How did you get into Ae?

[User300401]

In 2001 I moved to Rome, there I met a girl, she was friend of the romans of rephlex rec, she borrowed me confield and the first listening was on the broken cd player of my pc. It was a hard listening, I usually enjoied the cubist touch it gaves to the simple/linear music but confield didn't need it, it was already cubist. It was better when I had the listening on another cd player but it took some period I could understand the real value of the work. Then i fell into it.

[tailings]

Necro post but so what, this is a really good thread.

Back in the early '90's I was clubbing a lot and had really gotten into EBM.  Front 242, MBM, RevCo, Ministry, that whole WaxTrax scene.  About the same time I landed a job at IBM which gave me access to UseNet, which really opened my world to a whole lot of music I had never heard of before.  Mostly I read rec.music.industrial and rec.music.ambient.  I keenly remember a Greg Clow(*) post from 1993 in which he prophesied the death of EBM and the emergence of bands like Aphex Twin and Autechre as the future of cutting edge electronica.  Shortly afterward I picked up a copy of SAWII and not long after that I purchased Amber.  Amber was like the sound of liquid mercury to my ears and I was entranced in a way few bands have ever equaled before or since.  Autechre has been among my favorite bands since.

 

* - He ran a fantastic label called PieHead Records, which put out quite a few classics that are well worth tracking down.

[sine nomine]

I was well I to breakbeats, dnb and techno growing up and so I worked really fucking hard to get into ae... I hated it at first, really did - but I knew it was because I didn't understand it (like a language or something) so I was determined to learn this "language" quaristice was my intro to them BTW... Its probably still one of my faves. 

[Soloman Tump]

On 11/18/2015 at 9:08 PM, Soloman Tump said:

Fairly late to the game.

 

I randomly purchased draft 7.30 from HMV in Bracknell when it was released, it was the recommended dance album of the week (!)

 

I was already into Squarepusher and Aphex and knew a bit about 'chre but initially this album fucked with my head and I didn't really understand it. Took a while before it started to click and then

 

*hedaplode*

Blessed be HMV

[prdctvsm]

i 1st heard ae way back when, on this lp:

 

[Lexicon]

On 9/21/2020 at 7:38 PM, tailings said:

Necro post but so what, this is a really good thread.

Back in the early '90's I was clubbing a lot and had really gotten into EBM.  Front 242, MBM, RevCo, Ministry, that whole WaxTrax scene.  About the same time I landed a job at IBM which gave me access to UseNet, which really opened my world to a whole lot of music I had never heard of before.  Mostly I read rec.music.industrial and rec.music.ambient.  I keenly remember a Greg Clow(*) post from 1993 in which he prophesied the death of EBM and the emergence of bands like Aphex Twin and Autechre as the future of cutting edge electronica.  Shortly afterward I picked up a copy of SAWII and not long after that I purchased Amber.  Amber was like the sound of liquid mercury to my ears and I was entranced in a way few bands have ever equaled before or since.  Autechre has been among my favorite bands since.

 

* - He ran a fantastic label called PieHead Records, which put out quite a few classics that are well worth tracking down.

I used to work with Twinax IBM clients on a System 36 and Migration to AS400 during my AE “discovery” years. 

[Boxus]

I'm among those who got into Aphex and Ae via the Pi soundtrack. I was 12 or 13 yo at the time. And I was just lucky enough to have a friend with great taste who discovered that movie and bought the soundtrack. THANK YOU MAX. He was really into the Orb as well, and I listened to them and Aphex a lot at first, then got more into Autechre the following year after limewiring a bunch of random tracks and finally buying Tri Rep.

[beerwolf]

Definitely a ‘necro bump’

I was wondering/dreading reading my post as I was very much on a mission at that time to pickle (or perhaps fry) my brain in a primordial soup of illegal chemicals. Hah! It was quite amusing reading it, I think.....

