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Confield


thehauntingsoul

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I noticed that in Bine, there is a sound in the left speaker that sounds just like the speaker is blown.

 

fucking hell it took me a while (and tests on more than one pair of headphones) before I realized it was built into the track and I could stop being worried that it was turned up too high.

 

There's actually a few moments like that on this album, like the pads/chords in VI scose poise gets really bleety and clipped and makes it sound like you have shitty headphones but its just the way the track is.

 

either that or I have shitty headphones. The Bine thing I'm fairly confident about though.

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confield is definitely a summer album for me. reminds me when i was studying, and going for long walks around my place of study in light bushy areas. the hihats in uviol mimicking the cicadas. great times! if the weather is good this weekend i'll go and sit out in the park with speakers and beers and blast confield. awesome!

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Guest ataraxy2

Confield... I thought I might try listening to it via headphones. I never fall asleep listening to music, usually.

 

But it was late and I was tired. And somehow, after hearing and loving VI Scose Poise I fucking slept through Cfern until waking up at Uviol. It was seemless, didn't even know I had slept until I looked at the playlist. Felt fucking cold waking up to Uviol - gave me shivers. Basically, this album is incredible. Only track I don't really like much is Lentic, Pen Expers grew on me a lot.

 

It quickly (read: instantly) left my "try before buy" pile and I bought it. <3

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I'm glad we have some new faces (or avs) around here, it always makes me glad to see fresh ae fans.

 

I was thinking about this whole experiment and I think the biggest benefit that it has is that when you listen to the tracks after reading the comments of others, certain specific comments will stick to the track forever in your memory. The more we talk about the music, the more memories we have of things people have said about the particular tracks. Anyways time for my Confield review:

 

VI Scose Poise is quite hit or miss at first. If you compare it to the rest of the album it sticks out like a sore thumb, but after you get past the fact that it is just a really experimental ambient track, its actually quite pleasant and blissful. I'm really impressed at how they manage to weave such a calming and serene atmosphere out of such a cacophony of noise. This is truly one of the most relaxing and entrancing Ae tracks ever, if not out of all music. After all of this, it really does seem like this is the perfect opener. Its a real warm-up round, and the length really helps to build the anticipation before the album blows.

 

Cfern is a very difficult track to say the least. If you analyze the track right down to its core, it's built on nothing more than a 4/4 beat going kick,snare,snare,snare. The fact that such an awkward, stuttering and bent rhythm can be built around such a basic and simple core rhythm is really quite amazing. There is another magical trick here: the pads that come in around halfway through that whine and pop in and out of existence manage to convey one of the best examples of implied melody in the whole discography. After you hear the track a few times, you can follow the melody fully, even though it is never presented in its entirety. Alternating notes are severly truncated or omitted completely, but the melody is still successfully rendered in full in the imagination. Without rambling too much more, I really do think this is a fantastic track

 

Pen Expers is quite an interesting fusion of madness and meticulous beat programming. The initial beat is crazy and heavy, and repeatedly disintegrates into a soup of generated noise, only to swiftly return via some really quirky reversal of the beat. The pads slowly creep through in between the beats and then fully forms on the surface, and although the technique of slowly revealing components is not new to Ae, they did it in a fresh and new way here. Also I can't stress enough how awesome the beat becomes after it morphs towards the end. Pretty ace track overall, although it could probably use a few more layers and progression.

 

Sim Gishel is up and down for me. When I first heard it, it always used to trick me into thinking it was Rpeg and I was usually disappointed by what follows the intro. However, this track is really pretty sublime and brooding. Spastic twitching and clicking is found in spades here, and the rhythm uses a really interesting technique of alternating from straight 4/4 to 4/4 with swing/skip, and although the merging of the two into one track seems pretty intuitive, it has not really been done very often in music as far as I know. Also I love how the melody here is straight out of Tri-repetae. The types of chords and their interaction sound like they were taken from Leterel and then morphed and tweaked to near-unidentifiability.

 

Parhelic Triangle is a weird one, even for Autechre. It's almost impossible to try to describe this track in terms of beat/melody because the two blend together seamlessly and components from one bleed and morph over into the other constantly. The beat sounds like it was written and then played in reverse, which is a really cool effect, and the creepy de-tuned wind chimes really make the track whole. The first chunk is really all about the atmosphere, but the 'beat' is subjected to one of the coolest evolution processes on the album, and is swiftly transformed into a much slicker and more energetic beat. Its really hard for me to say exactly how I feel about this track, but again it demonstrates Autechres amazing ability to combine two contrasting ideas seamlessly making a track that as ambient and relaxing as it is energetic and invigorating.

