Need a little more time with the new Lotic before I'll feel confident getting anything down, so in the mean time I'll talk about how when y'all were sleeping, Autechre snuck up behind you and won 2015
Released individually as 4 separate performance LPs and as one lovely compilation containing all 4, Autechre draw from one of the most relentlessly versatile backcatalogues in music history and use every ounce of the creativity therein to put on 4 very different and almost equally awesome live performances, featuring, in equal portion, some of their most accessible and some of their most abrasive work to date (and everything in between). Each show flows together almost with more fluidity than the average Autechre studio album, and each one is absolutely mesmerizing.
The first performance...
Thumbnail. Click to enlarge.
AE_LIVE_KRAKOW_200914 by Autechre ...opens with what sounds like a demented reinterpretation of "Xylin Room", but with plodding & distorted acid-tinged thuds in lieu of Xylin's steady rhythmic clicking; this is the first of many sonic similarities to 2003's Draft 7.30 (which I've always felt is their most painfully overlooked) to come about in this show, though I would wager that this performance actually improves on Draft's sonic template. Draft 7.30 felt mechanical even by Autechre standards (with the notable exception of the heartwrenching "Surripere" -one of their best tracks ever for my money); this was by no means a completely regrettable decision for the album, as it acts as probably their most purely mathematical, totally left-brained work, allowing for a mind-bending exposure to the meticulous care that goes into their work without a heavy emotional implication; it's probably the "coldest" album that I still really enjoy listening to. That said, the way in which this Krakow performance takes the general mechanically complex fuckery and distorts it into some kind of realm of maddened genius (such is Autechre) imbues it with a kind of emotional weight that Draft 7.30 wasn't necessarily "lacking", but that certainly hits me on more of a gut level, and strikes me as having far more staying power. This is probably the most maddening disc of the 4, and I highly recommend turning out the lights and just chilling with a pair of nice headphones while this thing plays because if you've got sensory input coming from any other direction while listening then prepare yourself for overload. I imagine this one would've been the most fun to see live; the kind of sensory numbing that comes from the overwhelming energy of a crowd tends to leave me immune to all input sans aural, and that is exactly what this performance demands.
This one opens fairly similarly to the Krakow performance, though before long it starts to develop in a very different direction, evoking some of the more ambient textures found on Amber, but with hard hitting beats more dramatically superimposed over the lush soundscapes. It's just as likely to recede into eerie minimalism as it is to strike back with a sudden rush of syncopated polyrhythms. It's simultaneously immersive and jarring, like getting tossed around in a giant pinball machine in total darkness on acid, and it feels just as awesome as that sounds. Towards the end it starts to wind down into something relatively conventional (by Autechre standards anyway), as beats grow evenly spaced and eventually almost entirely recede to make way for some dark ambient droning, ending the show on a beautifully haunting note.
This one probably has the strongest opening section, and is probably the most distinctly melodic of the 4 discs, but overall I'd call it the weakest performance. It lacks the total cohesion and spotless fluidity of the others; it's the only one where you can actually kinda notice the transitions as they happen. Still, some of the strongest moments from any of these shows are scattered throughout. About 20 minutes in, Autechre hearken back to their Incunabula days, throwing together some really fascinating harmonic juxtapositions that place a much stronger focus on melody (and the fucking thereof) than on the rhythmic madness that dominates the larger part of these 4 discs. At one point the beat is just gone, and the feeling of floating isolation that comes just before it all comes CRASHING back into claustrophobia central is one of the best moments on any of the discs; it's eerie but still lulls you in to a false sense of security with it's stark minimalism. You trust Autechre with your calm and they FUCK that trust, and it's magnificent. After that episode transcendent moments become fewer and farther between, but it's never much less than very interesting, and there's even a few moments slightly reminiscent of their brief breakbeat period (except weirder) which helps break the would-be monotony.
Thumbnail. Click to enlarge.
