Autechre - SIGN 16.10.20

The good thing about vinyl is, that even with no electricity you could still listen to it.

So, if the potato virus kills the electricity, these are my choices....

  On 10/3/2020 at 12:26 AM, toaoaoad said:

This probably goes without saying, but has anyone else been busting out Elseq and NTS in anticipation of this release? I have really been digging into them lately, and as per Ae tradition they are revealing themselves to me in new ways on both micro and macro levels. In fact I might even say it has taken me this long to really appreciate Elseq, and I might have only just reached the second layer of understanding of the NTS material. I've barely scratched the surface with onesix. The excitement of the upcoming release has renewed my interest in this recent material - and in this site (longtime sporadic lurker here, newly joined, hello everyone!)

Being among fellow fans and reading the discourse on the material has helped reconnect with my inner fanboi and get even more hyped about this than I already would have been. Wish I could have been around when the NTS broadcast was happening in real time, but alas my head was in other places at the time and I only found out about it later that year. Now, with this excitement I am just starting to catch up, surely to be thrown off the deep end again with this release.

 

 

 

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I’ve been playing Exai a lot and I’d gone a bit without listening to it. It’s such a good album. 

Loads of other good music being released lately to catch up on. The 2 major footy codes in Australia (Aussie Rules & Rugby League) have also just begun their finals series, and the French Open is heating up. Have a pool being put in at my place. Approaching mid spring. Election intrigue. SIGN can take its sweet time (given where I live, it should already be enroute to make Oct 16)

autechre

More like Snoretechre, am I right?

  On 10/2/2020 at 10:12 PM, Hugh Mughnus said:

I don't wanna wait 2 weeks  

I don’t wanna close my eyes

I don’t wanna fall asleep

  On 10/3/2020 at 4:06 AM, baph said:

I don’t wanna close my eyes

I don’t wanna fall asleep

Cause I’d miss you baaaabeee

and I don’t wanna miss a thinggg

  On 10/3/2020 at 12:26 AM, toaoaoad said:

This probably goes without saying, but has anyone else been busting out Elseq and NTS in anticipation of this release? I have really been digging into them lately, and as per Ae tradition they are revealing themselves to me in new ways on both micro and macro levels. In fact I might even say it has taken me this long to really appreciate Elseq, and I might have only just reached the second layer of understanding of the NTS material. I've barely scratched the surface with onesix. The excitement of the upcoming release has renewed my interest in this recent material - and in this site (longtime sporadic lurker here, newly joined, hello everyone!)

Being among fellow fans and reading the discourse on the material has helped reconnect with my inner fanboi and get even more hyped about this than I already would have been. Wish I could have been around when the NTS broadcast was happening in real time, but alas my head was in other places at the time and I only found out about it later that year. Now, with this excitement I am just starting to catch up, surely to be thrown off the deep end again with this release.

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I'm pretty consistently one album behind with the deeper appreciation stuff you mention- ie it took oversteps to appreciate the weirder sides of quaristice; elseq to see how focused exai was in comparison. It's a bit scrambled now with so much to digest between live and nts.. but all that material is opening up more with each listen

I still can't appreciate enough all the energy they have poured into releases/live/dj'ing in the last 10 yrs or so in particular. Insane amount of amazing material

  On 10/3/2020 at 1:00 AM, Upset man said:

I’ve been playing Exai a lot and I’d gone a bit without listening to it. It’s such a good album. 

I’ve been doing the same and it sounds incredible it’s turning into one of my favourite records. Exai was also the first Autechre album I brought and I’ve been turned on ever since. Can’t wait for Sign and the artwork

  On 10/3/2020 at 9:27 AM, cobra said:

I’ve been doing the same and it sounds incredible it’s turning into one of my favourite records. Exai was also the first Autechre album I brought and I’ve been turned on ever since. Can’t wait for Sign and the artwork

I predict digitals dropping upcoming Friday

  On 10/3/2020 at 9:48 AM, azatoth said:

I predict digitals dropping upcoming Friday

+ "green" announcement pls.

  On 10/3/2020 at 12:53 AM, ArrraR said:

The good thing about vinyl is, that even with no electricity you could still listen to it.

The ol' sewing needle and postcard trick, eh?

  On 10/3/2020 at 2:54 AM, Valleyfold said:

Rob is lush. 
Sean is mental. 
What do you get when you but them together?

  Reveal hidden contents

Autechre : )

 

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I was gonna go with "mush", but I guess yours works too.

  On 10/3/2020 at 12:26 AM, toaoaoad said:

This probably goes without saying, but has anyone else been busting out Elseq and NTS in anticipation of this release?

