Autechre - Amber

oh shit now i see it in the search. well there are a lot of autechre threads and a lot of people talking about autechre might as well poll this again

seriously though

damn

i think this is my way in

oh word. yulquen or piezo for me. some weird gorgeous jams on this.

xp woah

Nil

"teartear" has a boards of canada vibe, i always turned that one up in the car. i listened to this album a lot on road trips.

Never heard amber TIL this poll

uh oh whiney's gonna get mad again.

He loves it.

The other poll has a better title IMO.

Flappy what’s yer pick

piezo for that 'wolf howl' rising and falling tone

The cover photograph depicts mountain formations from CapPOLLdocia -- Autechre :: Amber :: LP2

Yulquen and Piezo tied in the previous iteration of this.

I voted Teartear. Yulquen was a close 2nd

Also, my least favorite Ae record. Seriously.

didn't Whiney poll the titles of these threads at some point

^^^^

I still enjoy it (I like everything they've done), but it's not at all what I want from Autechre when I get in that special Ae mood. It also suffers a bit from SAW II (or--if you like--Loveless) syndrome, where it's been copied so much it's often difficult now to hear what was so advanced about it at the time

I mean xp

the last 30 seconds of "Silverside" where it pulls back and reveals the "full" melody is one of my very favorite Ae moments and one of those things that basically made me a fan. so I gotta vote that. plus last time I heard it I was driving through a thunderstorm which was a pretty cool experience.

I think "Teartear" is probably the best track otherwise. "Slip" will probably win. Man, this is a great album though. Never really cared much for "Yulquen" but I dig everything else. "Nine" is so pretty. Really like "Further" too. "Glitch" is a banger. Love how "Montreal" uses a door stopper as a percussive noise.

you mean one of these?

https://www.secured-sites.co.uk/images/gallery/B5Y78EENZS/93712205P1.JPEG

never thought of that. will have to go home and give mine a ping tonight.

Slip is so lovely

This band needs an editor in re to their shit song titles

Takes a special kind of fan to Think “oh yeah let’s load up vietrmx213.31.14”

those ones aren't so bad. take out the "mx" and the numbers (which correspond to the % of the EP they take up) and you have a fairly normal tracklisting..."Garbage", "PIOB", "Bronchus Seven", and "VLetr"

Anvil Vapre on the other hand with "Second Bad Vilbel", "Second Scepe", "Second Scout"...what was wrong with the first one???

I still enjoy it (I like everything they've done), but it's not at all what I want from Autechre when I get in that special Ae mood. It also suffers a bit from SAW II (or--if you like--Loveless) syndrome, where it's been copied so much it's often difficult now to hear what was so advanced about it at the time

― Paul Ponzi, Friday, May 4, 2018 5:51 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i disagree with every sentence of this post lol

Second Bad Vilbel refers to a nearby town that is twinned with the German town of Bad Vilbel

wait what are the records like Amber

Yulquen for life

Flappy what’s yer pick

― done and dusted (Ross)

not sure yet, i literally heard this album for the first time last night. "Slip" stuck out to me but that seems like the most immediate/melodic one. going to listen to this a lot more in the next few months. autechre is pretty much the perfect band to read to

For reading man? ZAmfir tho

this is a very good autechre album but autechre were not then and have never been "advanced"

are you intimating that they are copyists or that no-one else has copied them?

still stands as a favorite, along with ep7. these were my "entry point" into Ae. Would love to hear an album that sounds like Amber, if anybody cares to cite something.

xp neither

there is a ton of contemporaneous stuff that is a lot like amber

idk what though. I'm not really an IDM head or nothin' but if you like the first two Ae discs then Bytes by Black Dog Productions may be up your alley

lol pretty much all of it

just google 1994 ambient electronica and see what youtubes come up

it's not going to sound exactly the same as autechre any more than leonard cohen sounds exactly like bob dylan but in terms of beat construction + synth deployment + production tricks amber is pretty much standard stuff

if anything i would argue that autechre are really best at creating and maintaining a distinctive "mood" that sets them apart from other acts

ty, frogbs. i've a mate who's pretty well-versed in early days Rephlex / Warp / Artificial Intelligence comp. -type stuff, and he's mentioned Black Dog a few times.. figure i should've followed up on it by now. Some of Cylob's latter day material reminds me a lot of Autechre -- stuff like the first couple Ambient News albums, as well as older Cylob in general.

