AAA - Ask Autechre Anything - Sean and Rob on WATMM!

[Sean Ae]

I'm curious if y'all feel like masters

 

Or more jack of all trades, master of none.

 

Friends here in M10 are freaking out y'all are here so lots of loving and weird vibes coming your way B)

also Exai is 'talking' a lot more now~

 

nah we're not masters of anything, and def not jack of all trades, we got like the least transferrable skill set ever

[Ivan Ooze]

how much crazy clown time did you put into quaristice

[Sean Ae]

I never realised you lovex dm so much. Id heard you mention them in interviews before but didnt realise the high regard you held them.

 

Considering the collaborated with mark bell its not a million miles away, the thought of you two working with them is it? I know martin gore was well into bitstream.

 

What do you think of exciter? And whats your favourite dm album? Sorry for another favourites q.

i dunno it's hard to pick a favourite, either a broken frame, some great reward or black celebration, depending on mood

 

exciter was ok but tbh i liked them more when alan was with them

[Goiter Sanchez]

How do you both go about backing-up/archiving your work in case you experience a catastrophic HDD meltdown? Also, what would you surmise is the best format for backing up your work which is least likely to fail (eg: HDD, Flashdrive, Cloud, DVD, DAT, etc)?

 

Thanks :)

[Sean Ae]

 

 

Word up, Ae. I recently found a few of your old radio mixes on my old Compaq desktop PC (XFM, Breezeblock and Solid Steel), it was great to hear them again (big chunks of Wendy Carlos and Hafler Trio on that Breezeblock Mix :-D). I know you guys do the massive webcast marathons but does it work differently for the radio output? does the station come to you and you post them a CD of a half hour mix? And are you inundated with requests for this type of stuff in the lead up to an album release?

yeah sometimes its like that for outside radio programmers, we get quite busy with requests when we announce a new record.

 

In the lead up to Draft being released you did a mix for Radio 3: Mixing it and a mix for Mary Anne Hobbs. The Radio 3 mix was full of bombastic dance beats which almost left the presenters speechless, while the Radio 1 mix was more cultured/refined. It was almost as if the two CD's had got mixed up in the mail and went to different areas in the BBC. I thought that was a nice touch :-D

 

 

cheers

yeah we thought a show called mixing it should get a mix where we're really 'mixing it'

and MAH i mean, yeah playing dockstader and wendy carlos on a usually trendy show just made sense somehow

[Sean Ae]

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 -

 

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 ?

 

 

that description is pretty spot on

[Rob Ae]

are you already now starting to hear material you would release on a new album? and like, since your albums sound so different from one album to the next, do the tracks typically come from the same sessions or do you pick and choose from tracks before like, the previous album and so forth. and do you find that you have many aesthetics and ideas that are not released that you could have done a new album out of?

also i sent you a pm sean if you wanna check;

Its been over a year since we delivered exai, normally we might be sitting on some work that could end up on the next album, its hard to say at the mo, my instincts are that we'll not need it. The tracks have in the past been typically from the same period that end up on them, sometimes quite a few dont make it cos theyre not fitting for some reason, these could in one way form a non released aesthetic that u mention yeah. But have something that might've not worked well with the style of the lp.

 

In exai's case there was a lot of other material available to us, some similar styles to exai and some out of style stuff.

[Sean Ae]

Boards of Canada said they jam a lot and then sample the best parts to create songs. Do you also work that way?

 

sometimes, but loads of other ways as well

[coax]

thanks a lot rob for answering my questions. just needed to say thanks once.

[soundwave]

Hello again, you guys seem to be quite consistent in release an album + following EP/mini album every two years, is this a contractual thing or a deadline you set yourselves for motivational purposes? Do you take time out from music making after a release or are you constantly working on something on a regular basis?

 

ta :)

[Sean Ae]

I'm curious as to how soon in the creative process one of your tracks will be given a track title or a working variation on a track title?

 

soon as we have to save it usually

sometimes it gets changed way later tho, when we compile a release

[Rob Ae]

when i listen to cloudline it's like i'm stuck on an autobahn in da future did you guys plan it to be like this

Yes it could be, the forward, pressing on vibe but no. Its more of a sonic retina retention excercise, to smear emotional responses to music.

