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

[gl0tch]

Shit, super late to this party.

 

I have some questions:

 

- Can you discuss the process for choosing album art? What flexibility do you give TDr and do you pick from multiple concepts?

 

- can I do your album artwork?

 

- would you consider releasing an album that is one track long, 72min?

 

- would you re-re-consider your stance on soundboards? I know you talked about this earlier, but Sean pls, we're dying here!!!

 

- related, would you consider doing a WATMM member-only subscription service where u post some experiments or throw aways or a catch all directory posted to Dropbox or something? Some community fuckery sort of conceptual project?

 

- do you like any mobile apps for making music? Nothing serious, maybe audio toys to get you 'techre on while you are on the toilet.

 

Guys, seriously, thank you. Sorry if I was ever offensive on here.

[Sean Ae]

- Have you guys ever started a track and abandoned it because it didn't sound "autechreish" even though some might consider it good?

 

- When using something open ended like a Nord Modular or MAX, do you ever tweak presets in the interest of time, or do you most often start from the ground up.

 

in my case i have to make special effort to make it not sound like autechre, so if it happens it's not by mistake it's cos i decided 'today i will make a hip hop track' or something, and ruled out a load of stuff i'd naturally do

 

i dunno i mean there are no such thing as presets in max

well - there are but preset means something different in max, it's not something someone else made

 

but i'm not against it in principle, whatever makes a good track innit

[Sam]

Is this legit?

 

 

[Rob Ae]

 

 

When you read something like this do you laugh for a very long time

 

Autechre records are purchased solely by bald men in expensive anoraks who would masturbate to a car alarm if it was re-mixed by a German. This impenetrable curtain of misanthropic noise - released with an accompanying three-track DVD that features a squabble of hopelessly pretentious video "interpretations" - is typical of the menopausal electro-manglers' dogged refusal to bow to convention and produce anything of interest to anyone not either a) bald or b) German. It bleeps. It skronks. It krrraaaanks. But mainly, it blows like a ruddy awful hurricane. Remember, kids; if it sounds like a festering hillock of tune-shy bum-wank, it's because it IS a festering hillock of tune-shy bum-wank. Avoid as you would a bald German.

 

almost as condescending as the tortoise/achilles one

 

 

its not that bad really

i mean u can tell they kind of like it on some level :D

 

yeah seemingly northern humour.

[Dale]

sounds like you guys have rinsed the r8 in the past - I used to own the r5, but I found it difficult to really tweak the presets into interesting sounds (I could sequence stuff in unique, interesting ways on the machine itself, but altering the tones of the drums into something really cool was a big task at times without it coming across as though I was making some kind of 80s electro track). Did you ever own the R5 and have any thoughts on it? how did you manage to create the drum sounds of Flutter on the r8 alone!? Amazing!

[awepittance]

not that bad meaning not as bad as the pitchfork review of Untiled or just not bad in a general sense?

Edited November 5, 2013 by John Ehrlichman

[Sean Ae]

 

 

Hi there!

 

I am part of a musical collective that have met monthly for five+ years. Each time dinner is shared and each participants musical (well, more or less) contribution is presented and scrutinised according to a 'dogm'.

 

The dogm could be like... Make music for this one minute mov clip or use 1 sec sampled voices only or FM synthesis. Often constraints.

 

My question: since we have passed dogma no 55 we now sometimes have problems finding a new and inspiring dogm.

What would you find to be an interesting dogm to force you out of your comfort zone?

have you tried 'only ceramics' , thats a material I've always liked for many reasons

 

Might have been discussed, but not tried. :) How would you approach it?

 

Sean, you have another idea?

 

 

place a unique event on every 16th note, and nothing else

[Danny O Flannagin]

Are you guys getting paid to do this thread?

[Sean Ae]

 

do you guys still do any remix's of other artist?

would you guys ever think of doing bootleg versions of Incunabula-esque productions with the technology you use now a days?

 

 

why?

 

 

alien transmission sound design was ben burtt

 

never knew this, awesome

 

 

 

if you really [have time to kill] + want to dig details on alien this site is fucking class if you've not come across it. Esp worth checking the Ivor Powell + Terry Rawlings interviews. they're totally brilliant guys.