yea it's sonically similar to something like Tengo n' Vectif but I feel like even then Ae were big into screwing with the nuts n bolts of a track more than their contemporaries. if that makes sense

Saw them live Circa draft and they played one snatch of second bad Vibel admist a fully improv set

Amber is actually pretty unique, there is/was a lot of stuff around that sounds like Incunabula (Black Dog indeed), and again a lot of IDM that sounds like the later stuff, but Amber (and largely, Tri Repetae) hits a sweet spot in between that hasn't really been imitated that much.

Garbage has the best melody ever in ae history

While I get that Autechre have long since moved away from this album artistically, I still think very highly of this record and still enjoy the hell out of it. While I'm listening to it, I don't think "meh, this is old shit and it sucks that it's not more like Exai", I enjoy it for what it is. It's where their heads were at at the time and they did a great job of it.

Otm

i actually have a lot of work to do today but how many youtubes would it take to convince people amber is not unique among its contemporaries in 1994 ambient electronica

years back, somebody on ILX talked about this album - https://www.discogs.com/Phthalocyanine-Navy-Warship/release/11956 , by Pthalocyanine.. it's pretty singular-sounding, though it def shares some qualities with Ae's music.

Lowell is a quality poster imo

idk did another group release an album called amber under the name autechre

*Phthalocyanine

the goal was not to show that somebody released the exact same album but to show that autechre was not particularly "advanced"

although we've all been drunk guys i'm sure

great posts by map and j upthread, a pleasure to read

also this:

it wasn't so much new plugins as it was gradually moving to max/msp and an object-oriented programming approach to composition though, right? at least that's how i always think of their transition from more conventionally arranged music of the amber era to their amoebic morphing (but always readily identifiable as autechre) recent music.

― obviously DLC (Karl Malone), Friday, May 4, 2018 11:30 PM (three days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

is otm. I guess I fall on the side of preferring the recent (post-Confield) music because, at the most basic level, I'd rather listen to Roland Kayn than Boards of Canada. At a less basic level, j said it more eloquently than I could in the post quoted above.

ok i get what you're saying, i get that the aleatory elements were always there (at least since flutter) but i feel autechre were much much better when the tension between avant garde and functional was still there

― the late great, Saturday, May 5, 2018 1:02 AM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I feel exactly the opposite! It isn't as if the Mantronix / boom bap / Kraftwerk funk has disappeared, it's just become so much more integrated and subtle, which is why I find latter-day Autechre so singular and why early Autechre (as many have argued on this thread) can--fairly or not--sound part of a particular time and place. This may sound naive, and I may regret writing this if ILX exists in fifteen years, but I don't think NTS Sessions will ever sound dated.

I will also concede it may also be that the early work reminds me of my life back then, so of course it sounds dated to me. I wonder what a person discovering Autechre for the first time today would make of listening to Amber and Exai back to back. I think context is mega important here. Does Portishead's Dummy sound like the 90s because it is forever associated with a certain strain of coffee shop lifestyle music, or does it sound like the 90s because that's when you heard it? Would a teenager in 2018 hear "Wandering Star" and immediately think "oh, 90s, blech." I'm not so sure.

I sort of envy a person getting to hear any of this stuff for the first time.

I think you're mostly right PP, but the elements of NTS which disappoint me a little are the very obvious sonic callbacks to their earlier work, e.g. column thirteen is basically an extended O=0 - sometime when I'm feeling strong I might make a list. But aside from those quibbles, it's clear that the guys have complete control over the sounds they are trying to get, and the balance of chaos and determinism in the way the tracks play and mutate. At heart they feel rhythm and sound viscerally, and in many ways I think their quest has been finding ways to maximise that buzz - letting a track mutate slowly so that the same rhythm figure means something different every time, or making the sequence stumble and trip while your brain fixes it and waits anxiously for the track to get back on the rails, or presenting 200 variations on a sound or a melody until it lifts out of the track. They've been pressing these buttons for the last 25 years and getting better and better at it, so now tracks can run 10, 20, 60 minutes and stay riveting.

column thirteen is basically an extended O=0
One is all tuned comb filters, the other is FM chimes. Completely different ;-)

O=0 sounds like it should be the theme tune for a science-based afternoon quiz show in the 80s.