Edited October 2, 2020 by beerwolf

[splesh]

I was in high school and saw Salad Fingers, since the guy who had made Badger Badger Badger hosted episodes of it and other David Firth cartoons on his site. This was at the height of "lol so random omg" type humor in the mid-2000s. Watched some other FatPie.com stuff and enjoyed it, still like some of it. Since Firth listed artists whose music he used in his cartoons, I looked up Boards of Canada and Aphex Twin on Wikipedia and AllMusicGuide and found out that they were both considered to be part of the same style of music, "Intelligent Dance Music". This appealed to my self important teenage ego and at the time not really thinking that highly of dance music (looking back I feel like I rather missed out by being such a snob, I could have had so much more fun). As it turned out, there was this third musical act who were supposed to be one of the most definitive of the sound. So I looked 'em up. Untilted was their newest album at that point. I didn't totally get it right away but slowly but surely my love of Autechre would outshine the bands which had previously been my favourite the two years before (Ozric Tentacles and Explosions in the Sky) and become my favourite "band" for the rest of my life. I hadn't heard Quaristice in the year it had come out for some reason, so the year after that, in 2009, the first album of theirs I heard since becoming a super fan was Quaristice (versions), no sadly not on a limited edition hard copy with the nice brushed steel case. And it ended up being more than okay that I hadn't heard that album when it came out because Oversteps came out in 2010 and so it felt like I only had a single year wait between releases.

[may be rude]

older, more accessible stuff: amber, chiastic slide and cichli suite. then exai came out, which is a god-thing. from the watmm AAA thread i learned that draft and confield were standouts, got into those, then lp5, tri repetae and garbage, then oversteps, etc 

Edited October 9, 2020 by very honest

[sine nomine]

@spleshlove the salad fingers connection!

[mTesc]

In 1999, I had been oddly (it's not really odd, actually, but still) fixated on "Geography" by Front 242 (still one of my absolute favorite records) for a while, and I felt like nothing else had as appealing, immersive textures or a similar atmosphere. Then I heard ep7, and it was like a floodgate opened. I'd been familiar with Incunabula, and respected it, but I'd somehow managed to remain unexposed to subsequent Autechre records. That changed rapidly, of course.

[NewSchoolScience]

Artificial Intelligence, Incunabula

Edited October 10, 2020 by NewSchoolScience

[Nil]

Circa 2001, when getting into electronic music. Didn't click back then. Saw them live in 2005 for the first time, was absolutely fantastic, much more immediate and direct. Didn't find something similar in the records. Saw them live a few times afterwards, was blown away each and every time.
Then I instantly loved Oversteps, the first EP/LP of theirs to tick all my boxes. Then elseq, AE LIVE and NTS Sessions were instant favorites. Same goes for SIGN.

[d-a-m-o]

Pretty similar experience for me, I was into Aphex since 98/99 but for Ae the process took more time. Bought a copy of chiastic slide back in 2003 but I found it too "cerebral", didn't click. in 2008 I bought a copy of Quaristice and same thing, nice but I guess I wasn't ready. Then 2010 I bought Oversteps and it was mindblowing, so I listened to the full discography from start to finish and suddenly it all made sense, complete fanboy since this day.

[demo]

It was 2017, so not too long ago.

I was getting into Aphex Twin and Squarepusher when I discovered Chris Cunningham's fantastic videos. The first ae track I can ever recall listening to was...

I LOVED the harshness of it, the fast drums and (video aside) how alien the music was.
I was listening to a lot of music at the time so I really didnt delve into too much autechre, that was until Warp posted their brand new track on social media.

spl47 was the track that hooked me, this was the 2nd autechre track I ever heard and made me want more! Words can not explain how I felt when I first heard this, but I fell in love. (Although I really didn't understand jnsn code gl16)
Around this same time I was in my early days of collecting records, I believe Warp had just repressed Tri Repetae. Some article stated "most influential electtronic album of the 90's" or something, I bought into it big time. Bought the vinyl and ta-da....
Tri Repetae on vinyl was the first autechre album I listened to... my life changed that day.

[bronchuseven]

It was 1995 - my roommate played me Tri Repetae which I loved, then the first album I bought was Amber.

[gnarlybog]

In high school, researching every band on Trent Reznor's Nothing Records label and then shortly after watching Pi and discovering the beauty of Kalpol Introl.