 

Bine begins (in my opinion) Autechre's tradition of including at least one track that is more or less extremely experimental noise. The first few times, this track is just abraisive mind-fuckery, but it actually does have a fairly followable rhythm which it develops as the track progresses. I think the reason that it takes people so long to get into the track is that they usually skip after the first minute or so assuming that the whole track is the same, but like I said it does become quite cohesive and brilliant as it progresses. I'm actually quite a fan of this one, and even though it does not really do much musically (more of an auditory bath), Confield would just not be Confield without Bine. Its sort of an exaggerated melting pot of the various Confield styles.

 

Eidetic Casein is honestly a bit of a meh track for me. Not that I don't enjoy it, but I feel like it really drags on a bit too much without changing things up enough, or really at all. The strings really sell the track though. To me, it seems like they have a few core melodic breaks that are positioned in the proper places, and they fill in the gaps with (semi)random notes. This gives the effect of randomness slowly forming into the short 'sweet spot' and then unforming into randomness again to repeat the process. This is almost exactly the same technique they use in Arch Carrier, wherein they tease the listener and only provide the sweet melodic chunk after a bunch of random nonsense. The rhythm is pretty awesome, but on some days it just pisses me the hell off. Its just such a smug and pretentious beat. The buzzing snare noise here saves it though, because that noise is really a core element of Confield. In summary, it's not that I don't like the track - I'd never skip it on a playthrough - but I doubt I would ever get struck with one of those "Omg I need to hear X track" where X is Eidetic Casein.

 

Uviol I always forget about. I'll get to Eidetic and be thinking "aww shit the album is almost over" but then pop, a good 7 minutes of brooding tension. The melody in the background flows from light to dark, and the soundscape implies a vast, dark and empty landscape. It picks up towards the end and starts using some of the Ae fart noises that will become a staple in later works, and really once this component starts, I'm totally hooked for the rest of the track. The placement of it within the album flow is fantastic in that it really breaks up the action and gives you some time to build tension before the climax of the album. Also, the transition to Lentic is brilliant.

 

Lentic Catachresis is really my least fav on the album, and certainly my least fav album closer. That's not to say its a terrible track, its pretty nifty, but I will elaborate. The first few minutes are really really awesome, but I don't think its really the beat, its more the pads, and obviously the insane alien-cyborg gibbering which really makes it sound like it was alien-cyborgs singing along to the track because it fits really well into the groove despite its eccentricity as a melodic component. The beat here is nothing really special for me, I can't really say why but it simply is not that engaging for me. I thoroughly respect the ending of the album because it really works well as a closer in that it slowly turns into a wall of noise and then glitches the fuck out, but I simply have difficulty enjoying it after the first 2 minutes. I would hardly ever skip it (I think its sacrilege to skip an Ae track) but my patience begins to run thin pretty quickly and I'm always glad when it finally ends

 

 

So overall I would say Confield is a pretty spectacular work within its own context, but I generally don't listen to it out of choice simply because it is less about being rhythmically intricate and more about just being a total mind-fuck. It's interesting to me in the same way that acid is. Its beyond weird and totally unique but it is less than comforting and can lead to crying/screaming tantrums in certain scenarios. Its certainly a work to be respected, and absolutely fucking essential as a stepping stone in the Ae discography, but again it's more something to take in and analyze than to enjoy. Not that it's not enjoyable, just that it leans more towards the experimental side and compromises the integrity of the music in the process. To conclude, I don't want to imply that I don't like this album, but more that its just too cryptic to listen to on a regular basis (or when you just wanna hear some good fun music)

 

Holy shit that was a long one. :cisfor:

Edited by thehauntingsoul
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Guest Balance

That was pretty good hauntingsoul.

 

I have to say though I'm glad I don't make music or have any understanding of how it's made, because I read posts from those guys and they seem to analyse the time sig or how it was done and try to guess the technique or equipment used.

Actually maybe it makes it more enjoyable for them but I'm glad of my ignorance so I can just listen :)

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That was an awesome review, now the one I was writing doesn't look so good :dry:

Anyway, I've been trying to recommend Confield to my dad, and earlier today he finally gave in. He agreed to listen to ONE track from the album, so I chose Parhelic Triangle. Here is what he had to say:

"It's like a weaker version of a Nine Inch Nails track, lacks the atmosphere and intensity, but still musically complex.

