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Autechre. NTS Residency. (_O_)


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And what's with all this bqbqbq bullying? A very pretty, intricate, resilient little stunner which will age well. 11 minutes is also right in the sweet spot.

I was listening to this while on a walk earlier, and the beauty of this track hit me right in the feels.

=P

 

I absolutely love the pads and little melody... And then towards the end when that synth comes in and accompanies the bleep bloop synths, total mind-melt.

 

I now love this track.

=D

Edited by Hk47
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finally listening to the official / non-bootlegged version from the AEstore 

13 ctrl comes on:  :wtf:  :wtf:  :wtf:  :cattears:  :catsob:

 

I have so many regrets for not allowing myself to properly digest elseq before this came out.

I've listened through the elseq tracks a handful of times, continuously thinking I'd one day give them enough listens to get properly acclimated, and now I've got all this insanity to juggle in there too

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Don't worry about elseq, it was just a stepping stone to where they are now. This is the real shit.

 

Think about it: Have you ever heard Acroyear1? Naw, it probably sucked hard nuts, but the boys kept at it and instead we got Acroyear2 which is fucking great. Totes4realzies. :D

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Sad to say I'm really not feeling this one. The exai, AE_LIVE, elseq progression is probably my favourite stuff they've ever done, so I'm more than happy to hear further developments in this kind of sound, but this one just feels a bit flat. Seemed like they were moving into a more and more weird, abstract, alien sound which I absolutely love, and the onesix tour sounded even more so. Like all the sounds felt so alive with a ton of character, and everything was sequenced to sound so natural, like you were listening to the sounds of some alien world. I dunno this probably sounds dumb, I'm just struggling to put it into words. Basically this stuff just sounds like some tracks made in a computer, which is of course what it is, but it's lost that transportive element to me. Everything is just a bit straight and empty.

 

Obviously it's not bad, it's just not the kind of thing I was hoping for after the progression of the past few years. Glad to see so many people are loving it though and will obviously keep listening in the hope that it might grow on me.

This is much better articulated than what I said — really well put, misc. I haven't felt this "meh" about an AE release since Quaristice. "Straight and empty" is a good way to describe how it all feels to me. And it also does not feel very transportive.

 

Well, we've got 3 more releases left - let's see what happens!

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I'd presume this is because their influences (unconcious or otherwise) for this material are not 99% of electronic music producers.  Just a random sampling of names from the solid steel mix for example, Bernard Parmegiani, Peter Rehberg, Mark Fell, Asmus Tietchens.  Its not contemporary pop music..

 

Not sure where you are get the impression its not edited.  Length and repetition can be used to effect, they don't equate laziness.

 

If you're skipping to a random 30 second selection of any of their music, including Confield, you might get the impression that "its all garbage noise", "i miss when they wrote real music" etc

 

 

 

right, and all of those artists generally release 8-hour blocks of mp3s rather than albums?  I own quite a bit of Mark Fell's work, those are definitely albums

 

if I listen to 30 seconds of any album prior to 2013 I can tell precisely which record it's from, because each record was distinctive and new, back then, and also had way more depth

 

Ae has released very long tracks before (Ts1a, Sublimit, Garbagemx), the length has nothing to do with it; if they're doing painstaking editing and shaping, I'm certainly not able to perceive it.  the new stuff is just sort of hollow, as many people have been saying in this thread

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I think it still is painstakingly crafted, maybe even more than before. Everything they do happens within parameters they set, every detail is exactly how they programmed it. Sean says:

 

 

what I'm saying is that playing with coding in MaxMSP is not "painstakingly crafted music".  it's certainly painstakingly crafted as, like, computer software?  but not as music, or at least it's certainly not coming across that way

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lmao at the idea that dropping into random 30 seconds of a piece of music to discern how different they are is a good way to listen, let alone judge.

 

this bullshit doesn’t hold up to massive works of art. try doing this with john coltrane or philip glass. pretty good results.

