Autechre One more Ae itv

[Guest Goum Le Chat]

(excuse my english)

 

Autechre

Indirect beat

 

After 15 years of activity, "Quaristice"; 9th Autechre's record, comes to make an assessment of a career and beginning a new chapter. Free to desorient once again.

 

Club T, east London. Encounter with one of the most legendary arlesienne of electronic, Autechre, nightmares of journalists, so called elusive, loquacious and even rotten kids. Finally, not at all : in front of me, I have two smiling guys, teasing, talkative and very concentrate. A journalist dream...

 

How would you describe this new album ?

S.B. : hard question... I would say more accessible than the precedent. The methods of creation have been differents. We began to work with long live sequences, so the tracks evoluated all long until a complete dispersion of the original idea, that we've editeds as autonomous units, as tracks. Then we've started to come back to a logical of an album. We've recorded everything we made in realtime. This is why there is this instantaneous feeling, and more accessible, because the shape of a live is incompatible with pure audio search, complex articulations to the extreme like it was more the case in our precedents albums.

 

Like a sketch book ?

R.B. : not really, more like research i would say. When Sean talked about long sequences, you have to realise that all of them asked like 9 days of work ! We had a huge quantity of music at the end.

 

S.B. : and that was really pleasant to continue to play, play and come back to the recordings at the very end of the sections. Suddenly, that music was like familiar and new at the same time, wich allowed us to work editing with a different look, a different sensibility.

 

R.B. : when we had finished the first part of the process, recording the sessions, we had funny surprises while listening, because as Sean said, no single bits have been deleted. Some jams had 20 different versions with different lenght, who go to different directions sometimes to the real opposite. Suddenly, that confusion borned from profusion revealed very stimilus.

 

S.B. : in a way, it's our more complex album in term of decision-making, of production.

 

Have you ever imagine that new ways of listening deform your music, his sensibility, his density ? And Bleep.com started selling your new album in preview.

 

S.B. : honnestly, it's the listener issue. It's to him to give himself ways to listen decently to music he's interested in. For example, Bleep.com propose mp3 and flac versions. Flac reproduce audio data as they are. It's the same as a cd. From there, it's up to the listener to choose the best listening conditions.

 

R.B. : but it's true that there is a shift between good quality of listening gear that most people have, the soundsystem of the car or Koss earphones of the walkman, and bad encoding quality of what they're listening to. But remember rerecorded tapes...

 

S.B. : that's what make me bound when The Wire put unofficialy 3 tracks of the album on his website, even before Bleep.com's preview. Appart that it was twisted, encoding rate was an unimaginable mediocre quality ! I admit that i've been angry to see our music ill-treated like that just to make a scoop.

 

R.B. : what made me crazy with The Wire is that one of the tracks, I don't remember wich one, sounded so good with that filthy sound ! It's pretty interesting, because we're at a point where music is not considered as what it should be when it's about its own diffusion ! For example, our first albums on Itunes are encoded with a low quality...

 

Your first album came out in 1993... it seems an evidence that your music were going to evoluate with time, thought some of your fans are praying for a new Incunabula. Which musical and conceptual ways did you took since 15 years ?

 

S.B. : it's quite simple. We work. We're looking for new ideas. When something new shows up to us, we exploit it. I don't think we make an experimental music, I feel that our will to always redefine our music incite ourselves to explore some experimental aspect, but we never come to the console and say "let's do experimental music !".

 

R.B. : for example, when incunabula came out, we had only few pieces of gear. But we tried to exploit it in all ways possible. It"s the same desire today, but in fact, we have more ressources, we have more methodology, more skills, wich is in my opinion, the most important evolution in our career.

 

S.B. : our way to understand music and production have been totally influenced by hip-hop and electro-funk, people like Bomb Squad or Mantronix who revolutionized history of music by using funk samples in rotten drum machines. In hip-hop, you're rewarded because you're fresh, innovating. These guys always gave proof of enough imagination and eclectism to be fresh with almost nothing. This his how we want to make music. Mantronix have made giant footsteps to the production by the way of using compression on rythm, wich you can hear in drum and bass, the reverb that he borrow to the dub, giving it a more urban color... and these technologies were existing at this time, they weren't accessible.

 

 

R.B. : yes, it's truly fascinating. The guys were resampling their own music, and play the samples with drum machines ! In 80's, hip-hop became more cheesy by borrow lots of samples to James Brown, and I've looked at productions that escape from hip-hop, but had the spirit, like Renegade Soundware or Meat Beat Manifesto.

 

S.B. : it's true that at the time that accessible sampling technologies have been developped, it became easy to steal rythmic structure of a Mantronix record, put a James Brown sample and call it hip-hop.

 

R.B. : it's the moment where hip-hop lost his electronic anchorage, his flame, his futurism.

 

About technologies and production, compression is leading to become a major aesthetic of your work.

 

S.B. : I don't know if we can talk about aesthetic, but using of compression and reverb have a satisfactory way to push our music and our ears.

