75 Years of the Album: 45. 1993

Another half dozen of the best from (gasp!) 31 years ago. Heads up to Surfing on Sine Waves by Polygon Window, Debut by Björk, In on the Kill Taker by Fugazi, Tales of Ephidrina by Amorphous Androgynous, In Utero by Nirvana, Why Do They Call Me Mr Happy? By NoMeansNo, Sheet One by Plastikman, Gargantuan by Spooky, and Anodyne by Uncle Tupelo. Great records all.

Slowdive – Souvlaki (Creation June).

Recognised now as a hugely influential band, at the time not only did the press hate them, even their record company did! All the turgid Britpop nonentities would kill to have the profile that Slowdive have now. Souvlaki, the second of the band’s three initial albums, is probably the most Slowdivey if that makes sense. “Alison” is a stunning dreamlike song, whilst “Souvlaki Space Station” goes dub. Dubgaze anyone?

Mazzy Star – So Tonight That I Might See (Capitol October).

The pick of Mazzy Star’s for albums. “Fade Into You” is as perfect a start as any record could wish for. “Into Dust” is as hushed as a library: I remember a yappy Manchester University crowd being stunned into silence when they played that. “Five String Serenade” is an underrated Arthur Lee gem, and “Mary of Silence” and the title track are groove based, almost improv pieces. And has any singer a voice as sexual as Hope Sandoval’s?

Tindersticks – Tindersticks (This Way Up October).

Everything you need to know about Tindersticks was laid out plainly on this first double album, although there is more uptempo material than you’d usually find. Stuart Staples sounds a little less enervated than he often does, and there are classics galore. They’ve made more focussed records, but I don’t think they’ve ever bettered this overall.

Trans-Global Underground – Dream of 100 Nations (Nation October).

TGU’s fusion of Arabic, African, hip hop and dub musics arrived fully formed on their first LP. The style hopping takes a bit of getting used to, and the rapping is hardly in Rakim’s league, but the whole thing grooves. As with any TGU record, when Natacha Atlas gets the mic it moves the whole thing into a different sphere.

Autechre – Incunabula (Warp December).

Autechre’s first is a very different beast indeed to their later works. The rhythms are actually quite basic, and this is very much a melodic record in the vein of Warp’s other Artificial Intelligence crew, namely Aphex, Black Dog and B12. It’s not their best record, but it is a very satisfying listen. Sometimes they are simply too out there. When they retain at least a trace of melody amongst all the hyper-polyrhythms then there is more to cling to. It’s great that they’ve never been content to tread water, though.

Labradford – Prazision LP (Kranky December).

Kranky’s first ever album release. It defines the label pretty well. Taking the slowcore approach of Slint and Codeine and adding a bit of ambient atmospherics and you have the basic blueprint on which the label has thrived for more than three decades. Where Kranky’s other great band Stars of the Lid emphasised the drone, Labradford’s set up had more in common with a rock approach. Speed was not of the essence though. Prazision is less focussed then many of its successors, but more enjoyable in many ways for that reason.

Autechre – Move Of Ten

It starts verging on self-parody with Etchogon-S – all a clatter of arrhythmic beats, cut ups and clutter – but Move Of Ten continues the process of détente between Autechre and those left behind by the out-there beat science of their mid-decade records.

Billed as an EP (the duo seem to have an odd notion of the definition of the EP), it nevertheless runs for 45 minutes and holds ten tracks. What’s most striking about the record is how the duo seem to have re-engaged with what is happening elsewhere on the electronic music scene instead of staying in the hermetically sealed Autechre world. There are takes on acid, dark dub, even dubstep. 4/4 rhythms are embraced rather than shunned and melodies appear designed rather than accidental.

The dub squelch of Rew could sit quite happily on a Flying Lotus record. The magnificent nth Dafuseder.b (yeah, the titles are as enigmatic as ever) is dark acid. It has a flute sample (or at least what sounds like one), surely the first time the duo have engaged with the world of conventional instruments. It also ends abruptly, as if their attention span had been breached.