AE_LIVE_DUBLIN_191214 by Autechre
This one's my favorite. It probably flows smoother than all the others put together, but beyond that it shows Autechre doing stuff that actually sounds new. The other discs are remarkable don't get me wrong, but this is the only one where I don't feel totally comfortable drawing any absolute comparisons to their studio work (though Chiastic Slide likely comes closest). It's very... jagged, for lack of a better word. There's a lot of quick staccato and various beats and drones dominating the high-end running at breakcore intensity, but never for long enough to really form a predictable patter; I suppose some might find this isolating but I LOVE it because with this kind of intrinsic unpredictability, Autechre are able to do much more with much less; the tracks (tbh it just feels like one really long continuous track) have more room to breath than on the other discs, with entire sections often retiring for minutes at a time to allow for a single sample at varying pitches and intensities to dominate 80% of a passage (with some ambient droning occasionally filling in the blanks), and once you become fairly desensitized to the timbre, the fucking begins, and more and more layers start to drop in and morph and twist and they all fly around you in every direction while your brain continues to ride the soundwave that had been established pre-fucking; if you were an android with several thousand years of existence under your belt, I imagine this is what it would be like to feel your life flash before your eyes. It's an absolute whirlwind of practically every kind of sound Autechre are likely to ever implement and several I'm not sure I've ever heard them use before, and it all fits together like some in perfect perverted harmony like some kind of 7-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, (which again, feels JUST as awesome as that sounds (if not more(!!!)))
The previous discs are strong enough that they still more than hold up after the whole thing is over, but this finale is the major highlight for me.
After the kinda meh Oversteps and the VERY excellent recovery of Exai, I didn't really know what to expect from a new Autechre project, and sure it's not a studio album, but they're seriously pushing just as many boundaries as they always have, they sound fucking great, and now I'm more excited than ever to have the opportunity to experience these absolute masters of their craft in a live setting. If it's even half as awesome as the worst disc here, It'll still be a transcendent experience.
Oh hey cool write-ups on those, I'm still working my way thru, taking it slow. Dublin is really good and I've heard, would not be surprised at that being the best. Did you catch them on this recent tour? If not, I heard that when they do the new album again there'll be another USA tour, which would be really cool. Rumors tho so who knows. Also have you ever seen this max/msp patch that is rumored to be what was used on the ep7 track Liccflii (https://www.mediafire.com/?acarehqeh9lcuxt). You can download a trial of max/msp and it should still work, it's pretty neat.
Oh hey cool write-ups on those, I'm still working my way thru, taking it slow. Dublin is really good and I've heard, would not be surprised at that being the best. Did you catch them on this recent tour? If not, I heard that when they do the new album again there'll be another USA tour, which would be really cool. Rumors tho so who knows. Also have you ever seen this max/msp patch that is rumored to be what was used on the ep7 track Liccflii (https://www.mediafire.com/?acarehqeh9lcuxt). You can download a trial of max/msp and it should still work, it's pretty neat.
I just missed them, but after hearing what goes down when they're live I won't let myself miss em next time around. Oh hey cool I'll check out the max/msp thing. Thanks for the tip. You ever see the AMA they did on WATMM a couple years ago? http://forum.watmm.com/topic/81109-aaa-...-on-watmm/
Had been lurking that site for years and that was when it all finally paid off
Been out all weekend so haven't had time to jot anything, but basically here's the cliffsnotes of what I've been mulling over in my head lately (to be expanded upon over the next couple of days)
Thumbnail. Click to enlarge.
Person Of Interest by Person Of Interest
more cool outsider house stuff (thank you Satie), though perhaps a little more extroverted and not quite as "outsider" as a lot of what I've heard from this realm lately, though maybe that's just because I'm getting too used to the aesthetic and it's now the norm for me
forgot to mention this one at first but I've also been doing quite a lot of spinning of
M.J. Harris & Martyn Bates – Murder Ballads
Some of the most deliciously haunting dark ambient (+bits of other styles) I've heard in a long time (via Norman). Will be sure to sufficiently murder with over-analysis
Thumbnail. Click to enlarge.
Riot Boi by Le1f
Le1f, Mykki Blanco, Zebra Katz... the LGBTQIA hip-hop community is doing some of the most exciting stuff in music right now imo, and Le1f is continuing the trend with what essentially sounds like the not-shitty bits of Odd Future and a posse of contemporary trap-rappers got thrown into a dark abstract-qualities blender in the middle of an underwater nightclub, with more than enough molly to go around
Batu Malablab by M.C. Schmidt
Was intrigued to find what appeared to be a rap album of some sort on a Tap chart, given that I've never known out resident undisclosed father to be the world's biggest hip-hop head. What I ended up hearing made a lot more sense, especially after learning the dude's a core member of Matmos, though I think Mr. Schmidt is misleading us all calling himself an M.C.
dope stuff nonetheless
Also there's been some discussion at school music club lately re: classic west-coast alt. hip-hop, so I'm revisiting some old favorites in the area including
Satie's really good at unearthing some cool gems, which I should hope is the case given his profession. I feel like I'm bound to dig anything he sends my way. It's likely to be fairly groundbreaking.