You could say it lacks "soul", if you want to be pretentious."

 

I'll just leave that there. I may or may not bother to tune up my review, but just in case I don't, I have three important things to say: Pen Expers is AWESOME, Eidetic Casein is a perfect rendition of sickness and gradual decay, and Lentic Catachresis is the very last thing I wanna hear before I die.

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Guest ataraxy2

...but I generally don't listen to it out of choice simply because it is less about being rhythmically intricate and more about just being a total mind-fuck.

 

I approached it how I would Brian Eno. If I were to describe Confield I would probably say it is moslty-ambient, it works great as background music, and is full of lots of brilliant atmospheres. But it's not really normal ambiance, and it's unsettling.

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Very concise review there thehauntingsoul, deep and reflective as usual :) good too see good sir

 

Confield was the first Ae album i listened to properly (May this year) and kickstarted my summer of Ae. It took a few listens and I especially remember Parheric Triangle, or "punchy" as I referred to it (there is a definite punch sound consistently through it) which I found quite comical. Then I fell in love with Lentic, it's so encompassing and frenetically hypnotic it leaves you feeling cleansed, or brainwashed hehe. But a nice feeling it is, nice they left a few minutes of silence to catch your breath at the end of the song.

These are the 2 tracks that stand out for me here, Uviol is very nice too. The other songs are good but not standout for me. Not many Ae albums leave me with a certain feeling, because I find every track to be very different and find it hard to feel a certain mood or consistency in an album. So much is often packed into an Ae track and they are so diverse.

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That was pretty good hauntingsoul.

 

I have to say though I'm glad I don't make music or have any understanding of how it's made, because I read posts from those guys and they seem to analyse the time sig or how it was done and try to guess the technique or equipment used.

Actually maybe it makes it more enjoyable for them but I'm glad of my ignorance so I can just listen :)

Haha it's funny that you say that because I used to feel exactly the same way. Once I sorta started diddling around with DAWs to make music, I found an interesting thing. Once you know how the music is made very generally, when you listen to the music you will understand it in a deeper way. After this, you go back to the music MAKING and apply some of the new things you realized about the music, which in turn allows you to appreciate the music more, and so on....

 

If you're into Autechre I would highly recommend downloading a trial version of fruityloops or something and just see if it peaks your interest. Either way, I can say with confidence that you will be thoroughly fucking amazed at how deep and intricate the music actually is once you realize how the sounds relate to the music software (or hardware).

 

 

Also @Dragon: please do post your review! I may have massive ADHD resulting in extremely long posts but don't let that discourage you from posting. We aren't having a contest here, after all, and we're just around to share our thoughts. Posting is only half the fun if others don't share their thoughts as well.

 

edit:

But it's not really normal ambiance, and it's unsettling.

fucking lol that is the word if you had to pick one to describe Confield for sure!

 

&@AJW: Thx man, and yeah its funny you say punchy because that word always comes into my mind with Parhelic Triangle...

Edited by thehauntingsoul
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Guest Calx Sherbet

That was pretty good hauntingsoul.

 

I have to say though I'm glad I don't make music or have any understanding of how it's made, because I read posts from those guys and they seem to analyse the time sig or how it was done and try to guess the technique or equipment used.

Actually maybe it makes it more enjoyable for them but I'm glad of my ignorance so I can just listen :)

Haha it's funny that you say that because I used to feel exactly the same way. Once I sorta started diddling around with DAWs to make music, I found an interesting thing. Once you know how the music is made very generally, when you listen to the music you will understand it in a deeper way. After this, you go back to the music MAKING and apply some of the new things you realized about the music, which in turn allows you to appreciate the music more, and so on....

 

i'd be afraid that once i understand how it is made, it would lose it's feeling or something once i hear autechre again. or any IDM artist

 

so i guess in short, i never want to actually know. it can be a mystery forever

Edited by Calx Sherbet
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Its funny because pretty much right after I posted that, I went out and got really blazed and listened to Lentic and it blew me the fuck away. I think I've fully unlocked the track now.

 

But for serious guys post up those reviews! We only have a few more days until muthafuckin Draft 7.30!!!