So does the following track now I come to mention it.

One is all tuned comb filters, the other is FM chimes. Completely different ;-)

Foil for me here every time

Autechre have come back to the Amber sound and structure in later works, definitely on Exai for example.

apparently even perception of similarity can be completely subjective!

It isn't as if the Mantronix / boom bap / Kraftwerk funk has disappeared, it's just become so much more integrated and subtle

right, so ... pretty much what i was saying?

starting to become more familiar with this album, my love for it growing each and every day

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Did I ever share this?

https://i.imgur.com/ByzHWT7.jpg

Coincidence? I think not. Just played Papa Don't Preach backwards at 33rpm and it sounds remarkably like Teartear ;-)

soundcloud or it didn't happen

it didn't. love the cover connection though

Very good! Wrong album, but I've always through 'Recury' off Chiastic Slide would have been brilliant with an MC over the top.

I do love the idea of Madonna, ear to the ground, reading word of Autechre in the hipper corners of the press, putting on an album in search of new producers to mine for ideas, then immediately pressing stop.

Desperately seeking Surripere.

autechre really should have done more work with mcs

Ccec iis the only thing I can think of with an "MC" on it.

Funkstorung are kind of "Autechre with MCs", right?

East Flatbush Project - Tried by 12 (Autechre mix) (which basically dissolves into ccec); The Bug - Skeng (Autechre Remix); the microphone fiend 'remix' (mashed up with blifil live)...

but yeah, more would be great.

"Goz Quarter" from Envane samples Kool Keith rapping

Them collaborating with Tricky in the 90s is one of the big missed opportunities I think. He was going into dark electronica territory on Pre-Millennium Tension which would have married with ae's aesthetic quite well I think. They could have bonded over a shared love of 'Microphone Fiend'.

I always thought their remix of Tortoise was an odd match. They never remixed or worked with NIN, did they? That's surprising, all things considered.

YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO @ the madonna combo

Heh, yeah always makes me laugh. It was a genuine double take on my part - the Madonna album was out on a shelf one day and in the corner of my eye I thought I saw Amber. Some of the detailing and how they may have up is uncanny

https://www.stonesthrow.com/app/uploads/2020/06/beauty-and-the-beast-1024x518.jpg

Just read that was a thing

I dreamt that there was a suite of videos for the whole album that somehow I'd never discovered - drone flybys of landscapes like the one on the cover, manipulated with 2d and 3d digital effects, fitting the music perfectly and talking it to another level (though I think in the dream the music was actually my own subconscious creation!)

Feel like I need a full-library Autechre session soon, it's been a while since I've listened to any of their albums which is stupid because they are perfect for losing myself in sandbox video game worlds and late night hacking

plonked this whilst i did some sketching today, forgotten what an utter gem it is all the way through

oft forgotten these days because it's a transitional album, but it is fantastic in its own right

Yulquen forever. This is the best pre Confield album.

Best album period, but I'm not a fan of the Max/MSP-generated stuff.

it does bum me out they never made another track like Silverside

My 2nd least favorite Autechre album behind Quaristice. It's got stunning tracks on it, but far more that sound like unfinished sketches. Would have been their best 90's EP if properly edited down.

I prefer it to Tri Rep, maybe not Confield (which I've warmed to a bit in recent times)

I still can't figure out what it is about Quaristice that doesn't work

Tri Rep forever

I still can't figure out what it is about Quaristice that doesn't work

― Sade of the Del Amitri (dog latin), Friday, October 18, 2024 11:23 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

for me, it's the track lengths. I don't think bite-sized Ae works at all. It's the only album in their discography I don't love and never bothered to buy

yeah I think that's why I prefer quaristice.quadrange

I probably would have voted for Slip or Montreal - kinda surprised neither it nor Montreal got any votes (especially since the first response is just "Montreal")

Further for me, it's so atmostpheric and disturbing

fucking NO ONE voted for Slip???

I think I would have. Piezo edged it out perhaps