...
Um sorry... Alright so this is pretty cool stuff. Tracks follow fairly logical progressions and don't offer up too many surprises, but this is still very much in the house music left-field (wherever that is at this point), existing in a much colder, darker, and less straight-up banging realm than a lot of what the genre has to offer, BUT it still grooves in a fashion far more straightforward than a lot of it's contemporaries (some of which I've talked about earlier). You could still probably dance to this pretty easily (assuming the sun's been down for awhile now and you've got a few pills handy*)
The second track, "Keep it Moving", is probably most in line with what I've been listening lately in the genre. It slowly builds upon various rhythmic motifs, adding and subtracting layers slowly and subtly, while exploring the leftover territory with various forms of dreamy ambience; every so often the track strips away that second part and throws in some (relatively) conventional sounding pounding in its place which offers up a nice little adrenaline rush that really adds to the overall pacing of the track. Towards the end some new synths are introduced and strewn atop still-present the recurring elements we've been absorbing for the last 10ish minutes, and the ambient noises get just a teeny bit wilder. Basically Person of Interest trick you into listening to essentially the same track twice but with just enough variation for it to still be very interesting and engaging. Bastards.
The rest is pretty cool too (particularly that last track, which is fairly unlike the first two in its utilization of some pretty aggressive percussion. I mean it doesn't hit as hard as the first track, but it's more erratic, almost threateningly so. There's something diabolical here and I like it)
so like I'd talk about some other shit but music club and I have been paying respect to those demi-gods who built this wonderful Bay Area culture in which we grew up, so really I've been mostly just listening to Mac Dre and E-40 for the past 48 hours
It's funny I was listening to hyphy before I even knew what it was. I like to shit on the bay all the time but tbh it's pretty cool here. Was able to be surrounded by some dope shit during my formative years.
Bandcloud Guest Mix by De Leon
Favorite recent 2015 find. DJ mix from some dude at this Philly label called /\\Aught (which I'm gonna check out further), consisting largely of gamelan (and similarly styled music) trimmed down to "normal" song lengths (by western standards. Gamelan goes on for like a bajillion years normally) and spliced together as smooth as I've ever heard a mix, which is especially impressive given the subtle nature of these pieces; they beg that you listen closely so it should be all that easier to hear the seams, but it flows back and forth between tribal rhythms and haunting minimalism with beautiful fluidity, eventually carrying on into a finale/outro of sorts that I'd describe as like progressive tribal ambient? Basically it's like it took the whole first part of the mix and fastforwarded it 2000 years into the future to close up the thing. I suppose this end bit is stylistically out of place, but it feels kind of "right" in that it leaves you with a sense of having gone on some kind of spiritual journey through a time-displaced Indonesian forest where everything is unfamiliar yet strangely inviting, where the past and future slowly meld into one. Good stuff. Holy fuck I am tired night fellas
um so my computer decided I'm its bitch and went and committed seppuku right in front of me. Managed to recover about 80% of my music library so until I finish reconstructing that (using this opportunity to finally switch to foobar), I'm just gonna be talking about stuff I can get on soundcloud, starting with:
I listened to Rabit's album from earlier this year and thought it was dope and it certainly warrants another go but I thought I'd give this a spin first, and HOT DAMN this is making far more of an impression on me. This is some truly apocalyptic, "the industrial science facility is collapsing around me and I need to escape before it self-destructs" type shit. This is honestly like being hit in the side of the face with the flying appendage of a malevolent fully-sentient AI until you're dizzy and stumbling around aimlessly in this metallic post-apocalyptic hellscape, seeing double and praying for divine intervention and cursing humanity for going too far in its continued quest for progress.
