This picture was taken sometime in the early 40s, probably 1943. It was a creased wallet photo that I spent some time restoring; the fact that it scanned and blew up so well is a testament to the amazing quality of black and white film photography.

Carol Audrey Rosvald, Age 13

So I pulled together all my Autechre CDs and downloads and tried to select something from every release that spoke to me as a compelling piece, and then started trying to arrange them together in a way that made rhythmic sense and had some flow. You’ll be the judge of whether I managed to pull it off, but it was really fun trying. I had to go from 75BPM to 167BPM in a little over the hour — by the time I got to ‘Sublimit’ I went crazy with the effects, so it’s kind of an ad hoc remix/hit job.

I think I hit every release aside from their remixes and odd stuff like the Hafler Trio collaboration.

If you don’t like Autechre at all I don’t think I’m necessarily going to change your mind about them. But if you have any interest, give a listen.

Download audio file (Chaircrusher-AutechreRetrospective-DJMix.mp3)
http://music.cornwarning.com/audio/Chaircrusher-AutechreRetrospective-DJMix.mp3

Second Peng Anvil Vapre Know1 Oversteps Tewe Chiastic Slide Treale Oversteps Chatter Artificial Intelligence 2 V-Proc Draft 7:30 Rale Quaristice d-sho qub Oversteps Montreal Amber Surripere Draft 7.30 Bike Incunabula Eutow Tri Repetae++ Bcdtmx BassCad EP Cfern Confield Tilapia Cichlisuite Dial Gantz Graf Sublimit Untilted

Picture is by Alice Rosenbaum and I straight up jacked it without permission.

“Oversteps” is a phase transition for Autechre back into relative accessibility. I’m giving them pop points for keeping (mostly) a recognizable pulse, usually in 4/4 time, and cleaving (mostly) to traditional Western harmony. This is a good thing for a couple of reasons. First, it means the listener is never left without a trail of breadcrumbs to follow. Second, it means that they’re not letting their Aleatory Automation completely determine what’s happening. I’ve always thought I can tell whether machines or people are making compositional choices. While I might be fooled by especially clever computer programming that can pass a musical Turing test, I rarely think human-driven music seems arbitrary and pointless. People can and do make awful music, but at least there’s a human connection attempted even in their worst efforts. I’d rather listen to a human being imitating the sound of an Aeolian Harp than to the wind playing one. Even a human trying to sound random on purpose is more interesting than an actually random performance.

The track “known1″ perhaps synthesizes Autechre’s conflicting impulses to be abstract and to convey some human emotion. It opens with a looping minor key progression that could conceivably be performed by a human on a piano. About 90 seconds in a splattery, nasal counterpoint comes in and follows the general outline of the chord progression. As this higher sound falls out, there’s a B section that plays once through before again being visited by the splattery counterpoint. Employing what sounds like Karplus-Strong plucked string synthesis, the traditional harmony is subverted by a subtly “wrong” scale tuning and inharmonic overtones.

“Pt2ph8″ follows with a pentotonic clattering underpinned by a plucked bass. One would never accuse Autechre of conventionality in the structure of this track, but there is a couple of chord changes that signify to me a yearning melancholy as effectively as they would in a folk song. You can hear the random processes at work generating the off-kilter ornamentation, and yet they’re employing some overall macro control to pace and shape the sounds. There’s some drama to the pacing and satisfaction in the denouement, even if along the way there’s plenty of busy randomness.

The album opener “r ess” starts with a 30 second fade in that sounds like dead air for at least 20 seconds. The piece crawls slowly up from the noise floor, into what sounds like the ambiance of an East German train station, where a disorganized orchestra is playing through broken public address speakers. Gradually a beat totters in, replete with un-quantized swing and polyrhythms, only to trail off as vague tones fade in and out.

“ilanders” signature gesture is a long-form, swooping minor key bassline artfully distorted against (also artfully) distorted drums. The distortion is in the foreground of this piece, pulling your ear along with its continually variable texture. I know – sort of – how they achieve this effect — a combination of waveshaping distortion and frequency modulation — but they manage to make it sound interesting, and even attractive in its own mutant fashion. This means something to me because I know how to achieve something similar, but not how to do so in a way that isn’t just ugly and annoying.

“Oversteps” as a title seems to suggest that the pieces that comprise this album are somehow instances of going too far, or maybe that they are meant to convey the unsettling sensation one gets when miss a stair in the dark. I imagine this would be an apt reaction for someone who has never heard Autechre before. I’ve been listening to them for their entire 17 year career, and to me, “Oversteps” pulls back from the precipice a bit, and gives listeners some actual musical pleasure in return for their time. With these guys that isn’t always the case. Autechre is incapable of not being interesting, but they aren’t afraid to be frustrating. Some of their music makes you wonder why you bother even to listen, since they’re obviously are keeping whatever it is the music means to themselves. But “Oversteps” does not leave me feeling unsatisfied or cheated. It is certainly not for everyone, but in all the right ways, it seems like Autechre have deigned to stand quite a bit closer to their audience and even look them in the eye this time.

