was like damn. I was obsessed with that song for a while.

That while will last for me until I die.

  On 12/9/2017 at 12:56 AM, Bechuga said:

Incunabila, £11.99 from Virgin Record stores. Press play, Kalpol Introl starts.

 

...

 

"I paid £12 for this?"

sounds like my intro to BoC. Always saw them being lumped in with AE, Aphex, Squarepusher as one of the IDM greats so I bought MHTRTC expecting Krazy Beatz... most underwhelming first listen of my life so far

  On 12/9/2017 at 9:09 PM, calx said:

Corc.

 

I’d only dabbled in a few ae albums previously, LP5 hit me hard, Corc especially.

I'd agree with LP5, no specific track though. My run of Autechre albums first heard was Amber, Tri Repetae then LP5 and I remember listening to LP5 and thinking alright there's some very deep magic going on right here. Whereas Amber and Tri Repetae were fairly straight forward in working out LP5 had that next level music-making science that I came in the future to associate with Autechre (the magic eye/ear effect and the smoke and mirror effect of the way you'd put on the album and it would sound so different to how you thought it did)

Dark Art IDM in it's purest form *drinks more Trappist*

I remember listening to Confield realaudio previews back on the old Warp site and somehow getting the impression that it was a noise album. Not sure if that was a shock though.

Gantz Graf was quite a huge step forward from Draft, but I was more surprised than shocked. I remember that one also sounding like noise, but I was a more seasoned Ae listener by that point.

As Stickfigger says, known(1) was pretty confronting at first, but I fkn love it.

Osla for n was a bit of a shock, as I didn't think they could get any more next-level in their rhythms.