draft 7.30

[jules]

I want to hear that

Edited January 14, 2020 by jules

[markedone]

On 1/8/2020 at 6:57 AM, Soloman Tump said:

Anyone got a good quality vinyl copy they want to sell me?

ive got a nice copy i'd possibly trade or sell, but unfortunately youre in uk and im half a world away, would prefer usa..  i made a vinyl rip of it (on my parents' nice decks, lol) to fill a request on what.cd when that site was still alive a few years back

[Chabraendeky]

On 6/8/2017 at 12:30 AM, auxien said:

I definitely want the cassette version of this, just to have if maybe never actually listen to. One day.

I bought the casette, and just now I'm listening to it the first time. Is it just hallucination or is there a slight difference in mastering?  I think the bass is more present like on the CD.

And the softness of the tape sound really makes a huge difference for me, has more wamth to it. And I like the dynamics here too. I wouldn't have guessed that it could be such a different experience even though I hoped for it.

Edited February 11, 2020 by Chabraendeky

[Soloman Tump]

On 1/8/2020 at 1:02 PM, xox said:

 

 

 

Wish fulfilled

Watmm has some lovely people here after all.

[auxien]

7 hours ago, Chabraendeky said:

I bought the casette, and just now I'm listening to it the first time. Is it just hallucination or is there a slight difference in mastering?  I think the bass is more present like on the CD.

And the softness of the tape sound really makes a huge difference for me, has more wamth to it. And I like the dynamics here too. I wouldn't have guessed that it could be such a different experience even though I hoped for it.

sounds like that's just the cassette-ness coming through, but who knows. discogs doesn't mention anything but i did find this little tidbit that's supposedly somewhere: 

Quote

"Any resale of this item is prohibited by law. However, should you wish to resell the item illegally, we'd like to advise you that the market value of the item will increase significantly after the album's release date. Thanks for your full attention."

 

[Chabraendeky]

Yep. That is written on it.

[Boxus]

Reniform Puls is so good. One of the best closers. Deeply emotional but in that cool, detached way. The skittering percussion sounds perfect and even when it gets more dense and complex it never overwhelms the mix; the track keeps that sort of open, airy atmosphere throughout. Also nice how it ends a bit like Nuane with a little minimal glitch loop.

 

[auxien]

29 minutes ago, Boxus said:

Reniform Puls is so good. One of the best closers. Deeply emotional but in that cool, detached way. The skittering percussion sounds perfect and even when it gets more dense and complex it never overwhelms the mix; the track keeps that sort of open, airy atmosphere throughout. Also nice how it ends a bit like Nuane with a little minimal glitch loop.

i've never held it in terribly high standing as a closer, despite being on easily one of their best overall albums. tho it's one of the weaker on the album imo, i definitely think it's a great track....and i think maybe the last couple minutes outro is missing a bit of drama of the rest of the track, sorta the comedown after...reminds me a lot of the intro to VI Scose Poise. i wonder if there's an interesting story to that outro...just checked AAA and didn't see it discussed  sean&rob pls

[auxien]

this album is fuckin wild. it's always balancing on the edge of completely falling apart, but it's still somehow super tight and controlled. would love an outtakes/b-sides EP from this era one day.

[Amen Lare]

I think it's their most "try hard" album: a situation of creative deadend being full-forcefully overcomed. Gives off this struggling and over-produced feeling. It's kinda the best one with doubts

[oscillik]

lol

[kieselguhr kid]

2 hours ago, auxien said:

this album is fuckin wild. it's always balancing on the edge of completely falling apart, but it's still somehow super tight and controlled. would love an outtakes/b-sides EP from this era one day.

there's that 12 min ambient version of VL AL 5 they played on one of their radio shows

[sweepstakes]

2 hours ago, Amen Lare said:

I think it's their most "try hard" album: a situation of creative deadend being full-forcefully overcomed. Gives off this struggling and over-produced feeling. It's kinda the best one with doubts

this is surely not going to be a popular take but I think you're spot-on.