[hoggy]

 

What do you think might be the effect of extreme cerebral stimulation of listening to for example especially long tracks on Exai? Especially when that stimulation is hard to vocalise or simply emote to or physically express?

 

For example, sometimes when I really love something and find it intangibly stimulating, I find that I have no way to express it to people (a description can't really express 'that thing') - do you ever get this kind of frustration? Do you think it might effect how someone thinks, behaves, feels?

 

To try to clarify a bit more - I'm talking about extreme stimulation with no real world counterpart - that thing where something just 'does something' you can't explain it.

tbh it's only frustrating in a third party kind of way

like, if i'm seeing someone trying to explain to someone else what's good about a track and they end up resorting to ill-fitting metaphor or cliche-speak

but in terms of us, and process, or playing rob stuff, nah, u can just tell if someone is getting it, there are a ton of unconscious signals i think. or i feel, i mean

 

That makes sense, but I meant that I sometimes get an impulse to act (don't you?), driven by something inspiring, but because of the strange nature of the inspiration, there's no way to act on it, there's nothing that correlates in the real world - it's like watching a film containing the secrets of life but made by aliens, and totally connecting with it it, but then having no way to apply it

 

It's the impulse to act on it more than the desire to explain it verbally I was talking about more

 

It's like that thing Francis Bacon said:

 

“Supposing I was satisfied with what I did? How can you be satisfied, because everything escapes you. You know that perfectly well. You know that even if you’re in love with somebody, everything escapes you. You want to be nearer that person, but how can you cut your flesh open and join with the other person? It’s an impossibility to do."

[Rob Ae]

Hello again, you guys seem to be quite consistent in release an album + following EP/mini album every two years, is this a contractual thing or a deadline you set yourselves for motivational purposes? Do you take time out from music making after a release or are you constantly working on something on a regular basis?

 

ta :)

 

Pretty regular basis.

[awepittance]

 

related to your reply to i believe it was awe's question about the NSA to which you said it (spying) was a necessary phase-

 

so in the nearish future when brain implants, chips that allow you to connect your brain directly to your computer are available, will either/both of you say 'damn the torpedoes' (in this case the torpedoes being the american gov and possibly other govs recording every thought you have in a secret facility somewhere, and organizing all the data into various cross-referenced, instantly searchable databases, to be used in who knows what ways), and go ahead and get one so you can control your max patches directly with your brain waves? assuming you don't already. is that what you meant by saying the NSA stuff is part of a necessary phase? that all of this is inevitable, that all of our brains are going to be under direct monitoring by gov/commercial entities but that we have to accept that if we want the cool shit like robot servants that bring us our tea when we think about tea, or being able to compose tracks with our thoughts like raymond scott wanted to do?

 

nah

i don't know why everyone is focusing so much on the nsa

everyone's at it, all spying on each other

it's not like some nice neat pyramid, it's like a web

 

in the future we're gonna be so much more networked than this, even the concept of monitoring will be totally antiquated

 

what do you think of this quote by raymond scott

 

 

 

 

• "Perhaps within the next hundred years, science will perfect a process of thought transference from composer to listener. The composer will sit alone on the concert stage and merely 'think' his idealized conception of his music. Instead of recordings of actual music sound, recordings will carry the brainwaves of the composer directly to the mind of the listener." —Raymond Scott, 1949

[Sean Ae]

 

do you like ween? it's 2 crazy musicians making a bunch of awesome tracks

I remember hearing an alternate version of Buckingham Green in one of the webcasts, so I'm guessing that one's a yes!

 

Have you guys done any coding in ChucK?

 

 

nah but i saw it years ago and it looked interesting iirc it was made for live coding, is that right? would prob appeal to me if so

[Guest burnibus]

Black celebration is a bit spesh to me also. Ill always love violator cos of the situations when I first heard it long journeys through the lakes and being so young, id never heard any music like it before and the production was so deep.

 

I bumped into your richer sounds friend. He was playing brian enos new album through their kit. Was nice to not hear rihanna in there.

