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

[YEK]

modern/new musicians you admire ?

[Guest Credo]

 

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?

[jules]

 

when working with tdr, do they give you formal presentations on their thoughts about the art they produced according to your guidelines or is it more of a PDF back and forth collab of sorts?

yeah Ian's big on the epic deluge of concepts and ideas - before hearing the work sometimes, while also being capable of trashing it all for a hunch, pdf/response tennis tends to occur towards the very end, say when its all about specific tones or something like that.

 

id has differed over the years though

 

 

im sorry if i am harping on this topic but it interests me a great deal. he comes up with concepts before hearing anything? do you brief him on the overall tone first then i suppose?

[Guest SPAG]

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?

[Sean Ae]

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

[Guest 21B]

 

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

[triachus]

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?

[Guest terra incognita]

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

[Rob Ae]

 

 

Hey guys! Love the music!

 

I'd like to know if there's any truth to this quote about an ep someone tried to pass off as one of your own.

 

http://www.beatport.com/release/sil-taper-sto-lend-ep/286401

 

What does tie this EP to Autechre themselves (other that it sorta does sound like them) is that some of the sounds where recycled from programed beats that were left on Roland R8 drum machine after a Warp event. Sean Booth & Rob Brown actually borrowed equipment from Derek Marin for the live show Autechre performed at a Blech party in NYC & in the process left beats on the machine. The beats were later used to create some of this recording.

 

You guys are amazing. Please come back to NYC at some point. I bought tickets to your Brooklyn show during the Quaristice tour and ended not being able to go. I'm still crying about it.

yeah we borrowed gear all the time R8 EPS/ASR10/desk/FX/cables, so we could just travel with memory cards n floppy's - the gear would have not tracks in after we left as i don't recall ever having to write stuff into the units, so its not possible imo, these tracks don't suggest otherwise, at least from what i can hear.

 

nice story, cos i often wondered if anyone would ever try.

 

 

nah it's sort of legit actually

cos the r8 keeps the patterns from the last track loaded, so like, 1/4 of the set i think

 

the problem is tho, i wasn't using any r8 sounds that night. the patterns were triggering the nord and the r8 audio wasn't hooked up. so all the sounds would be wrong, not even the right type of sound cos they would be whatever sounds happened to be on the pads, and the note numbers on the nord would have nothing to do with the r8, so you'd have like, a cymbal where a nord kick would be or something, it doesn't really translate unless u also have a nord there with our memory card in it

 

ah i was thinking this R8 stuff was earlier set material pre nord etc,

 

as u were

[cebec]

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?

[Guest KunoMerit]

 

ah i was thinking this R8 stuff was earlier set material pre nord etc,

 

 

as u were

 

 

 

This hints at a classification that you have in your head for your material. Can you expand?

 

In my mind it was always something like:

 

early studio/gear - 202, r8, juno(?), etc.

nord, eps

max

elektrons

max

[Guest]

Hint: There's already a compressed silent track hidden in that bit of silence Tac Lacora.

 

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

[Sean Ae]

 

 

for me oversteps is about memory

but i'm not gonna say much more than that

 

 

nostalgia ?

 

 

nah, memory

[awepittance]

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?

[Sean 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

[psn]

 

 

- fear of failure

 

 

- wouldn't turn up if so - hahah

 

 

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

[Rob 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?

 

yes we do,

 

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

[Sean Ae]

thanks for answering my other questions.

 

What is this track? You played it during the second half of the Mixlr webcast.

https://soundcloud.com/soothsayer-1/autechre-webcast-oh

 

Thanks for those mixes by the way. Do you remember the one you did many years past that ended with you playing a ton of older hits/pop in rapid succession? It was like you were trying to kill popular music, it was amazing.

 

sam tiba - 420

 

ah that was plunderphonics - plexure. amazing album

[awepittance]

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. Edited November 5, 2013 by John Ehrlichman

[Guest]

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 :-)

Edited November 5, 2013 by Guest

[Dale]

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?

[Sean Ae]

Do you both rate William Gibson's work? Maybe even met him IRL?

Could you imagine yourselves making a soundtrack to Cunningham's 'Neuromancer' (which is cancelled, sadly)?

Also, Quake or Unreal Tournament (this is important)?

 

Love u both, no homo!

 

 

yeah would love to soundtrack neuromancer

 

well out of them two, quake

[awepittance]

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?

on this tip I'll just quietly put this here

 

[Rob Ae]

 

 

ah i was thinking this R8 stuff was earlier set material pre nord etc,

 

 

as u were

 

 

 

This hints at a classification that you have in your head for your material. Can you expand?

 

In my mind it was always something like:

 

early studio/gear - 202, r8, juno(?), etc.

nord, eps

max

elektrons

max

 

well at some point the R8 would be used not for sequencing its own sounds and juno 106 sounds in earliest sets, then used for seq its own sounds and eps samples later sets, then nord sounds later later. so i guess the later year the set was, the less likely the r8 sounds were used. so more likely a mismatch of the r8 seq to sound like i hear in these 'autodesk' trax.

 

autopilot

[Ifeelspace]

Do you think women are under-represented in the world of the idmz?