 

R.B. : it's physical and dynamic.

 

S.B. : it's like phase shifting. It's great when you're at a festival, in fornt of the speakers, and the music goes phasing.

 

R.B. : yep. Anyway, electronic music outdoor...

 

S.B. : it's just perfect.

 

R.B. : of course, it's not about social context of the event, it's not about talking about rave party, but rather about acoustic possibilities that are offered by the fact of playing outdoor. The way that suddenly, out of a club or a concert hall, it's the music herself that became architecture. In a way, we come back to the beginning of the question, principal aesthetic of our work is that architecturale projection of music. Production technologies like compression are elements of this architecture.

 

S.B. : so yes, you can dance on architecture !

 

R.B. : anyway, at the advent of modern studio, I'd say even at the moment when Phil Spector invented modern studio, production technologies tip up to the aesthetic field and became an instrument itself.

 

 

S.B. : Spector is a genius... for me, music is essentially about production.

 

R.B. : what's interesting with production technologies, it's that sometimes a guy like Spector or Stanley Kubrick in the cinema, succeed to transform a technique as an aethetic. Suddenly, technology is creating emotion.

 

S.B. : yes, in Kubrick it's an evidence ! He revolutionized the use of steadycam including what were his particular specificities and what they enable in expression. It looks weird to go on like that on cinema, but it's a big influence for us. You see, like Lynch and Altman, these guys have knowledge about compression !

 

(noise in the bar intensify, an old Madonna record is played, it looks like a provocation. Rob keep on about Ae's influences.)

 

R.B. : we have a way of working that is very visual. You see, it happens to us sometimes, when we're in tour, to let gear and roadies get in the bus, and we follow them in car, listening to the day before's live recording. We test the evocation power of our music by associating it with defilading of the road, day, night, in a cinematographic way. Sometimes it allows us to make connections with things that we didn't imagined, mental pictures we didn't projected and will allow us to rework the music in a more visual and spacial way.

 

S.B. : what's very interesting is that you can play with scale notion, with very simple methods. It's not necessary to go by gimmicks like "big sound + big reverb", it's interesting to understand how you can stimulate emotions by playing with playing effects oppositions, phasing in realtion between shape of the sound and spacialisation. You can really distrubate reality. To come back to Kubrick, in 2001, it's an evidence that if you have this impression of gigantism of universe, it's because lighting contrast are strong and travelling are incredibly long, almost imperceptible. We try to work that way.

 

Banalisation of informatical home-studio and softwares that become more and more intuitive, do you think it put back in cause formalisme of your music ?

 

S.B. : you see, we didn't used computers... we use computers on stage because we won't take all the studio with us. We worked 2 years with computers, wich is the time to became informatic ingeneer ! We're still working on hardware, with sequencers, synths, effects etc. We've always paid attention to never entierly on computers, because we quickly had the impression that they were limited. It means that fro all I could see from computer using as unique creation instrument, until now, it's loop music, as far as complex they can be. I don't judge people that work with Ableton Live as a full home-studio, or even as a dj interface like we can see it more and more. It's just that I prefer personnaly mix vinyls with decks, with all that's supposed of organic possibilities, rather than mixing files in Live, wich is, in my opinion, format creativity.

 

R.B. : I come back to hip-hop but and electro, but once again, these musicians showed us that we have to explode our creativity and with her will explode the limits of the technique and received ideas.

 

S.B. : yeah totally, these guys tell the whole planet that a deck can be a musical instrument that their robotic rythmics could be music, that we could invent new ways to paint...

 

I have a stupid question for the end. Here is a list of words, each of you can only respond by a single word.

 

Stockhausen ?

S.B. : dead.

R.B. : acoustic.

 

Justice ?

R.B. : Justice or Just Ice ? You're talking about that french conceptual thing ?

Oui.

S.B. : unknown.

 

Luc Ferrari ?

Autechre : end.

 

Warp ?

Autechre : friends.

 

Timbaland ?

S.B. : surestimated.

R.B. : thief.

 

Nu rave ?

S.B. : unexisting.

R.B. : over.

 

Old school rave ?

S.B. : embarassing.

R.B. : lost.

 

Radiohead ?

S.B. : previsible.

R.B. : victimised.

 

Drugs ?

S.B. : yes !

R.B. : revealer

 

Something to add ?

S.B. : I love chamois.

[Guest Enter a new display name]

Just post the original text in french, nom d'un cheddar!

[playbynumbers]

damn, that's actually really interesting ... especially the bit on kubrick

[brian trageskin]

Just post the original text in french, nom d'un cheddar!

 

lol

[ishishiba]

cheers for that! pretty interesting, i liked the cinematic references.

[Guest Goum Le Chat]

Yep, all that stuff about their music and visual stuff is damn interesting. Did they ever talk about that ?

[ishishiba]

also, 1st time i've heard them mention ableton live. always wondered what they thought about that....