M62 is another fine track. It rattles along on a Gas-like kick drum pulse while gentle micro-melodies scurry about along the surface. There is a sense of calm about the beatless ylm0 even though the crystalline drops of sound are far from still. Its followed by the grand finale Cep Puiqmix whose dark block-chords are eaten into and rotted to nothing by scratchy termites.

Following on so quickly from the brilliant Oversteps and retailing at mid-price, you would be forgiven for thinking that Move Of Ten may just be a bunch of stuff that wasn’t good enough to make the cut first time round. It’s far from the case, and continues Autechre’s always fascinating voyage into new realms of electronic music.

***

While on the electronica kick, I must say I was really impressed by the Breach mix on this week’s Mary Anne Hobbs show. Check it out on the iPlayer. Original and powerful stuff.

Album: AUTECHRE – Oversteps (Warp 2010)

Of all the artists that emerged in the electronic boom of the early nineties it could be argued that Autechre alone have always pushed their music forward. Over the years it’s got them praise and flak in equal measure from a fanbase that seems permanently at war with itself. For fifteen years their music seemed to follow a linear progression. Beginning with the Artificial Intelligence era when they were operating in a similar area to contemporaries Aphex Twin, Black Dog and B12, they gradually became more and more beat focussed. The melodic warmth evaporated over time as the music became more and more complex and clinical. Some fans embraced the changes, but many others lamented the constant progression into denser and more difficult areas.

Then in 2008 Quaristice appeared. For Booth and Brown it was a revolutionary record. Some saw it as a major step backward, but really it was a step back, forwards, sideways, up and down all at the same time. Embracing such alien concepts (for Autechre) as beatless ambience, and heading off in a dozen different directions at once, it could be viewed as a career summation, as the work of artists who’d lost direction, or a rejuvenated duo hungry to explore uncharted fields. To these ears, it was definitely an exciting point in their career, when the possibilities seemed boundless.

Two years on, Oversteps confirms this view. Still indisputably Autechre, it nevertheless sounds like nothing they’ve done before. There is still room for beats of mind-boggling complexity, but nestled amongst them are tracks of rhythmic simplicity. The sounds are warm and melodic, but alien and following weird atonal patterns at the same time. Undoubtedly, it’s their most sombre work. It also contains passages of unworldly beauty, but others of apparently dissonant ugliness (which grow into swan-like elegance in time). Being Autechre, awkward changes of pitch and tempo are abundant, and yet it’s really just a case of adjusting your perceptions. Structures may be fantastically intricate, but structures they are. There is nothing random about this music.

Picking highlights from Autechre records is always fraught with danger. Some of the pieces that prove to the most satisfying are often slow to reveal themselves. It took literally years for me to come to terms with Confield, for example.

The beatless See on See is a sonic chandelier of reflective sound. Treale has a thumping rhythm that’s as close to quasi-industrial music as they’ve ever got. There is something Fisher Price about the melody of O=0 that goes all over the shop, and yet makes a weird kind of sense. D-Sho Qub is a mad mix of Saucerful of Secrets era Floyd and swarming alien insectoids. Yuop provides a grand finale of atypically cinematic grandeur.

Back in 92-94, it seemed to me that electronic music was the future. It sounded like the future. At its best it encompassed every human emotion, but in a way that had never really been done before. Back then, I didn’t really expect the mainstream music of 2010 would be so conservative and retrogressive, but I especially thought that what I’d call the ‘popular underground’ (ie stuff that wasn’t aimed at a tiny audience, but was never going to be selling by the million either) would be far more progressive than it is. Autechre continue to fly the flag for the future. Whether it will ever catch up with them is a moot point.

Tracks
1 r ess 5:12
2 ilanders 5:32
3 known(1) 4:43
4 pt2ph8 4:10
5 qplay 4:39
6 see on see 4:37
7 Treale 6:05
8 os veix3 4:38
9 O=0 4:53
10 d-sho qub 6:26
11 st epreo 4:08
12 redfall 3:49
13 krYlon 6:09
14 Yuop 6:22

Websites
www.autechre.ws

Album: AUTECHRE – Quaristice (Warp WARPCD333 2008)

It seems like there has been a deluge of articles and reviews analysing Quaristice already, and it’s only been out a little over 24 hours (on CD at any rate). Although the press has been unanimously positive (at least what I’ve read has), there have been as many interpretations of the music as there have been reviews of it. The fact that the tracks are shorter and that there are twice as many of them is deemed to be of great significance, as is the presence of three beatless, broadly ambient pieces. Some have hailed it as a return to the listener friendly Autechre of the Amber era, a stepping back, a taking stock. Is it hell a taking stock.