[toaoaoad]

Did they ever state that in interviews/the AAA tho, or is it just speculation? Seems likely enough the way it's pieced together that it must have been somewhat wearisome to produce, but don't they also seem to always enjoy what they do? I'm thinking of that popular anecdote about Clark hating the process of composing ETBOY which is another one of those very meticulous idm albums. So I think it's easy to hear albums like that as "this was probably a pain in the ass to make but it sure paid off" but that doesnt' mean they didn't enjoy doing it.

Edited September 25, 2021 by toaoaoad

[Amen Lare]

15 minutes ago, sweepstakes said:

this is surely not going to be a popular take but I think you're spot-on.

Thanks, it may seem like a critical view, yet I regard Draft as almost my favourite LP (I prefer thinking in separate tracks rather than albums) -- I'm just always in doubt about it, it sounds great & terrible at the same time. And not because it's "out there" or "experimental", on the contrary, its stylistic ambitions feel normal.

4 minutes ago, toaoaoad said:

Did they ever state that in interviews/the AAA tho, or is it just speculation? Seems likely enough the way it's pieced together that it must have been somewhat wearisome to produce, but don't they also seem to always enjoy what they do? I'm thinking of that popular quip about Clark hating the process of composing ETBOY which is another one of those very meticulous idm albums. So I think it's easy to hear albums like that as "this was probably a pain in the ass to make but it sure paid off" but that doesnt' mean they didn't enjoy doing it.

For one, they didn't tour at all (maybe coincidental, tho it happened only once before 'rona?), and the title is suspicious: "draft", "30th version". Anyway, if it turns out it was the most joyful production experience, it won't change the character of the record -- I'll be finding other words to describe the uneasiness.

[auxien]

3 hours ago, Amen Lare said:

I think it's their most "try hard" album: a situation of creative deadend being full-forcefully overcomed. Gives off this struggling and over-produced feeling. It's kinda the best one with doubts

i think i see your point. and i almost agree with the second sentence, but it feels a bit less /produced/ than some other albums of theirs imo (Untilted coming to mind first). 

that first sentence tho, idk where you're getting the creative deadend thing from, it sounds to me more like a creative ...roundabout.  jk but also not really. it's plenty full of creativity to my ears. maybe they've said something to the contrary or it just feels that way to you tho? 

2 hours ago, kieselguhr kid said:

there's that 12 min ambient version of VL AL 5 they played on one of their radio shows

very true, need to dig that up again it's been years since i've heard it.

but i guess hoping they go back and dig through old stuff is gonna be a lost cause, doesn't seem common at all for them and i can imagine why. maybe it'll happen one day tho

[eczem]

4 hours ago, Amen Lare said:

It's the best one, without a doubt

ftfy

[auxien]

few Draft bits from AAA

Quote

Sean: a lot of the stuff around draft time was done in dp, just triggering a sampler from the sequencer (akai z8 over midi) - the motu midi interface we were using was really fast so you could mad rolls with it. we'd do tuned rolls and then copy them and multiply the length of the roll by 1.05946 incrementally to make it play melodies.

 

(dp refers to Digital Performer)

Quote

Sean: tbh a lot of that on draft was done with amp envelopes, but there are some really light touches of quadraverb and lexicon on select parts as well, usually with some feedback matrixing thru quite brutal eq and really quiet in the mix

we were also doing stuff like making 2 melodies with slightly different notes or in a different order and then sending the muted one to the reverb and mixing the reverb quite low so you almost can't tell

Quote

"Oooh, I know what I've been meaning to ask for ages. The code inside the tape inlay of Draft7.30

My theory on here a while ago was this -

mcbpete, on 16 Jan 2013 - 08:37 AM, said:
It kind of looks like Rube-Goldberg code (i.e. a convoluted way of doing nothing) in what looks like Pascal - A whole bunch of 'for'/wait loops with no actually functional part of the code, so it's either a timing section from a larger piece of code or (more likely) a bit of geeky humour by the boys about the process of the audience listening to the album (eg. Repeat Listendraft; until time = 1894 for tracknum = 1 to 12 )

So what actually is it ?"