 

http://www.zen171398.zen.co.uk/Alien.html

 

 

cheers, wicked

[olo]

Rob & Sean,

 

I know nothing of your personal lives, but, like, you guys sitting in your respective homes, answering a bunch of questions from fanboys & girls for most of the day, the past several days.

 

Aren't your wives/girlfriends like "awwright, can you like fix the damn running toilet, get the kids to school, go pick up some milk & cream, take out the trash, for christ sake, do something besides tappity, tap, tapping on your laptops!!!"???

 

or

 

"Oh, you're on watmm dear, let me top off your tea & fluff that pillow...carry on love."?

 

Don't get me wrong, you guys are f'ing champs for doing what your doing, but aren't you like bored yet?

[Sean Ae]

Me and my fellow watmmer Hello Spiral are doing a music collaboration project, we send eachother bits and pieces and work on tracks together.

 

Here is a track that's a work in progress. I made a video for it.

 

 

 

 

What do you think?

 

top 40 material

[YEK]

do psychedelics play any role in your music? lots of people like to listen to your music with an altered mind.

[Sean Ae]

Earlier in the thread you said something to the effect that your DSP programming has paid off with regard to people finding some of the sound palette on the new album and EP to sound really 'deep' and analog-like --

 

Has gen~ made this 'easier'? or is it a refinement of your ongoing MSP development, improvements to MSP sound quality, or all of the above?

all of the above

altho max 6 came out after we'd done all the exai stuff so like, it's sounding different again, being 64 bit

[jules]

 

 

 

 

for me oversteps is about memory

but i'm not gonna say much more than that

 

 

nostalgia ?

 

 

nah, memory

 

 

 

the memories of an ancient shaolin warrior?

[nizzleone]

There aren't too many examples of people remixing your music, is there a reason for this?

 

Would you consider releasing stems of tracks (new or old) so that fans could take a crack, or is that mostly tied up in the whole Warp thing?

[Sean Ae]

 

Sean, Rob, when this interview ends will you gift us some unreleased Autechre track? :)

 

 

Trying to keep it short....

I discovered you 2 years ago for the first time. Imagine that.

I listened to your album Oversteps and couldn`t relate much. Then i read

and interview where someone mentioned Incunabula. Now this i really liked!

 

When you where unknown, did you ever feel like you don`t exactly know

where the whole thing is heading and ask yourself how much time you would invest in making music

(which you need to take out of your "real" life) if no one was listening?

Asking cause sometimes i feel bad if i don`t make-practice music-making all the time even if not many people are listening to my things.

 

thats it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

i guess i never had that dilemma cos it's what i prefer doing, it's a real privilege to be able to do it all the time. i know that's prob not normal nowadays but w/e

back when we had jobs, in the early days, i would get so little sleep cos i loved doing tracks, it def never felt like a chore

 

i mean this is my real life

how did you get max/msp to sound so slamming on the live tours? do you run the audio channels out to anything outboard or beef it up with something outside of max/msp? With something like Max4live this would easier now adays to mix and eq/compress individual max/msp instruments in an organized way but I assume you were doing this all the way back during the confield tour.

 

on that tour we didn't even have a sound man iirc, so they'd just have to deal with it

we started taking jamie out in 2005 and things got a lot easier

 

did you guys break out individual channels for things like kick drums and the other layers then in max/msp?

 

 

no it was just 2 channels out of each laptop, and we had a nord each as well for a couple of tracks, 2 chans out of mine and maybe 4 chans out of rob's i can't rem now

[pizza]

how was it like doing the squarepusher remix? did he like it?

