Autechre Who has written the most cringe worthy or pretentious Autechre reviews?

[dr lopez]

why would you take any music reviewer seriously ?

I heard that writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In that death is too good for you if you're caught doing it.

 

as a student of both music and architecture and part-time dancer (daggerin' only) I find that quote completely and utterly reprehensible.

 

Reductionists who refuse to consider discussion of and writing on music need to be take a second to think why they're on this forum. Also music reviews (aka WRITING) are not inherently bad, they just require such an incredible scope of knowledge to pull it off that it rarely works. Alex Ross comes quickly to mind...

[baph]

I'm pretty sure Xenakis danced about architecture a few times

[dr lopez]

holla holla dolla dolla

 

 

 

 

holy shit i forgot i love late modernism before it came to america

[blos]

as a student of both music and architecture and part-time dancer (daggerin' only) I find that quote completely and utterly reprehensible.

Oh me too, I was just bein' faux-profound. Reading a good review can make my day. And I wrote quite a few reviews myself, way back when.

[Panoptic Sweep]

How did I miss this one? http://www.spannered.org/music/1382/

[superbixen]

http://www.chronicart.com/#!Article/Entree/Categorie/musique/Id/autechre___exai-12504.sls

 

in french sorry.

but we can all agree that only us can write so much pretentious nonsense.

 

for the non-french readers, imagine gantz graf made out of words: pure random wank... but in a facepalm way.

 

"Subjugué par la beauté de ces objets devenus impossible à cerner, il en vient à s’interroger ainsi, une énième fois, sur l’inexplicable transcendance qui finit par emmener ces formes vers les cieux : vient-elle d’ici-bas ou de là haut, du Monde des idées ?"

 

google translated (with some corrections)

 

"Captivated by the beauty of these objects which are impossible to identify, he [the listener] comes to question, yet again, the unexplainable transcendence which brings these forms up to the heavens: does-it come from down here or from up there, from the World of ideas?"

 

[Guest zaphod]

from rateyourmusic:

 

 

The underground at 7am. Perception is what you make it. You could sit, or stand around here just like anyone else. Or what? You won't find an answer in their faces. You could look at this situation and plain be fascinated by the way it all works. The plain mechanics of the train, the way it advances without ever really going anywhere, bringing people to places. And aren't those people just functioning, too? Couldn't this vacuum be used in any positive way? Would it make a difference if the train would be powered by the emptiness in their heads? The amount of pointlessness of the situation? The complete lack of communication? Would this be as irrational as 40 people in one room avoiding each other's glances?

Suddenly you feel an uncomfortable tension as you realize you can't know what anyone is thinking. Does it need to be uncomfortable? Are you actually looking for someone who thinks the same things as you do? Why do you assume other people's heads to be empty? The whole situation suddenly seems to be about to burst due to its sheer lack of explanation, due to the mass of perspectives from which you could look at it. What if you could read people's minds? Would it change what you would think about the situation? Suddenly you notice that this is what you are looking for: A point of view from which it wouldn't make a difference anymore what the others are thinking. You are strangely sure you won't achieve this right now. What's now anyway? You are working, functioning just like anyone else. Where is the freedom?

It's right here, it's you selecting what's your reality.

 

 

that was about confield

[dr lopez]

lol

[baph]

from rateyourmusic:

 

 

 

The underground at 7am. Perception is what you make it. You could sit, or stand around here just like anyone else. Or what? You won't find an answer in their faces. You could look at this situation and plain be fascinated by the way it all works. The plain mechanics of the train, the way it advances without ever really going anywhere, bringing people to places. And aren't those people just functioning, too? Couldn't this vacuum be used in any positive way? Would it make a difference if the train would be powered by the emptiness in their heads? The amount of pointlessness of the situation? The complete lack of communication? Would this be as irrational as 40 people in one room avoiding each other's glances?

 

Suddenly you feel an uncomfortable tension as you realize you can't know what anyone is thinking. Does it need to be uncomfortable? Are you actually looking for someone who thinks the same things as you do? Why do you assume other people's heads to be empty? The whole situation suddenly seems to be about to burst due to its sheer lack of explanation, due to the mass of perspectives from which you could look at it. What if you could read people's minds? Would it change what you would think about the situation? Suddenly you notice that this is what you are looking for: A point of view from which it wouldn't make a difference anymore what the others are thinking. You are strangely sure you won't achieve this right now. What's now anyway? You are working, functioning just like anyone else. Where is the freedom?

 

It's right here, it's you selecting what's your reality.

 

u wot

[ambermonk]

For lulz, see Metacritic for Exai reviews: http://www.metacritic.com/music/exai/autechre

[splesh]

A user named DefaultXR on rateyourmusic.com posted this review of Exai on March 30, 2013. I just looooooooooove the irony of the first paragraph where they seem so oblivious as to seem intentionally ironic. In case you miss it, it's generally believed or maybe known in these parts that Untilted was itself heavily made on Machinedrum and Elektron gear

Quote

Autechre lost their magic after Untilted. Nowadays all their music suffers from the cliche "dubstep"-style heavy synth sounds and over-reliance on reverb. I'm pretty sure this album was made entirely with their Machinedrums and other Elektron gear. It all sounds way too samey and boring, especially compared to the albums they produced during their glory days: LP5 thru Untilted.

Until Untilted, Autechre were masters of the "studio as an instrument" technique. In an interview in Sound on Sound from 2004, they said "A lot of the time we have the studio set up a certain way for one track, and then we have to completely rewire it for the next track." ( http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/apr04/articles/autechre.htm ).

Their tune has since changed, and because of this, their tunes have also changed: "I’ve got a studio at home, but when I’d go and work with Sean there was no major setup to work with, and all we really had was our live set equipment that we’d been doing one-off festivals with and touring. So there was a lot of material in the hardware that was relative to the live set of the last album, which was a fusion of studio-based computer hub material containing painstaking stuff we did on computer, but the majority was hardware interfaces doing a lot of the commanding and telling the computer what to record as opposed to the computer telling them what to do." ( http://www.barcodezine.com/Autechre%20Interview.htm )

It's obvious to me that the majority of the music on this album (as well as on Oversteps, Move of Ten, and Quaristice) was all taken straight from the output of one piece of gear. No extreme DSP to twist sounds beyond recognition and make each track sound unique; instead, now everything sounds the same. This is especially tragic because Autechre, unlike many experimental electronic artists, actually twisted the sounds into something not only otherworldly and unique, but also very musical and melodic. It wasn't just wankery sold to people who get too into the idea of "intelligent" electronic music (hello Richard Devine!); it was always undeniably musical, and even during the coldest moments, it had warmth if you were open-minded enough to hear it.

Ironically, this album sounds (on the surface) much warmer, but all of that warmth is the sound of the Machinedrum, rather than the sound of the artists. To me, their best albums were much more human than this because they didn't over-rely on one machine to give them a sound. It was human because no one piece of software or machine could sound like that. This is much more robotic because it sounds just like the machine that was used to create it.

 

Edited January 8, 2022 by splesh