Listen to samples and/or purchase at Bleep.com

(tom/t-woww): why do people name their children summer and autumn but not also
winter and spring
(tom/t-woww): i ask
(luna/orgasmic): valid question
(kent/dr.hitlerballs): calling a girl winter would be kinda cool
(kent/dr.hitlerballs): if she was a 6 ft tall model with lethal cheekbones and
a permanent pout
(kent/dr.hitlerballs): Especially if she had a last name the sounded like a
first name
(kent/dr.hitlerballs): like Winter George
or Winter James
(kent/dr.hitlerballs): or Winter James
(kent/dr.hitlerballs): and a middle name that’s some fucked up family maiden
name
(kent/dr.hitlerballs): like Winter Delacroix James
(kent/dr.hitlerballs): if i could find that girl I could manage her
multimillion dollar modeling career and gracefully transition her to
feature film roles
(kent/dr.hitlerballs): and cry at her wedding to a billionaire financier from
Dubai
(rich/.): where she would fail miserably and take pr0n roles in desperation
(kent/dr.hitlerballs): nah with a name like winter delacroix james, she’d be
up for golden globes
(kent/dr.hitlerballs): tho winter james does sound like a porn name as well

And I was already a satisfied customer, because most everything else you can get at the supermarket smells like ass to me.

Google Buzz is another whiff. I don’t really care about the privacy issues, because I don’t regard GMail as being private. Like any other part of society outside of sitting in the dark in a Faraday cage, it isn’t private unless no one cares.

What bothers me about it is that it looks clumsy. It tells me I have new stuff and if I look at the buzz list, I can’t actually see what’s new. It also tries to aggregate things like Twitter and Google Reader, but provides a vastly inferior presentation. So I end up going back to Twitter or Google Reader to see what’s up. Which means Buzz is just redundant.

At this point, Google has a significant percentage of the smartest programmers and designers on the planet working for them, and lately they’ve been turning out clumsy crap. What’s up with that? I’m so into GMail and Google Reader to organize my online life — they’re pretty much exactly what I need and nothing more. Google Docs means I don’t even have to screw with installing a word processor on my machines.

But when Google fucks up, they put both feet in. Remember before Google Personalized Home Pages started to suck? I’d give them my constructive feedback and criticism, but I’ve never gotten any acknowledgement from them when I’ve tried to contact them about anything, so they might as well be inside a black hole. A black hole that spews internet applications.

I can’t even keep up on Iowa City music, much less America or the world, but the Kwaito stuff is so fresh — it reminds me of the more stripped down UK Funky stuff that’s caught my ear lately. It is another example of the Soca beat being picked up and thrown into the global dance music blender. I made a quick expedition through the Afrodesia MP3 site and picked up a few things, but I’ve barely scratched the surface…

And if that’s not plenty to think about, the Afrodesia site has a crazy selection of stuff from all over the continent, including a boatload of very nice deep house.

Here’s Big Nuz doing his thing, which is apparently rapping in Zulu…

Anyway, I went looking for some place to buy the music, and it turns out Hit Thing has re-issued it, so I ordered it. In the meantime I found it on the Internets. Below is my ‘refix version’ — I tweaked the EQ and compression for modern DJ’ing, and warped it to steady 116 BPM. The original was a fairly constant 114, but I think there are a couple of clumsy tape edits or stretches in it to throw it off here and there.

Download audio file (LiaisonsDangereuse-LosNinosDelParque.mp3)
http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/LiaisonsDangereuse-LosNinosDelParque.mp3
LiaisonsDangereuse-LosNinosDelParque.flac

All files here.

And the original.

“Heavy Spritzer Twist” is heavy on the Hoagy Carmichael samples, with some Ahmad Jamal on the chorus. “Nat” is as the title suggests, made with Nat King Cole samples.

Download audio file (Chaircrusher-HeavySpritzerTwist.mp3)
http://cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/Chaircrusher-HeavySpritzerTwist.mp3
Download audio file (Chaircrusher-Nat.mp3)
http://cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/Chaircrusher-Nat.mp3

I first saw Shake spin on my first trip to Detroit in 1994, at a party for the closing of Dan Bell’s 7th City distribution, playing an impossibly funky down-tempo set. Every time I’ve seen him play since is a reminder that there are very few DJs in the world who love music with Shake’s unique combination of childlike glee and deep erudition.

http://music.cornwarning.com/live-the-mill-2010-01-23-old-pantherhottlipstick-homicideslw-the-boo-hoos/

So the overall emphasis is on UK Bass styles with some other stuff thrown in. I had to do crazy things with tempo to get the last track to fit, but that’s kinda fun too.

Download audio file (Chaircrusher-2010-01-23-DJMix.mp3)
http://music.cornwarning.com/audio/Chaircrusher-2010-01-23-DJMix.mp3