[triachus]

Exai was announced almost half a year in advance before the release date in a facebook post by tdr, saying they were working on the new album art. WATMM nearly exploded after that. A smiliar thing happened with a tweet about the L-event artwork.

 

 

 

How did that happen? Are they allowed to do that? Was it your decision or the label's decision to let those bits of info leak out of the blue? Was it a promotional thing? Will future Autechre releases first be vaguely announced via the artwork designers from now on?

[Rob Ae]

 

 

What do you think might be the effect of extreme cerebral stimulation of listening to for example especially long tracks on Exai? Especially when that stimulation is hard to vocalise or simply emote to or physically express?

For example, sometimes when I really love something and find it intangibly stimulating, I find that I have no way to express it to people (a description can't really express 'that thing') - do you ever get this kind of frustration? Do you think it might effect how someone thinks, behaves, feels?

To try to clarify a bit more - I'm talking about extreme stimulation with no real world counterpart - that thing where something just 'does something' you can't explain it.

 

tbh it's only frustrating in a third party kind of way

like, if i'm seeing someone trying to explain to someone else what's good about a track and they end up resorting to ill-fitting metaphor or cliche-speak

but in terms of us, and process, or playing rob stuff, nah, u can just tell if someone is getting it, there are a ton of unconscious signals i think. or i feel, i mean

That makes sense, but I meant that I sometimes get an impulse to act (don't you?), driven by something inspiring, but because of the strange nature of the inspiration, there's no way to act on it, there's nothing that correlates in the real world - it's like watching a film containing the secrets of life but made by aliens, and totally connecting with it it, but then having no way to apply it

 

It's the impulse to act on it more than the desire to explain it verbally I was talking about more

 

It's like that thing Francis Bacon said:

 

“Supposing I was satisfied with what I did? How can you be satisfied, because everything escapes you. You know that perfectly well. You know that even if you’re in love with somebody, everything escapes you. You want to be nearer that person, but how can you cut your flesh open and join with the other person? It’s an impossibility to do."

Yeah well, i get that, but its a normal human thing right?, to want to rinse the things you love so much for all it may have. With inspiration, i see it as similar, that it can simply be something transferring from a persons one idea to another, like the film effect u mention. The actual idea can be way different, but still knock you onwards to do your idea.

[salvakkpooo]

Ever thought in coming to play live stuff to South America? To Argentina to be more precise.

[Sean Ae]

How large are your personal music libraries? Records or CDs or Tapes or digital? Which format do you consume the most?

never measured it

i don't even know how many records or cds i own

 

23881 tracks in my iTunes lib

 

er digitals mostly, depends on what room i'm in, i only have one deck atm

[barbu]

Hello Sean and Rob, hello watmm!

 

Is there any place I can find more Gescom bootlegs?

so far I've only heard one from 2001 and one from 2003 in Strasbourg. have you ever considered releasing a compilation of these and some others on Skam?

[sergeantk]

Any experience with anxiety disorders? Some AE is so disassociating that it induces a state similar to the total dissociating feeling I get during severe panic attacks, such as Cfern.

[blos]

Over-thought question time: one of the main differences between "early Ae" and "later Ae" is the tension between rhythm and arrhythm - at least that's one of the main things I get. Obviously "flutter" was consciously in that vein but it wasn't a major part of the toolkit until maybe cichlisuite / chiastic / envane. At least that's how it seems to me. Obviously we all like a massive 4/4 boom-bap, and that's like junk food when you guys do it well (e.g. 6IE.CR, IO, 1 1 is, etc) but my very favourites (e.g. Pencha, Osla for n) seem to scatter beats around like confetti while a steady pulse runs invisibly through it.

Oh yeah, the question. How does that come about? Is it usually programmed? Some kind of time-scatter algorithm that you push right up to the bleeding edge of rhythm v chaos? Micro-editing? Played live and tweaked?

The reason I ask is that it's probably the number one thing I like about Ae and the most difficult to describe.

[Guest burnibus]

One more thing. With a track like treale did you have a good idea earlier on about its trajectory?

 

It builds harmonic tension throughout and then that sweet little melody at the end is a pure release and blissful. Just wondering if it kind of just happened or was more stategic?