[danshoebridge]

Winter 1995 and I picked up Anvil Vapre on a whim from the new releases in HMV Manchester while up visiting a friend. Listened to it later round his place, sounded very strange and couldn't quite work out if I liked it or not. There was definitely something there though.

Couple of days later I was heading back on the train so bought Amber on tape for the journey. This one sounded pretty great actually - listened to it on repeat for the journey. Once I got back I had a smoke before giving it another go - it totally 'clicked' and blew my mind in the process. One of my favourite ever musical experiences.

[Key]

Don't really remember exactly but it must have been a combo of listening to John Peel and reading the NME around 2000ish. The first release I really got into at the time was Confield, hype ever since.

[Braintree]

I had seen the "Second Bad Vilbel" video but hadn't paid much attention to it, but then a friend showed me "Gantz Graf" sometime later and I was just blown away.

[Spamlet]

I put their entire discography at the time on shuffle while playing Destiny, for probably hundreds, maybe something like a thousand hours. Really made a nice fit for the baroque and mysterious sci-fi atmosphere the first game had (in the sequel the bombastic tone of military heroism has kinda taken over, disappointingly). But yeah I kinda absorbed it through the second thread of my ADHD brain. Peak experience honestly. To this day I haven't listened to most of their albums linearly lol, but I do feel like I have an equal appreciation for all their different sounds. I truly believe that the chaotic pace of their tracks helped me get in the zone to parse the game's PVP, and more importantly, vice versa

[Untitled]

Sooooo,

I grew up in a town called Rotherham, the next town on from Sheffield......

When I was in school, aged 14, I had no interest in music as such, pop music in the UK was terrible (around the time of BROS...ugggh), then I heard Master of Puppets, started growing my hair long, and became obsessed with metal from then on.

Fast forward a few years, and I was smoking a lot of weed with my mates, and my music taste had mellowed a little. We used to sit in my mates car out in the Peak District and listen to John Peel.

One night he had Autechre on doing one of his famous sessions. I couldn't believe what I was hearing, totally blew me away.

The next day, I went out and bought Anti EP on cd, and I was hooked. 

Found out they were on Warp records, and they lived in Sheffield.

Ended up seeing them live loads of times in some really mad places, like Halloween 1999 when they DJ'd at The Grapes on Trippet Lane, Sheffield. Sat next to Sean and had a long chat with him. It was just before he left Sheffield for Suffolk. There were about ten people there that evening.....

The strangest thing for me is that the Warp shop was the best place to buy metal albums in Sheffield. We used to go in there and dismiss all the bleepy noises they used play in the shop as towny dance rubbish......

 

[nickinko]

I was about 18 and my buddy gave me the Cichli Suite CD for my birthday. I'd transitioned from New Romantic to Goth to Indie and spent most of the previous couple of years listening to guitar bands like The Wedding Present, The June Brides, The Shop assistants and The Wolfhounds. But we were all just starting to broaden our horizons and get into electronic music more. I was listening to things like The Black Dog's Spanners, Plaid's Not For Threes, The Drum Club's eps, Transglobal Underground, Underworld, Bandulu, that kind of stuff. But Autechre was obviously something different again. 

It's funny because I've been listening to them on and off ever since but have got gradually more and more into them over a couple of decades. I still find stuff in their old records I've never noticed before.

 

Nice thread!

[cichlisuite]

It was probably spring of 2003, I spent some time in Paris on a art history excursion and had a really wonderful and inspiring time there. While roaming the streets of Paris I found a record shop. At that time I was a young techno/electro/detroit enthusiast and thought there is no greater music than that. So I was digging into their electronic music section, and found Miss Kittin's Radio Caroline vol.1 that had a very intriguing playlist (artists I knew at the time: Der Zyklus, Alexander Robotnick, Marshall Jefferson...). I bought it immediately and listened to it on my portable CD player (Sony Discman lol). Little did I know this particular record will change everything about me in relation to electronic music and music in general. It had Autechre's Flutter and Mu-ziq's remix of Kinesthesia's Flicklife and these tracks blew me away and all I was doing for the next several years was digging this immense treasure, eventually wandering way beyond just electronic music.