I've gotten as far as Exai by now. Almost there ...

  On 10/3/2020 at 4:05 AM, demo said:

More like Snoretechre, am I right?

Dammit, Billy!

  On 10/3/2020 at 7:15 AM, markedone said:

I'm pretty consistently one album behind with the deeper appreciation stuff you mention- ie it took oversteps to appreciate the weirder sides of quaristice; elseq to see how focused exai was in comparison. It's a bit scrambled now with so much to digest between live and nts.. but all that material is opening up more with each listen

I still can't appreciate enough all the energy they have poured into releases/live/dj'ing in the last 10 yrs or so in particular. Insane amount of amazing material

I absolutely agree about the energy poured into releases, live work, mixes etc. We are lucky! At the same time, do you think it's kind of what one should expect in some ways? Sean has implied this in certain interviews, particularly in relation to the length of the NTS sessions - where he said he doesn't know why that amount of material should be seen as weird. (Or something to that effect.) What I mean is, I know some really great musicians who aren't well known and never blew up at all and basically got discouraged because nobody cared. They're not whiney about it - they know there's so much coming out and this is just how things go, especially when you're not good at the non-music side of things in releasing music. At the same time, if they had the interest that, say, some groups on this site had, they'd totally take advantage and share consistently loads of great material, just as Autechre have.
I'm not saying that what Autechre do isn't special...it is really special, both quantity and quality wise. At the same time, it seems totally logical to me that if you can make such crazy and imaginative music and expect it to be greeted with such interest, even being able to live off it financially, you would go to town like Autechre have done. I think their approach is what should be normal in a way, and that loads of quieter artists have it a bit backwards today. Obviously it's up to the other artists how they put material out, they have their reasons for such few releases, and I'm not demanding more; it's just strange to me the release schedule of a band like Boards of Canada or even Aphex. The one album every couple of years model seems weird to me in this internet day and age and in light of how prolific a lot of these guys are. I think Autechre have got it right with the Ae Store and their output levels. It's awesome.

yeah i agree, that flood of recent Ae discs/downloads (NTS, AE 2016) make them pretty modern in a way, just like those colundi madness ; BoC are obviously quite old school and... bit slow :P

  On 10/3/2020 at 11:22 AM, IDEM said:

The ol' sewing needle and postcard trick, eh?

Implementing the RIAA equalization and stereo sound mechanically will be interesting.

  On 10/3/2020 at 4:07 PM, Lianne said:

The one album every couple of years model seems weird to me in this internet day and age and in light of how prolific a lot of these guys are.

Yeah, I also think that the distribution method affects in what length and how frequent the releases are. It seems more like a nostalgic relic now to release albums every few years.

The ~1 hour album was kind of product of the CD era, wasn't it? You needed to get enough music to fill a CD to justify a full price CD. It also pretty much killed the single releases because very few people were buying CD singles or even EPs. Also before CDs albums were around ~30mins (LP) and double albums ~60min (2xLP).

Then the album every 2 or 3 years was more due to the record companies scheduling releases evenly so the stuff they put out don't compete with each other.

In the era of digital distribution these limitations don't make much sense. You can be releasing singles every week with a subscription model or whatever or release massive 30 hour albums every 5 years. Continually evolving remixes of the same tracks every few months? Or just anyway you like it really.

del

  On 10/2/2020 at 9:19 PM, xox said:

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xflood

  On 10/3/2020 at 8:10 PM, Wurstwasser said:

xflood

  On 10/3/2020 at 7:49 PM, zkom said:

The ~1 hour album was kind of product of the CD era, wasn't it? You needed to get enough music to fill a CD to justify a full price CD. It also pretty much killed the single releases because very few people were buying CD singles or even EPs. Also before CDs albums were around ~30mins (LP) and double albums ~60min (2xLP).

Nah, CD singles peaked in the late '90s, sales-wise. The internet killed them off, because you could get the a-side for 99p or pirate it, which meant there was less incentive to put time and money into recording b-sides, manufacturing and distributing copies, etc.

In terms of release rates, it's a difficult question, largely in terms of how easy it is to 'absorb' the music. It all depends on how much time you have to listen to music, how much new music you buy, how much you like to get to know albums. I have a friend who loved buying new music because he loved the surprise of stuff he didn't know well; on the opposite end, for me it's really important to really get to know a record in-depth before I really feel I like it. Something like the NTS Sessions was a bit of a nightmare because it was an eight-disc release of music from a group whose music normally takes longer to fully appreciate than most, released in a year when there were maybe 30 other albums that I bought, as well as exploring back catalogue stuff. I never really got the one-on-one time with it that I would have liked, and as a result I don't feel I really know or appreciate it as much as some of their other stuff. So from a personal level, a one hour album every couple of years works for me because it allows me to mentally process the music of my favourite artists as well as being able to throw in some new (and old) discoveries. 

