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Not trying to be negative, but I think it would be a significantly stronger record if it were a bit less BOC-esque. To whatever extent Boards is just as much psychedelic trip-hop as "IDM" (yeah, the latter is a non-thing, basically), the less psychedelic and less trip-hop cuts from ABCDEF...etc. are the strongest ones (the faster tempo, more acid-like ones, for instance). The synths that don't waver with BOC's signature faltering harmonics are also more appealing. Listening to the record feels like there was a checklist being employed to make sure that BOC's aesthetics weren't strayed too far from while there was a more genuine pull in a different direction. I'm not suggesting that this was actually the case, it's just the impression I'm left with.

This seems like a reasonable place for the random observation that the cover art for Oversteps looks like it should belong to Confield. I always imagine it as being the artwork, really weird, I know.

Oh yes, ok. That makes more sense. Yeah, those chords are almost like a character that shows up here and there in ae's world. T ess xi seems like the most obvious reprise to me, but for sure.

There's a bit here where Sean is asked if some part of OneSix is a remix of Lera (I think), and he responds that it is but that it is also a remix of one of the pieces from Warp Tapes. Does anyone know which part of OneSix this is? And Which part of Warp Tapes. Does this also mean that Lera is a mutation of something that appeared on Warp Tapes?

This joker on reddit:

We're gonna party like it's 2002 (personal associations, anyway)

This is really exceptional. Not really as Live-2010-ish as suggested by the various Youtube or Soundcloud bootlegs and a bit more like if you collided SIGN/PLUS viscosity/texture with something like 2014-15's freneticism. I'm very excited to get to know this and the other, forthcoming recordings better.

I'm very into the first half/world-building but not so into the story, really. Especially the resistance replicants living in the ruins or whatever – feels phoned in. The final bits are good, though.

I've been listening to L-event a fair bit lately as it reminds me of fall. I still get flashbacks to the panning / scaling website distortions, very Twliglight Zone-ish and suiting the atmosphere of the first three-fourths of the record perfectly. Tac Lacora, in particular, has a really mischievous, poltergeistian, gremlinesque vibe to me, like floating furniture and cabinets slamming by themselves, televisions turning on and off, etc. With the exception of the last track, there's something spooky about the EP for me. Not really dark, but quite different from Exai even if it shares a lot in common with it texturally and structurally. Exai sounds epic, sounds like it takes place outdoors with sprawling vistas, and most of it seems pretty diurnal to me. L-event comes off as more claustrophobic-ish, seeming to exist at night, with, again, strange things happening.

Yeah, this is one of my favorite things of late. It's got such a nice eeriness that pervades it while not being overtly dark, per se. Really nice atmospheres, and I appreciate how sparse it often is, nice restraint.

Kind of obnoxious to start a thread with this question, but I've attempted searching the forums, and I remember this having been talked about a while back (probably a couple of years ago). I thought it was Helena Hauff, but perhaps not. Anyone recall?

I agree. It jumped out at me. Some of the tones behave, seemingly, identically both in terms of their modulations and their relationships with each other. Crazy if that's an accident.

It's so interesting and funny that he's laying out who did what in quite a few places. It seems like yesterday that he said "We never say who does what!" in some interview. I like that insight

The granulated chord sounds feel like they're almost verbatim TAPR to me. The rest of the "track" or section or what have you seems entirely different, but those molten, vibrating synth stabs transported me right back to 2003.

Yeah, this is fantastic. Which date is this?

I actually really dig the lighting (orange-red neon). I wonder if there was any pushback on this from Ae or if they were cool with it. Maybe it was even their idea! But that would be unusual.

Rather different from the Primavera set, isn't it? Still a lot of that ecol4 DNA running through it but presenting more similarly to the SIGN version?

Anybody else feel like TAPR was trying to get a reprise in at around the 25 min mark (and for a bit thereafter) on the Primavera recordings?

Wow, new Autechre and the first original Cronenberg in 23 years on the same day. Sounds great, I think. I'm happy and maybe a bit surprised that it's reminding me as much of AE LIVE (and perhaps exai in places) as it does so far (23 min in). I agree that there are Oversteps tour vibes per Draft78's post. Maybe more in the synth / tonal stuff than rhythmically. Also as jaderpansen & Iwanttobefree mentioned, the ecol connection, although I think that I spotted it later. 20 minutes in or so.

I am absolutely with you in finding elseq more and more engaging. That is definitely true. I find NTS, however, and found it from the very beginning, to be really accessible. There are some weird, abrupt endings that leave me scratching my head a bit. Like the tape just ran out or one of the guys hit stop (I understand that this isn't how it works at all) without notice. But, apart from that, I find NTS to sound either carefully constructed or carefully edited. elseq feels like rolling the dice to me as an observer. I don't know what weird thing is going to come at me next. It's a bit like Quaristice in that sense. It feels intentionally haphazard (not the individual pieces but as a collection of pieces) unified by unexpected turns. And then, the pieces, themselves, do also have a kind of rusticity in general. There are a lot of tenuous, challenging harmonics. There is also a willingness to meander that I don't find present in the NTS pieces. Again, I'm coming around to it, but it's not because my impression of what it is has evolved; it's more just that I appreciate it increasingly for what it appears to be. Also, 13x0 is one of my favorite Ae tracks of all time. A lot of elseq 1 resonates quite hard with me.

It's not so much that we don't notice that the live sets or NTS (or exai or, to a lesser extent, oversteps) share the same DNA as elseq. I agree that you can hear similar processes at work (and, as you've mentioned, some overlapping pieces or versions of pieces). I think it's that elseq sounds the least carefully harvested and the most unabashedly experimental (not to be confused with "challenging," I mean it literally - the pieces sound like experiments intentionally created in the interest of seeing what will unfold). I can be dead wrong about the thought process behind elseq vs. the others, though. It's just an impression that I'm getting, and what S & R were actually doing and seeking may be very different from my interpretation, obviously.

So, I've incrementally listened to this one all the way through a couple of times recently (in car, multiple sittings), and it's definitely grown on me. I've typically found the pieces populating elseq 2 & 3 to be pretty challenging in feeling a bit too sketch-ish for my tastes. (I still find TBM2 to be one of my least favorite Autechre tracks, probably, of all time. The relative sameness of the shuffling clap just marches on and on gets really grating after a while.) But, overall, I'm digging the release more. A lot of their recent work seems to sonically exist parallel to modular synth work, and I suspect that a lot of the principles are also similar (in terms of how various Max objects that they've created are informing one another), and that seems to be taken to its logical conclusion on elseq. It feels like a lot of the tracks and their extended lengths are almost created in the interest of observing what will happen, and that's a vibe that I don't get with the NTS or the live material of the last decade, which feel more deliberate or piloted. Anyway, growing on me.

elseq-1 remains my favorite of the five, and I think that largely owes to the back-to-back interplay between 13xO step and this track.

When I was in my late teens, New World vultures were believed to be more closly related to storks than to Old World vultures (as well as to eagles, hawks, etc.) because of some obsucre morphological similarities (that I don't recall what were / are), but now because of DNA testing, it's been learned that they are indeed more closely related to eagles, hawks, and Old World vultures that to storks. Taxanomic reversals do something really pleasant for my mind. It's a particular brand of cognitive dissonance that is actually nice.

So many things. Depending on mood, it can happen at most any time. Recently, the sentimental bits from "The Batman" pulled the heartstrings a couple of times.