Sean: that description is pretty spot on

 

Quote

Sean: most things
surripere was two tracks originally, the second half was done before the first but the first half wasn't done to go with the second, they were just the same tempo and it occurred to us once we had both bits that we could put them together
 
draft feels skeletal to me, kind of hollow but deep as well
like a ruined city in the distant future

 

Quote

Rob: Surripere was something pretty heavy as it turned out to be 'that long one' on that lp, i think at the same time we knew if we got it right it would get to be a really good part. There wasnt a descriptive narrative as such but it was mostly down to getting the relay of quite a few events to work into each other well. I guess its got some visual sense of flow and then some still, then turbulence and such. 

 

Quote

Rob: draft7.30, sequenced by hand, meaning in an interview about overall shifts in that periods' process than the previous LP, it meant that a lot of the work was a result of being really concerned with getting as close to the events as we could in the DAW, getting access to as much of it as we could - and jamming less while still working on a larger sense of flow. each track was different to some extent because all the tracks were done at different times. not as a whole LP project in strict order.

 

Quote

Rob: thanks for understanding, each album has something that its tracks share amongst them. and each album is periods in a time line, so theres tangible difference to how we made them , what with , where, and what we were into, but a word like - crystalline for draft7.30 would be too easy to come up with, but to be far too misleading as a whole.

(sorted document here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XAizLmKun4yF6oBVUhIrewYN-ZiY_9ORckmT-hF93Ho/edit#gid=0)

Edited September 26, 2021 by auxien

[ooqpoo]

On 9/25/2021 at 8:03 PM, Amen Lare said:

I think it's their most "try hard" album: a situation of creative deadend being full-forcefully overcomed. Gives off this struggling and over-produced feeling. It's kinda the best one with doubts

the only album i know that feels like it's desperately trying to power through a debilitating bout of constipation, in a good way. 

[Soloman Tump]

A few days ago I was listening to this album at 5am whilst driving in a thunderstorm, carnage on a motorway with leaves, wind, rain, lorries everywhere, pitch black, lightning firing off all round.  it sounded fucking sweet and I nearly had a panic attack.

[BobDobalina]

3 hours ago, Soloman Tump said:

A few days ago I was listening to this album at 5am whilst driving in a thunderstorm, carnage on a motorway with leaves, wind, rain, lorries everywhere, pitch black, lightning firing off all round.  it sounded fucking sweet and I nearly had a panic attack.

At any point in this treacherous journey did you come upon a... sudden roundabout?

Spoiler

 

[splesh]

Great album which unfortunately suffers from a handful of times where there are sounds which feel like DSP bends/glitch sounds which are too of their time (Xylin Room has an instance of this with something that sounds like the kind of interference you used to get on some speakers/soundsystems if someone was calling your cellphone while you were listening that you'd hear before your ringtone). There's old sounding DSP which isn't detrimental (even some that works to positive effect like on Sudden Roundabout and Reniform Puls) too, but this slight issue at its worst moments unfortunately puts a bit of a dampening on the replay value for me.

VL AL 5 has some serious foreshadowing of Exai going on, but just more crammed together whoa.

[xox]

@splesh stop rediscovering awtekrr!!! geeez

Spoiler

lol jk

 

[splesh]

I almost wish there was a remaster correcting this issue because otherwise the structures and sounds are so so great. Confield which is two years older doesn't feel it. And even if something like EP7 is chockful of preset sounding FM sounds, somehow those don't feel as immediately and intensely aging to the music therein. Sad but true. Otherwise, Draft 7.30 would surely rank higher in my estimation.

[ignatius]

i love draft. no complaints here. to me it has a digital hiphop vibe.  i like the way it sounds particularly because there isn't another autechre record that sounds the way it does. i think it's the heavy use of the akai Z8000 over adat so it stays digital all the time or something.. idk. i know there's lot's of analog stuff but there's stuff on it that just cuts through in this splintered digital slap that i love.  it's also just mutant weird. 

i confess i don't concern myself w/ranking releases as i find it tiresome and have been obsessed w/every release at one time or another so just follow my mood.  in some way they all stand alone or something. shrug.