Putting aside dumb sci-fi metaphors and templates for Valve games for a minute, this is fucking aggressive, truly frightening industrial shit, but it derives this aesthetic not just from hard-hitting metallic pounding (though there is a healthy dose of that), but more prevalently from a monotonic robotic spoken word overlaying straight from a technological Orwellian nightmare and even moreso form underlaying the industrial onslaught with what is a surprisingly meticulous and actually pretty subtle atmosphere of distorted background melodies fairly intricately arranged alongside softer off-kilter beats, all of which in turn highlights the violent surface of the affair -Benpaco I think this would go really well on your apocalypse chart- making the whole thing feel subversively haunting and honestly really unsettling rather than just plain threatening. This is the stuff of 23rd century nightmares. Every fear modern science fiction has instilled in you comes to fruition here until there is nothing left but the cold shattered remnants of a dead world composed of melted steel and sentient malevolent robot death-machines. I feel dead, and more or less ready to become amish. Fuck.
So while I'm still having a surprising amount of trouble really getting my Lotic thoughts together in a coherent fashion, I had to go write a thing for school. Before that I was looking to find some new noise and I also asked my /mu/tant friend if he knew any good focus music, and he insisted I could kill two birds with one stone with
My head hurts, but this definitely served its purpose about 1000X better than most internet white noise generators, and I actually think I liked it, though not in the way I'm inclined to like most music I listen to. Let me be perfectly clear in stating that my ears are bleeding big time, but I never really had any strong urge to turn this off while it was playing. It's strangely immersive in its total lack of any kind of recognizable dynamics. It's essentially just one massive stronghold of static and various forms of harsh noise so omnipresent that empty space doesn't stand a chance of sneaking in anywhere, which normally isn't my jam and to be fair I'm probably not gonna listen to it for any purpose other than hardcore focusing, but I think it's successfully joined the ranks of Earth and Shit and Shit of bands that listening to as a means of aiding concentration is far more than just a boring necessity. I may even listen to this just for the hell of it when I'm feeling brave enough to really deliberately sink my mind into its structure, though at this point I don't really know how to analyze or even really talk about noise records of this nature without revealing how desperately uninformed I am. But I think I'll be back to this LP before too long, in part because right now it's certainly left me with far more questions than answers as to what's actually going on inside. Gonna go put some ice to my ruptured eardrums and think it over.
haha well this is embarrassing. Turns out the last couple of times I thought I had been listening to the above I had in fact been listening to an older, entirely separate recording, which explains why I was so lukewarm about it when Tap seemed to be going wild about the whole thing. MUCH stronger performance than whatever this thing was I found on Soulseek. The one I listened to made the whole thing sound like easy listening but this here really highlights the subtleties in the various repetitions, and the performers handle the soft/slightly-less-soft dynamics with ease. It actually reveals how interesting and ultimately enjoyable the composition really is. Will write more in a bit but yeah ignore any previous comments re: this. Excellent piece easily marred by a sub-par performance.
early morning edit:
Working off of this idea of subtle differences in performance: the version I had been listening to (which I have now determined was a 2009 recording by the Phoenix Ensemble) has the players a) almost rushing through the piece (or as much as "rushing" is possible with something like this) and b) have no sense of dynamic relationship between instruments. Everything is always level and the strings and clarinet blend together on the same level sonic platform without much differentiation; like if those strings had all been clarinets I probably wouldn't have been able to tell the difference between any of the 5 clarinets. On this recording, there is a stunning interplay between the instruments, and time and great care is taken with the piece, and although I fucking hate saying shit like "this must be how the composer intended it to be played", the thought still crossed my mind more than once. It's not a very overtly complex piece, but the mood it purveys straddles a very fine line between anxious and soothing, never quite falling completely into either mode of expression but always offering engaging intimation towards both, but and without the many dynamic subtleties which were lacking in the version I had been listening to, it seems to succeed in expressing neither sensation and comes across as simply dull. It's an excellent piece, and I think one of the best Feldman has composed, and while being the least overtly technically demanding of anything I've heard from him, it's probably still one of the most difficult for which to really do justice if the musicians performing it wanna keep "the feels" in tact, and believe me, there are feels. And they are lovely.
If I've learned anything from this "wrong performance" fiasco it's that this is a very subtle piece and a very easy piece to fuck up, which just makes me appreciate just how finely executed this version is all the more
(thanks Tap for hooking me up with the right recording)
I'd add this to my 2015 chart but I like to keep my year charts fairly "zeitgeisty" and seeing as this piece was written a little while ago it's not really an artifact of 2015 imo
Last edited by undefined on 11/19/2015 22:35; edited 2 times in total
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum