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Is it any coincidence that Confield week happened to end on October 31st? It's pretty spooky. Anyway, I finished my review, so here ya go:

 

Now that LP5 has defined Ae's brand new style, it's time to fine-tune everything and push these strange new sounds in a different direction. While LP5 sounded insane and computerized compared with previous releases, it still had accessible, down-to-earth expressions of emotion and musical language. But, since LP5, Autechre have taken a different route. Their music has become much more complex, from the crazy new rhythms and patterns to the very emotions that it attempts to describe. Confield creates a haunting visual language that finds

surreal beauty in places that are robotic, alien and inhuman.

We begin with VI Scose Poise, which allows the listener to calmly explore this new language without being exposed to the ear-shattering chaos yet to come. At a glance, it sounds light and quiet, yet if you pay attention, you'll find it is actually surprisingly heavy, with a complex, intricate rhythm. Gotta love those ambient vibes, so relaxing...

Cfern is where it all kicks off. From the first few seconds, the discordant melody sends a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach. Fear and doubt slowly creep up on you. It takes quite a few listens to notice all the different sounds scattered around the stirring rhythm. Earlier I noticed that, after 4:00, the final beat in every measure made a different noise, from squelches and pitch drops to something that sounds like an alarm.

And now for the climatic masterpiece of PEN EXPERS. Pen Expers is a lightning fast rollercoaster explosion that hurtles and corkscrews you through a universe of perfect timing, AWESOME beats and an unholy brightness that will shine your hair clean off. Seriously, how can anyone listen to Pen Expers all the way through without feeling a total state of clarity and awareness, without the singularity happening right there inside your very head? I've said it before and I'll say it again, Pen Expers is INFINITELY FANTASTIC.

Disembodied binary data bubbling inside your ears? Sim Gishel must have started. This is an interesting transition from Pen Expers, taking you on a slow, unfolding journey through atmospheric Hades. The crunching glass beats are quite hard to appreciate at first, but after a while you find that it complements the droning quite well. In fact, it's hard to say which is the background and which is the foreground.

Now we venture into no man's land with a truely terrifying track. Parhelic Triangle gives you the impression of being attacked by hoards of insects and wasps, all of them actively shooting out their stingers and lacerating your body, while the complex church bells ring along in the background, working up the horror building inside you until it peaks.

Bine is even less forgiving. This track is total, unrelenting pandemonium. Every single sound is working to assault you, to kill you. Your captors have plugged your brain into an artificial simulation, where you're consistently cut apart and re-assembled in all manner of creative ways. I can't help but to listen to this track and move my body in some way, then getting caught up in the impossibly fast succession of noises until I almost pass out.

While most of the previous tracks buried their emotion deep inside complex movement and abstract sounds, Eidetic Casein is a full-on, in your face spectacular of warped, evil sounding synths. Everything seems to be unnaturally distorted to feel manically happy, like clown faces stretched and contorted until they're downright creepy. We explore the slow, horrible decay of sanity and vitality, as the sickening undertones of disgust and repulsion take over the track. Towards the end, your thoughts become more and more twisted and paranoid, your body fails and digests its own stomach. Everyone in the world is mocking you, as you descend into the depths of inhumanity. You are too horrified at your own fate to be able to think much at all. If I had to choose which track describes its mood in the most powerful way, I would choose Eidetic Casein, hands down.

Uviol begins. This track has the very strange property of being soulful and organic, yet equally cold and mechanical. It's actually quite hard to believe that humans could create a landscape like this. Such sharp, almost brutal noises, yet the overall tone is so relaxing and entrancing. At the end, all the weird noises stop, and you realize you've been listening to a high pitched double beep, over and over, for eight minutes.

Lentic Catachresis is the epitome of glitchy, unrelenting, alein-sounding music. Probably the most difficult track on Confield, with a constant drone of scuttling noises with an unbelievably complex pattern of movement. If you have synaesthesia, these noises look like heavy little black balls which dart left and right against a silvery-grey background.

Just before a human dies, their brain goes into chaos mode, with every memory in their brain flickering into consciousness in a fraction of a second. There is also a noise. The millisecond before death, there's a fleeting, whispery click of a noise. If you somehow recorded this noise, and reduced the speed until it was nine minutes long, Lentic Catachresis is exactly what you would hear. Every connection made in the brain during life is reversed, so it can enter its original state of non-consciousness and click off.

Perhaps the most important part of this track is the 40 seconds of silence at the end, because that, not the glitching out, is the climax of the track. The track is a build-up towards death, and this silence is the experience of death itself. Ideally, when I die, I would like to listen to Lentic Catachresis just beforehand, and get axed in the head or shot or whatever at the exact moment the silence starts.

 

 

Aagg.. never save something in notepad if you plan on posting it, it becomes full of fake line breaks that have to be manually deleted.

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Thought I'd get my thoughts posted before we begin with Draft soon.

 

Such a complex album -- this did take a while for me to fully appreciate (in fact, there's still some areas of this album which I haven't quite understood fully) but I like the challenge of this, it's what draws me to their music. I almost see this record as a dark journey in some way for the listener. I would put this album on if I were in a focused mood -- I couldn't allow for Confield to just be background music, I have to pay full attention all the time.

 

I'll concentrate on discussing tracks which I enjoy the most on Confield -

Cfern is very engaging, the melody is simple in it's structure but the sound of the melody is what makes the track become empowered. Cfern has so many little intricate sounds here and there to watch out for, a lot of detail is involved among the stretchy beats. I love the way the melody transitions into a moaning parallel to the main melody structure heard at the beginning and middle. The breakdown introduces new sounds to keep the interest accelerating even further.

Pen Expers is a top 3 ae track of mine - a clear favourite among many listeners of ae. You can tap your foot to the DMX kick drum, it has an underlying basic track structure but has all the chaos going over on top. I can relate to the suggestion someone made about this track giving out an imagery of light breaking through a dark place. Still gets a very regular listen among many ae tracks.

Sim Gishel has one of the best intros to an ae track - very cool and calculated tune. Parhelic Triangle develops so well with the eerie bells resonating throughout. There's really no other ae track that compares with this one in terms of how atmospherically dark it is.

Uviol is usually played whilst I'm out walking at night back from work. I have to cross a marina where the setting is just right for this tune. Those synth stabs fit in so well with the delicate synth tones which were most emphasised at the start, beats become splashed over everything. Definitely associate this tune with the night.

 

Overall, Confield allows ae to show off their techniques so well - emotions from this release don't vary in any way, I've always maintained my opinion of this album as being dark, listening to it at night compliments it so well. Not a particularly favourite album of mine from Sean and Rob but I admire and appreciate it a lot. Very challenging (to me anyway), I'm still getting to grips with a lot of the tracks even though I've been listening to ae now for a long time.

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Word, dragon and bread you guys both raised some interesting points. I think it's safe to say that the overall theme of this album is darkness, and if you want to draw parallels to movies, pretty much everything Ae has done up until this point would probably fit into the sci-fi genre, but this album clearly makes the jump to horror or at the very least sci-fi horror.

 

I think what really makes this album so hard to listen to regularly is that it is just a terrifying piece of music. It's not angry, or sad, or happy, but terrifying.

 

Also I think I need to mention Splitrmx32 briefly

 

Autechre play Weissensee against I'm Gluck is probably a severly underappreciated ae track. Has a really retro-sounding beat and rhythm, and the melodic component to the track progresses with all the finesse and class of earlier works like tri repetae. If you haven't heard this track you should certainly do so immediately. Drowning in a sea of indiependence is not really that fantastic but this track more than makes up for that. Has a really arabic feel to it towards the end when that blissfully brilliant melody breaks through.

 

Autechre play at Drowning in a sea of Indiependance is probably worth listening to but I would just toss it on as background music when you're posting on Watmm or doing something equally pointless.

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here's a cover of parhelic triangle i recorded:

post-rock band covers autechre

keep in mind it was made in 2006 when i was only just starting to get into recording post-rock, so it's a little sloppy and overcompressed (also it's one of the first times i'd ever played drums), but i guess it kinda fits the mood of the track, or something.

 

 

If you haven't heard this track you should certainly do so immediately.

and if you haven't heard the original neu! tracks that it was based on, you should do so immediately!

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy20vdqpfx0

 

couldn't find im gluck on youtube, but weissensee is a great track.

Edited by modey
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Guest ataraxy2

here's a cover of parhelic triangle i recorded:

post-rock band covers autechre

keep in mind it was made in 2006 when i was only just starting to get into recording post-rock, so it's a little sloppy and overcompressed (also it's one of the first times i'd ever played drums), but i guess it kinda fits the mood of the track, or something.

 

Be friggin' awesome if you could re-record it. And also if it changed again a bit further on in the song, like how Nine Inch Nail's Metal goes from electric to acoustic as it progresses.

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