 

also lol that mark fell records would pass this test.

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I'd presume this is because their influences (unconcious or otherwise) for this material are not 99% of electronic music producers.  Just a random sampling of names from the solid steel mix for example, Bernard Parmegiani, Peter Rehberg, Mark Fell, Asmus Tietchens.  Its not contemporary pop music..

 

Not sure where you are get the impression its not edited.  Length and repetition can be used to effect, they don't equate laziness.

 

If you're skipping to a random 30 second selection of any of their music, including Confield, you might get the impression that "its all garbage noise", "i miss when they wrote real music" etc

 

 

 

right, and all of those artists generally release 8-hour blocks of mp3s rather than albums?  I own quite a bit of Mark Fell's work, those are definitely albums

 

if I listen to 30 seconds of any album prior to 2013 I can tell precisely which record it's from, because each record was distinctive and new, back then, and also had way more depth

 

Ae has released very long tracks before (Ts1a, Sublimit, Garbagemx), the length has nothing to do with it; if they're doing painstaking editing and shaping, I'm certainly not able to perceive it.  the new stuff is just sort of hollow, as many people have been saying in this thread

 

Releasing 8 hours of music debuting over 4 radio broadcasts is pretty new territory for any artist, which is part of why this is exciting to me.  Those artists from the solid steel mix i used as an example all make music outside conventional delivery formats: GRM stuff has some super long tracks and tends to be released on vinyl only becuase it is an 'archival' format for the work.  Mark Fell has done numerous installation/gallery based projects and releases in unconventional formats.  So just putting those forward as a framework to see this work.

 

We've only heard a quarter of this thing, but to my ears NTS1 is similarly painstaking as any of their work, to use that criteria.  Ts1a always seemed a bit messy, and has the jammy feel you mention, but all the tracks on NTS1 sounds quite refined to me.

 

Looking forward to continue this conversation as we hear more; we dont yet know if each set will be similar in style.  Maybe I will be fatigued by NTS4 and end up agreeing with you.

Edited by Marked x 0ne
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what I'm saying is that playing with coding in MaxMSP is not "painstakingly crafted music".  it's certainly painstakingly crafted as, like, computer software?  but not as music, or at least it's certainly not coming across that way

I'm sorry, and if you're coming from the perspective of just wanting to hear stuff more edited and honed in, I feels ya, but I have to say this is a gigantic load of bullshit. That Picasso (?) quote about drawing a bull in 30 seconds springs to mind.

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I kinda agree that perhaps this stuff could be a bit more concise (and that it's not as impressively weird as some of their previous work), but there's also a part of me that wants them to bring on the 3 hour tracks.

 

 

lmao at the idea that dropping into random 30 seconds of a piece of music to discern how different they are is a good way to listen, let alone judge.

this bullshit doesn’t hold up to massive works of art. try doing this with john coltrane or philip glass. pretty good results.

also lol that mark fell records would pass this test.

lol

 

"I listened to 8 bars of Music For 18 Musicians and what is this?"

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dunno, a different POV could be that these kind of hyper-anally edited micro-glitched dsp wankfest IDM albums.. well they were done.. they’re fun and mind blowing to discover etc.. SP’s Go Plastic, Aphex Twin stuff.. but they also have this kind of early 2000s bedroom producer smell, and it’s a bit of a funny smell. Maybe a bit of cum stain in it.

...

the newer ae things are loose and more open, the quality is absolutely there but it’s different from the past. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Thanks for this thought. I think I've felt like the hyper-edited wankathon was some kind of holy grail that was "Correct" in the same kind of way a Bach fugue. But now that you say it this way, it seems to be missing something that's present in the new stuff, doesn't it? Post-Oversteps Autechre is more alive. So many new batshit, far-out, gnarly tracks, but now you can feel the gestures, the flick of human muscle in them...and that makes them more trippy and crazy and exciting. Like world-class jazz musicians with FTL engines.