Autechre’s progress is frequently portrayed as a linear movement from melodic electronica to impenetrable, boffin-like mathematics as music. While this stereotype is broadly true up to Confield, since then, Booth and Brown have really been forging outward rather than onward. Both Draft 3.0 and Untilted were warmer and more diverse works and Quaristice really only continues this process of diversification. It certainly it isn’t a retrenchment, or a retreat into the cosy havens of the comfortable.

One thing that they do seem to have consciously done is to distill their ideas into more concise forms, and in doing so have taken three minutes to say what they may have previously said in seven. The fact that they no longer have to deliver an album every eighteen months just to put bread on the table really shows. Every beat, every pulse, every note feels like it’s exactly where its creators intended it to be. This is gleaming, precision-tooled music. But paradoxically it is also very human.

To be honest, Autechre’s music is best reviewed after a year, not three listens. Like Scott Walker’s latter works, it’s not easy to assimilate and appreciate in one go. It needs familiarity. This is especially true of a collection of twenty, very different, pieces (immensely varied, but still coherently a whole). “Rale” is my favourite at the moment, but that’s really beside the point. Quaristice has all the hallmarks of a benchmark record, combining mathematical aesthetics with melodic ones, precision tooling with human emotion. It opens the doors to so many different possible directions that they could take their music. I feel that I’ve barely begun to get to grips with it yet. I know this much, though. It’s pretty fucking amazing.

Tracks
1 Altibzz (2:53)
2 The Plc (4:17)
3 Io (3:08)
4 PlyPhon (2:33)
5 Perlence (3:25)
6 SonDEremawe (1:21)
7 Simmm (5:00)
8 Paralel Suns (3:03)
9 Steels (2:56)
10 Tankakern (3:39)
11 Rale (3:43)
12 Fol3 (3:47)
13 FwzE (2:39)
14 90101-5l-l (3:11)
15 Bnc Castl (2:52)
16 Theswere (2:12)
17 Wnsn (4:57)
18 Chenc9 (4:57)
19 Notwo (5:34)
20 Outh9X (7:15)

Website
www.autechre.ws

Song of the day: AUTECHRE – VI Scose Poise (2001)

It’s strange how some music, left unlistened to and unloved for years, can suddenly make sense when returned to. Like many, Confield both confused and repelled me when it came out. Autechre had been steadily moving away from their listener-friendly electronica into more and more experimental realms, but by and large I went happily with them. But Confield sounded like they’d crossed the bridge from inquiry into total insanity, and I wasn’t about to follow. Whichever way I wore it, the album resolutely refused to make sense, but ended up just giving me a headache. Happily, I found the later albums easier to get on with, and dismissed Confield as a sonic diversion that Booth and Brown needed to get out of their system, and I didn’t need to hear again.

Curiosity getting the better of caution, I gave the CD a spin for the first time in getting on for seven years today. I was really rather shocked at how easy it was to listen to. OK, the beats often go completely overboard into a kind of rhythmic Tourette’s Syndrome, and there are some sections that are, frankly, just electronic gibberish. But in amongst it all, there are some passages of outstanding beauty – they just need a minor adjustment of your ears to accommodate the strangeness. The opening track “VI Scose Poise” is a good example. The foreground is a complicated melange of micro-glitches and what sounds like a ball-bearing rolling around in a steel cone. It takes a little getting used to, admittedly, but behind this is a rather sad, wistful melody that gives the track a human feel not immediately apparent. Other tracks like “Sim Gishel” also have some buried heart beneath an outward veneer of impenetrability. I’m sure there are many like me who have copies of Confield that just sit there – passed over in favour of Chiastic Slide or Tri Repetae every time. It’s worth returning to. Give it another try!