Collage / Autechre - elseq 1-5

How To Conquer Fear, RTomens, 2016

more pictures over here

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Are Autechre necessary? I wonder...

In this age of countless small sonic statements streaming across all digital platforms Autechre come across as dinosaurs from the pre-digital era. Now their latest, elseq 1-5, takes the form of five albums...like the digital era equivalent of a Yes triple album? By being all modern and making it digital only (not their first) at least they avoid the old world spectacle of what would be a 5 (6? 7?, who's counted the minutes?) album vinyl box.

So it feels like a Big Statement, the kind a Big Band (no, not like Ellington) would have made once upon a time, before even Autechre were born (1891, or 1991) and their longevity (25 years!) itself seems to automatically add wrinkles to their sound, their very existence.

Whilst it costs next to nowt to put an album out these days, into the endless stream wherein your music will more likely drown rather than swim into the lives of many people, what that does it test the true creativity of the artists. After all, with no money to be made, why else are all these people doing it? I actually mean creative endurance which, we might assume, is the mark of a genuinely creative person as opposed to the creative whim of someone dabbling in music just because they can, having downloaded the software.

Whereas in the old days bands depended on the label to keep them alive and push the product before giving them the elbow once sales dropped below a sustainable level. It was a cruel world, right enough. Some say, even since Punk, it was a better way, a way of sorting the 'men from 'the boys', if you like, to which I say 'bollocks'. It was the only way except for total independence, i.e. setting up your own label to promote your music. Costs, costs, costs...the material world of card sleeves, vinyl, cassette, rehearsal rooms, recording studios...it's a wonder we had any music, never mind so much great music.

Is greatness redundant? I think it is, judging by most of what I hear. A subjective notion, of course. Music comes and goes so easily, weighs nothing and often costs nothing; it's as if it barely exists....my thoughts barely exist...I'm having to catch them as they spin out on the ether from this wrinkled hard drive in my head...

Autechre sustain the notion of Greatness, Great Bands (yes I know 'band' isn't appropriate) just like the old days. There are many Big Acts today, I know, but who except the numbskull gives them their time? They thrive on sheeplethink, naturally. Capitalism demands celebrity materialism. People willingly maintain it. Autechre's 'awkward' techno has attracted a big fan base, all boys, every one, poring over those cryptic titles, twisting Sean Booth and Rob Brown’s sonic Rubik's Cubes over and over like true obsessives...perhaps only Aphex Twin can rival them for techboy adulation.

Well is elseq 1-5 any good? Stupid question, which you'll have already answered if you're interested. It's Autechre and the Autechre machine rolls on, regardless of acclaim (which it always gets), hovering low, hoovering up every electronic variation over quarter of a century and recalibrating Techno, Hip-hop (beats), Glitch, Drum 'n' Bass, Drone whatever, literally remixing (remember post-Rock?) to make it all Autechre. It was sturdily built to start with, but at the same time, a shape shifting entity, fluid, enigmatic, rather than heavy, weighed down with specific genre definition.

The long tracks are too long, though, but that's the nature of heroic individualism, eh? No-one's going to edit for them and no-one's going to say "Twenty-seven minutes? Too much!" to their faces. As much as I like the idea of an electronic Punk revolution that will make Autechre look like Yes, one that breaks out of a ghetto and sparks a lot of activity, it's not happening. Autechre should be dinosaurs, but the plain fact is they're still making interesting music, the kind that stands out in shuffle mode...because it's Autechre and they remain unique.

(they also seems to be control freaks because no tracks are available on YouTube, one having been there and gone, presumably blocked by the 'authority', which is crap and smacks of corporate control)

2013 Releases of the Year

Cue fanfare.

Here's what the music world's been waiting for.

Autechre seem to be missing from a few lists by those who supposedly know their electronic music, which proves they don't. Familiarity breeds...ignorance? 

I've included all three of Morphine's Charles Cohen albums, even though they may not see a 2013 release; call me crazy. 

Some included didn't get reviewed on the blog because it slipped my mind to do so, or they went unnoticed. One such album is the Cacophonic release of Tape Recorder Music, an absolutely essential record. As are the rest, of course.

New Mix: Descent Into Deep Time

Another treat for lovers of deep listening, unless you prefer Beyoncé, in which case, what are you doing here? Something of an acousmatic thread runs through this, although other musics feature, such as The Haxan Cloak, who I accidentally omitted from the listing. His 'Dieu' appears after 'Intensites'. No mix is ever perfect just as a work of art is only ever abandoned, as Jack Vettriano or some other great artist said.

Listen on Mixcloud or download here

Descent Into Deep Time by Timewriter on Mixcloud

Chemical Imbalance - W. Murch
1 Descent Into Deep Time - A Dontigny
2 Fleure - Autechre
3 Trawsfynydd Nuclear Power Station - Emptyset
4 Dynamique Resonance - B. Parmegiani
5 Cristaux Liquides - M. Rodrigue
6 Tar - H. Vaggione
7 Lethe - Dhomont/Krebs
8 Intensites - A. Yterce
9 Archives - L. Ferrari
10 Bédé - R. Normandeau
11 Repons - P. Boulez
12 Portrait - C. Calon
13 A Sign Of Tension - Paranoia Dept
14 Belli Machina - Tetreault/Mori/Labrosse
15 Derailment - Marclay/Yoshihide
16 Wrekwahn - Ensemble Skalectrik
17 Autour - C. Schryer

Exai - Autechre (Warp)

Not another Autechre album...

...no-one in modern electronic music is supposed to make more than a handful (never mind 11)...and in doing so, prove themselves to be left standing at a post they may well have erected years ago, only to watch younger technicians leave them standing...

...well, Rob Brown and Sean Booth have the audacity to persist - because they've got nothing better to do?

What's it like, though? Like Autechre, and more so - like Autechre grown up and giving the young pretenders a good kicking. Every devious detonation of bass and percussion blasts the competition out of the water. What competition? Nobody has or can (sensibly) try to sound like Autechre. Such is the studious configuration of rhythms they concoct - they've got more time signatures than Dave Brubeck.

It's bass music for brainiacs - sophisticated manoeuvres in the dark such as 'Draun Quarter', which plays skittish percussion against a leisurely keyboard line, whilst 'Fleure' features trademark scrambled electro transmissions that brilliantly breakdown in an atomic blast of boosted bass dynamics before burning out. Tension between hi and low-end dynamics drive the album; whiplash beats and deformed drones, brutal mutations evolve, as on 'irlite (get 0)'. To paraphrase Derrick May, 'cloudline' is like George Clinton and Stockhausen are stuck in an elevator with only a sequencer to keep them company - a breathing space amid the intense arrangements which hardly constitutes peace, but to these ears is underpinned by the spirit of The One as rewritten for mechanized funkateers.

Here is Rubik cubism in sound which appreciative listeners can spend hours trying to lock together in their heads, only to fry their brains - but oh what a delicious mystery.

One Album of the Year, already - perhaps the Album of the Year - in February? Surely not. Yes.

Autechre EPs 1991 - 2002

Genius blah blah...of course, it’s obvious, and listening to it all may well give you ’19 Headaches’, but oh what sweet pain that would be. From the ‘rave’ sound of  ‘Cavity Job’ to the frantic tick and squiggle of ‘Cap IV’ with its contrasting doleful piano, we witness the dynamic duo’s digression from the norm. By 94’s ‘Lost’ they were already well on the way towards greater abstraction, warping (ha-ha) drum ‘n’ bass and electro as they saw fit, as shape-shifters supreme, the boys would keep on mutating the elements.  By ‘EP7’ (1999) they’d reached a high point in the art of sophisticated sonic sabotage with sounds far beyond the comfort zone of genre, reaching some fantastic place on the other side where your ears are both assaulted and massaged, frequently at the same time. Yet with ‘Dial’, from ‘Gantz Graft’, they were still capable of touching some remote base back on Earth (Detroit), whilst in hyperdrive through their unique parallel universe.  

Of The Digital Archive And The National Treasure That Is Autechre

Life now feels like just a matter of waiting for the World Cup to start...a terrible reflection on the state of my existence...which reminds me of the Hancock sketch about Sundays where he sighs and says something like: ‘It’s just waiting for the next meal to come along’. Not that I’m expecting a feast of great football from England...

   The wait is made more endurable by music, of course...and in particular, right now, Autechre’s latest work, ‘Oversteps’. They should be made a national treasure, officially...by the sonic equivalent of the National Trust. Well, maybe not, because if such an organisation existed they’d be busy preserving traditional Folk music...and Elton John, perhaps, who can afford to preserve himself. Although as demonstrated by the new hair he got himself years ago, self-preservation doesn’t always yield the greatest results...

   We have all this music preserved on the PC’s museum of sound, but my generation recalls the legwork needed, once upon a time, to track down oldies-but-goodies, and the extortionate price demanded should that object be deemed desirable by the ‘right’ people.