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 Why do you think they stopped editing themselves? Doesn't "elseq" probably mean "edited live sequences"? I'm sure that they ARE able to go back and edit what they "jammed" live. Tho it's not really a jam as there was a long programming process beforehand.

 

 

 

slightly cleaning up live jams does not = painstakingly crafted music, which is what we had from 1993 to ~2012. 

 

when i play a random 30-second selection of anything from exai / elseq / ae_live / nts, there's just not enough difference, the sonic 'playground' is way too similar ... i.e., as i said, they're now enslaved to whatever weird semi-AI they've written in MaxMSP, such that they literally stopped buying hardware and don't make music outside of MaxMSP now.  

 

i mean, in general, i was intrigued by elseq and i think it was an interesting idea to edit live jams and release a massive mp3 album; not a bad idea, and the tracks are pretty good.  but they're literally just doing "elseq two: electric boogaloo" at this point, like, here's eight more hours of the same effing thing (obviously some differences but meh)

 

 

I think it still is painstakingly crafted, maybe even more than before. Everything they do happens within parameters they set, every detail is exactly how they programmed it. Sean says:

 

 

With this kind of algorithmic music, because the algorithms are made by people, it is people music! You get that thing of, "Eww, it's not human!" But that's so far off how I think of it. I think of it as being more human, because there's all these decisions in there, and they're human decisions. They're what people chose to do.

 
 Generating the music using their custom code is actually more expressive than placing every single sound by hand I believe.
 
 
 
Here's a link to their elseq interview in case anyone wants to read it again: https://www.residentadvisor.net/features/2756

 

 

This.  I don't know how their system is designed but I assume they've created a very mature set of black box abstractions which they can hook together as they please.  This gives enormous flexibility and allows experimentation and orchestration at a much higher level, ironically reaching a much finer level of detail despite these finer details being abstracted away from the user.  

 

The balance between high and low level is always difficult.  Play instruments by hand is kind of like programming in some shitty inflexible language because you literally only have two hands and one instrument texture.  Programming sequencers is kind of like programming in C.  I assume they're created something like C++ where they can reach immense abstraction but also drop down to the metaphorical assembly level (sample-level math operations) any time they please through gen~

 

Instead of re-writing container classes all the time in C or using weirdly implemented once you can just use very clean and well defined std::vectors for instance.  Similarly in a well implemented Max/MSP framework you could create high levels of abstraction with regards to high level abstract DSP primitives

 

I assume that if they had to they could whip together something really abstract and weird in a short amount of time whereas most electronic musician's workflows would require them to work really hard to do that.  With a well designed system abstraction can be a primitive which can be manipulated in arbitrary but well defined ways whereas with typical synth programming you have to do everything, and this limits expressiveness because you have to express everything manually, whereas with abstract generative methods you can express broad abstract concepts with limited amounts of code

 

I'm probably projecting a lot and I'm a programmer not a musician so that influences my thoughts on the matter.  I wrote some rants on the matter years ago but never got around to actually implementing anything.  The Max half of Max/MSP is a pretty shitty programming language imo with a lot of weird hacks and unexpected behavior, I'd love it there was a more perfectly implemented version without the weird shit because it would increase agility tremendously instead of being a headache.  Ideally you can do this all in plain MSP but it requires much more processing power and you lose the nice event processing abstractions of Max.  

Edited by Zeffolia
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yaaaaawn ffs man, it's just the same MaxMSP noodling as elseq and the live shows ... can I get some actually new Ae please

 

To me it sounds very different from elseq and ae_live somehow. I know that there are some paths that must be the same, some of the sounds sound familiar, but all in all the overall feel of nts session 1 is different than from elseq and ae_live

Definitely a more evolved version of the elseq stuff. Obviously tied in with AE_LIVE/Exai too, but to me this (so far, of course) is like elseq, but good.

 

 

look, for sure NTS is better than elseq + Ae_live, but it's not that much better. 