[Sean Ae]

 

Sean Ae, on 05 Nov 2013 - 11:08 AM, said:

 

John Ehrlichman, on 05 Nov 2013 - 10:39 AM, said:

 

Sean Ae, on 05 Nov 2013 - 10:32 AM, said:

 

John Ehrlichman, on 04 Nov 2013 - 3:32 PM, said:

 

When you found out that the Skinny Puppy remix album you were going to be on would feature 50% nu-metal is that when you guys decided to make a very abstract/noisy skinny puppy remix?

nah we had no idea what the rest was gonna be like

it was just weird, we didn't get any parts we just had this cd sent to us, and the track wasn't our thing at all, and we had been messing with soundedit a lot so we thought it would be fun to chuck it into soundedit and see what came out the other end

is prob the weirdest mix we've ever done tho

nice, macromedia soundedit for old mac? You guys ever use Hyperprism around that time too?

yeah good old sound edit 16

yeah we had hyperprism but i dunno if we ever used it on a release

i think by the time i got it fatboy slim was already hammering it so it was like, straight in the bin

I remember soundedit16 was out before my computer was able to do multitracking (too slow) and you could open up like 20 instances of it and have them all playing at once. Do you remember anything you might have used hyperprism in.. gescom minidsic perhaps? I think the skinny puppy remix is what made me think you guys might have dabbled with it before.

 

 

honestly can't remember

i don't think so anyway

 

there are some bits of granulab on the minidisc maybe

[gmanyo]

do u ever get the temptation to put a bunch of donks on ur track? like "oh man i could just put a mad donk on this snare rush"??

[Sean Ae]

Sean/Rob, you made massive use sounds that we summarize as glitch nowadays. After that you started to liberalise the tempi and beats, I mean when I heard that pitch fall down starting in the center (and also on 5.06) of Stop Look Listen I was really stunned.

 

Do you feel there's something similar weird or groundbreaking, - but later commonly used - visible at the horizon?

 

That http://www.nme.com/reviews/autechre/6602 "Autechre records are purchased solely by bald men in expensive anoraks who would masturbate to a car alarm if it was re-mixed by a German" quote: Old story happening ever and ever again. Some people who don't like or understand specific art start bashing about it. Shostakovich received a Pravda article "Chaos instead of music" and got into real trouble. Fortunately this is not the case nowadays anymore :-)

 

yeah well, at least we don't have to keep all our 'private' compositions in a special drawer

 

i dunno i mean i can't predict things we might do, and def not things we might find

[joshuatxuk]

 

 

 

 

for me oversteps is about memory

but i'm not gonna say much more than that

 

 

nostalgia ?

 

 

nah, memory

 

 

the memories of an ancient shaolin warrior?

 

 

Dudes, I don't think he remembers, let's not press the question.

[Sean Ae]

do you guys still feel highly respected by warp? it isn't like they've forgotten about you guys, afx, boc and other big players who have made them into what they are today?

do you get concerned about change of management at warp in the future and how this could impact your relations with them? i heard that plaid are unhappy with warp (read that in an interview) because as a label, they take such a big cut of the sales of records, that it is kind of grating on them now. i guess it might be different for your guys as you probably have a larger fan base than ed and andy?

 

i got no idea what kind of deal they got, ours is p good

 

u got a source for that quote?

 

 

do you guys still do any remix's of other artist?

would you guys ever think of doing bootleg versions of Incunabula-esque productions with the technology you use now a days?

 

yes we do,

 

probably not, i mean we still are to some extent.

 

lel

[Sean Ae]

 

 

 

- fear of failure

 

 

- wouldn't turn up if so - hahah

 

 

What's the worst thing that ever happened while playing live?

 

once my r8 caught on fire, and my hands were covered in vodka so they also caught on fire, and to put them out i starting clapping my hands together, and all the audience started clapping as well, and some of them started setting their hands on fire as well, as a kind of tribute

[gmanyo]

 

 

 

 

- fear of failure

 

 

- wouldn't turn up if so - hahah

 

 

What's the worst thing that ever happened while playing live?

 

once my r8 caught on fire, and my hands were covered in vodka so they also caught on fire, and to put them out i starting clapping my hands together, and all the audience started clapping as well, and some of them started setting their hands on fire as well, as a kind of tribute

 

i literally can't tell if you are serious or not

 

that is amazing if it is real

Edited November 5, 2013 by gmanyo

[psn]

Haha!