What I don't like is the fact that four years seems to be a fairly normal gap between albums these days, for both underground and mainstream artists. I appreciate that there's less money in record sales and thus we're not likely to get back to the album-every-year format that was common up to the end of the last century, but I remember when any artist took over two years to release an album, it was heralded as some long-awaited follow-up, and yet now it seems to be the norm. As always, it's the industry dictating this, and it's a real shame, especially with someone like Aphex. He's obviously willing to put shit loads of stuff out there - the Soundcloud dump is a great example - but between 1991 and 1996 he put out 28 releases; in the same length of time between 2014 and 2019 he put out 10. Not that I necessarily want 28, but he has said in an interview that the amount of stuff he puts out physically is kind of dictated by Warp.

  On 10/3/2020 at 10:26 PM, purlieu said:

Nah, CD singles peaked in the late '90s, sales-wise. The internet killed them off, because you could get the a-side for 99p or pirate it, which meant there was less incentive to put time and money into recording b-sides, manufacturing and distributing copies, etc.

In terms of release rates, it's a difficult question, largely in terms of how easy it is to 'absorb' the music. It all depends on how much time you have to listen to music, how much new music you buy, how much you like to get to know albums. I have a friend who loved buying new music because he loved the surprise of stuff he didn't know well; on the opposite end, for me it's really important to really get to know a record in-depth before I really feel I like it. Something like the NTS Sessions was a bit of a nightmare because it was an eight-disc release of music from a group whose music normally takes longer to fully appreciate than most, released in a year when there were maybe 30 other albums that I bought, as well as exploring back catalogue stuff. I never really got the one-on-one time with it that I would have liked, and as a result I don't feel I really know or appreciate it as much as some of their other stuff. So from a personal level, a one hour album every couple of years works for me because it allows me to mentally process the music of my favourite artists as well as being able to throw in some new (and old) discoveries. 

What I don't like is the fact that four years seems to be a fairly normal gap between albums these days, for both underground and mainstream artists. I appreciate that there's less money in record sales and thus we're not likely to get back to the album-every-year format that was common up to the end of the last century, but I remember when any artist took over two years to release an album, it was heralded as some long-awaited follow-up, and yet now it seems to be the norm. As always, it's the industry dictating this, and it's a real shame, especially with someone like Aphex. He's obviously willing to put shit loads of stuff out there - the Soundcloud dump is a great example - but between 1991 and 1996 he put out 28 releases; in the same length of time between 2014 and 2019 he put out 10. Not that I necessarily want 28, but he has said in an interview that the amount of stuff he puts out physically is kind of dictated by Warp.

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I didn't really check the statistics for CD singles but I was the only person I knew that bought them, lol. The nice thing was the various remixes they contained which now seem to be sadly going away? I mean for electronic music you usually get the "album version" and then bunch of remixes by other artists which were sometimes much better than the original. I've been buying the various Björk singles digitally because they have some really good remixes.

In general I like the 20-30 minute EP format best because trying to fit 60 minutes of continuous uninterrupted attentive listening in a day can be a bit of pain. Also my attention span is a bit limited. For some genres though the hour long format suits better, like say ambient. But one hour of ambient isn't that many individual tracks anyway.

Most of the time though I just pick and mix whatever the tracks I feel like not thinking much about how they fit together. That's how I mostly listen to the NTS Sessions also. Just occasional track here and there whatever suits the mood.

Some singles do get digital-only remix packages these days, but they're definitely fewer and farther between away from pop and mainstream club music.

The thing I miss with electronic music is artists remixing themselves. In the '90s there were so many great longform singles from Ae, FSOL, Orbital, Underworld, Aphex, The Orb, numerous others, where the artist took the original track as the source of inspiration for a 40 minute release of radical reworks and new material. Longer, in some territories - Underworld's Dark & Long EP got a wonderful 40 minute version in the UK and then an additional 70 minute 'single' release in Scandinavia. 

The death of the physical single has also contributed to the end of more interesting music in the charts, as any band, guitar-based or electronic, had their fanbase who'd buy the CD or 12" for the b-sides and get the single into the charts; now there are rarely any b-sides so they basically just get ignored and people wait for the album.