 

 

 

everything after Exai (and arguably a bit of Exai) is just = Sean and Rob literally stopped using anything but MaxMSP as of 2011 (as confirmed by the Resident Advisor interview from a couple years ago). 

 

in other words, all of their music is now just half-assed jam sessions within the same limited palette of their own programming within MaxMSP, they're coasting along with the same sound at this point, doing $50 mp3 cashgrab bullshit.  maybe the problem really began with quaristice 'versions', so much garbage in there ... i guess that was when they decided to stop editing themselves (because people are willing to pay for studio outtakes and jam sessions, i guess?)

 

I've listened to these guys since 1998 and love their first ~8 albums so it's just a bummer to me honestly

I don't think NTS (so far) is better than AE_LIVE. The medium very much effects the work in these cases specifically though: being able to re-experience AE_LIVE's different dates and changes is a very unique experience for a music listener. NTS is maybe pre-recorded, maybe live, we don't know...and again we've only heard 1/4 of it. What I've heard so far is already imo better than elseq, but I'm not much of a fan of that release for many of the same reasons you're not. However, NTS Sessions are shaping up to be much more to my liking.

 

If you can't hear the Amber/Incunabula era influence in four of seven, or the EP7 influence in t1a1, or the Oversteps influence in debris_funk, or Quaristice in 32a_reflected, the Draft 7.30 in gonk steady one, well fuck man you're just not listening hard enough. Their palette isn't as rich as it was previously where they were incorporating all sorts of crazy techniques and using machines in unique ways or whatever, yeah, no doubt and many fans miss that (myself included), but they're doing what they want and still doing their own thing and that's sort of just what they do, eh? I didn't care for much of elseq. I'm liking this, maybe I'll hate it in 4 months when the CDs get here, who knows.

 

...most of what I'm going on about is just give it some time. It's been in your ears for ~6 days, maybe you'll always hate it, maybe it'll grow on you, who knows. It's only been 6 days. We're 1/4 through the full set of sessions.

 

Calling it a cash grab is a fucking laugh though. They literally performed/played it all for free at an INTERNATIONAL LISTENING PARTY ON THE RADIO FOR ANYONE. It's still streaming, for free, right now lol. $30-50 for 8 hours of digital new music is reasonable imo. CD set is pretty reasonably priced as well. Vinyls are always expensive, especially for a huge fucking one-run-only set like they're doing with this? They easily could've gouged an extra $10-20 or maybe more for the vinyl set and lost very few (if any) sales.

 

edit: also only available through the autechre.bleepstores.com page. Not plastered all over Bleep, nor Boomkat, nor Norman, nor anywhere else. Promotion has been minimal, really. Shit's not even available on Spotify or YouTube. There's not even like T-Shirts or posters, not yet, like they often do...Cash grab accusations are a joke.

Edited by auxien
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"Cash grab" is an absolute laugh, $50 for this is beyond a steal.  If you don't think it's worth trading 5 hours of minimum wage work for 8 hours of fresh listening material and a lifetime of repeat listens then we're severely underestimating the value of art, especially obscure types of art not created by anyone else such as this

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So we're basically getting four LPs in one release. It's like they're increasing their overall efficiency. I guess in a way they're making history, from a music industry standpoint - not so much in terms of the sound itself, as much as all the mechanics and methods involved, if that makes sense.

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 It's like they're increasing their overall efficiency.

 

Yeah I mean, they made 8hrs of sounds. 

 

I make at least 19.5 daily though tbh..?

 

Edit: yeh I think this is "good" so far, else-q was similarly "good". Doesn't hold a candle to their albums proper or even AE_Live IMO (where we met you hehe). 

 

There's just something about it that's different and not as entrancing to me. I'm not saying it's a sellout or trash or anything, it's just "different" AE than I like. I'm (and presumably many other listeners) are the same about artists they love.