   There’s an argument that says all music is devalued now, not only in the monetary sense, because it comes to us too easily. I can see that. I mean, there is so much sound stored digitally on my PC that really listening to even half of it feels like an impossibility. Then again, I wouldn’t opt for returning to the days when we paid £35 for an album with one ‘killer’ tune on it. By ‘we’ I mostly mean us Rare Groove/Jazz DJs. Oh yes, the good ol’ days of being handed a pile of singles which Patrick Forge pulled out from under the counter at Record & Tape...

   The other day I had the idea of deleting three-quarters of my digital sound library so as to concentrate on what was left. But I don’t like the thought of deleting something that I might not remember to list again. It’s not the room on the PC, but the room in my head that’s the problem. Some days I flick in a frenzy, just because I can, which results in a brain filled with so much musical spaghetti that I edge towards insanity. I’ve often argued the case for cultural ‘pruning’, but doing it to a list of names is contrarily easier, and harder. Well, it’s not crowding out the bunker, is it?

   ‘Oversteps’ is an album that I’ll be ‘keeping’. It feels like a positive affirmation just to stick it on a digital list. It’s satisfying in so many ways, not least in the inventiveness, which you could reasonably expect from these two, but in the direction it takes overall. In a sense it is more about an ambient atmosphere, rather than their trademark chopped up time signature techno. They are, after all, the Dave Brubeck of Techno (ha!) – and ‘Redfall’ is even kind of ‘jazzy’ with its freeform keyboard ‘solo’...the way Herbie Hancock could have progressed in step with the present, but didn’t. And to add to that, ‘Krylon’ is in a similar mode, but reminds me more of Alice Coltrane harp-playing. Here and elsewhere, they create a kind of harpsichord sound, conjuring up something like church music for the 21st century. I’m sure Alice would approve.

   This is easier listening than many previous works, whilst at the same time being anything but Easy Listening. It’s something to treasure, for sure.

Report From The Bunker 2

Having written no fiction for months it feels as if my ability construct sentences in that way has diminished...been eroded by...something...lack of use...a part of my brain gone dormant...

If fiction no longer seems possible, is fact all that remains? Perhaps this blog is what remains...and it is all factual, of course...

But how much fact can one endure? Clicking on ‘Next Blog’ leads to pages containing photos of babies...click again and I find myself staring at a middle-aged woman with a back complaint, for which she has kindly provided a diagram to illustrate the problem...the next is written in a language I don’t understand and cannot begin to guess the origin of...with YouTube clips by bands I have never heard of...the next, by a teacher, talks about her family problems...it amazes me how personal people are willing to be...cathartic, I suppose...but do none of her family read the blog too?

Blog Land...a strange country...

Here in The Bunker the sky is blue out the front, whilst grey clouds gather over the back garden...dark, ominous, snow-laden, I presume. A blackbird enjoys the berries on the Pyracantha bush where, this morning, there was a redwing, the first we’ve seen in the garden. We watched it fly off to join a flock scattered throughout the trees at the bottom of the garden...ah yes, wild Camden...

I have come across bird-watching blogs...finding them more interesting than many others I’ve ventured upon by chance but I won’t be adding any to my list of Favourites...

All subjects are bloggable...

I contemplate, briefly, creating one about my fingernails, their growth, condition, cleanliness etc...someone’s probably already beaten me to it...contemplate blog searching ‘fingernails but wonder what the hell is wrong with me...it’s been one of those afternoons...unable to settle into doing anything....watched the start of ‘Apocalypto’ because someone leant it to me...but didn’t like the banter between the natives, although I’m sure ancient civilisations shared a joke or two...

Watched the start of the ‘Solaris’ remake...not bad, to my surprise...recall hearing, whilst we were there, that Clooney has a place on Lake Como...dream of a summer holiday...

Check my Amazon account to make sure no-one has bought what I’m selling because yesterday I was notified by the company that I was late sending a CD someone had bought...which I’d forgotten was even on there...but the sale did inspire me to put more stuff up for sale, that being my first I dream of a lucrative business but know full well the price the average book fetches and that I would have to sell a lot to make it worthwhile...

Contemplate selling loads of books...even more than currently sit in the two shopping bags on the floor bound for the s/h shop when I can be bothered...

Buying books is a habit; a bad one? If only they took as long to read as a film takes to watch...

Listen to Autechre’s ‘Quaristice’ album...on the headphones...and realise that they’re quite unique in the world of electronic music...and feel slightly stupid because people have been saying how good they are for years, although I’ve never fully got into them...wonder how many more artists I will ‘get’ when they’ve been producing music for years...