 

I like some aphex, not others, some BoC, not other stuff, and so on and so on. This is the vein of autechre I'm not the biggest fan of. 

Edited by Bulk VanderHooj
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Don't worry about elseq, it was just a stepping stone to where they are now. This is the real shit.

 

Think about it: Have you ever heard Acroyear1? Naw, it probably sucked hard nuts, but the boys kept at it and instead we got Acroyear2 which is fucking great. Totes4realzies. :D

This. They're finding their footing now. They did this with so many other records that it was like a cycle for a while - develop new workflow, create rather good album around it, stick with it and create GREAT album but get kind of bored with it. There's probably so much more going on in the system now that it might take 3 or 4 albums before it's really dialed in, but it's happening now. And who knows what's in store for the next 3 weekly installments?! Next in 2 days!! Strap in, the mothership is about to take off.

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Don't worry about elseq, it was just a stepping stone to where they are now. This is the real shit.

 

Think about it: Have you ever heard Acroyear1? Naw, it probably sucked hard nuts, but the boys kept at it and instead we got Acroyear2 which is fucking great. Totes4realzies. :D

This. They're finding their footing now. They did this with so many other records that it was like a cycle for a while - develop new workflow, create rather good album around it, stick with it and create GREAT album but get kind of bored with it. There's probably so much more going on in the system now that it might take 3 or 4 albums before it's really dialed in, but it's happening now. And who knows what's in store for the next 3 weekly installments?! Next in 2 days!! Strap in, the mothership is about to take off.

 

 

Kind of my thoughts, was thinking the boxed set might be the end of this "autechre era", the method etc. Like this is the physical release to capstone AE Live, ElseQ, and now the nts sessions. :shrugs:

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I'm still not through, because stuck on l3 ctrl mostly. What I can say is, the first track is too monotonous for me. OK, they do their typical drum disorder later in the track, but IDK. Need to revisit. 

 

l3 ctrl is awesome, but also needs criticism. The construction of it. It is mostly a long outro. I don't want necessarily very classical orders, like intro, main theme, outro, but here the most part it's an outro with variations. The last section, starting at the 13 minute mark, is my favourite one btw.

We need the lyrics! l3 has some vocoders going on at some point.

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I have to say I dig the idea of just releasing these super long extended cuts of the tracks. If you want to skip ahead then go for it. If you want to just be immersed in the same atmosphere for longer than their average length, you can do that without feeling like a weirdo for just playing a track on loop 4 or 5 times.

 

 

 

 


I think it still is painstakingly crafted, maybe even more than before. Everything they do happens within parameters they set, every detail is exactly how they programmed it. Sean says:

 

 

what I'm saying is that playing with coding in MaxMSP is not "painstakingly crafted music".  it's certainly painstakingly crafted as, like, computer software?  but not as music, or at least it's certainly not coming across that way

 

 

PBN that's ten strikes out of twelb by my count. Two more and I'll have to confiscate your Autechre badge.

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elseq 2 4life

just listened to elseq 2 today. damn what listen that is. it was easily the most challenging one for me at first but i've grown to love it as much as the rest of the other parts. love that it's followed by 3, which is the fuckin chill zone drone cool down. man i can't wait to listen to elseq 3 tomorrow… i've been listening to each part one day at a time this week, alongside NTS 1.

 

i donno about who wants to say this stuff isnt as good or interesting as their previous stuff, but then again you have people who say that about anything past amber… so i guess it's like fragrances. everyone has a different one they like and you're not wrong for liking it or disliking it. some are more popular than others. others more distinct. personally, i feel theyve just been improving since exai. I wouldn't go so far as to say NTS is 'better' than elseq, i mean we've only heard one part so far. but yeah it certainly is very close or on par with elseq 1—5 at least IMO. I haven't spent nearly as much time with it. I've had over 2 years to digest elseq in its entirety. since it came out it's been my most listened to album topping out quaristice, which was my previous favourite.

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