Autechre - NTS Session 1 POLL

voted all

it's basically tied between 13 ctrl, north spiral, gonk steady one and four of seven for me .. feel like the last three will get more votes so i'm going to throw one to 13 ctrl.

it's basically a space opera imo

N O R T H S P I R A L

that is one sick sick track and the bass strobe at the end is all-time

was jamming to four of seven in the car today, it's not their most radical song, basically a techno banger, but damn it's good.

yeah if I'm honest I voted north spiral, it's a three course meal

voted bqbqbq, would probably vote differently next week. yes I called it off-putting on the other thread, my words were taken out of context.

four of seven has a more straightforward beat but i feel like its progression isn't 'banger' at all, it's like constantly slipping sideways instead of building up to anything, then it just dissolves. the minor key synth lead with the weird bell sounds behind it are a few things at once imo, frantic, anxious, bombed out, somehow really sad. idk it's worked its way into my psyche wrt everything going on lately. there's a bit at 6:55 where it settles on this delicate, passing little moment that takes my breath away every time.

Autechre's genius - in fullest flower on these records - is making music which delights and fascinates at every scale. The flutter or scrape of individual notes and beats, weird involuted melodies, stumbling and intricate 8-bar rhythms, shifts in structure which take ten minutes, 20, an hour to unfold. It just holds my attention.

I'm excited about polling these because it's really gonna force me to hunker down and try to reckon with this music. There's so much of it, and it tends to wash right over me. Getting to know it for real is daunting, but I'm up for the challenge.

I really think we should do a ballot poll of the whole bunch.

"gonk steady one" vs "four of seven" for me. Need a bit to decide.

If the last two minutes or so of "north spiral" was its own isolated track, it would be a contender too

Sessions 1 and 4 will be the easiest ones for me to poll. 2 and 3 will be almost impossible, as there are four absolutely perfect tracks on each.

I really think we should do a ballot poll of the whole bunch.

^^

ah yes a definitive ranking of 30-something songs

i think this is fine

I think we'll get there eventually with a full poll, but I need to take it in more bite sized chunks for now.

Gotta go with gonk steady one but but carefree counter dronal is underrated.

13 ctrl
four of seven
north spiral
gonk steady one
carefree counter dronal
32a_reflected
bqbqbq
debris_funk
t1a1

Gotta go with gonk steady one but but carefree counter dronal is underrated.

― change display name (Jordan), Friday, October 5, 2018 5:51 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i really am obsessed with this release. one great thing about it is you can play the whole thing over an eight-hour workday. i love these polls because it makes me listen to tracks that hadn't grabbed me. i think this volume might be my favorite. bqbqbq is really astonishing and t1a1 has risen a lot in my estimation. carefree counter dronal isn't underrated by me, it's like endless trumpets playing a tribute to the rising sun.

I've not properly poked around under the hood of this one yet (I splashed out on the vinyl of NTS 2 at the weekend). So far I'm quite enjoying the prettiness / craziness of l3 ctrl

t1a1 - makes me think of a slow, lumbering robot walking through corridors, opening automatic doors, a la Georges Schwizgebel's Rapture of Frankenstein. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoNkmQ1e93Q It is indeed a strange way to kick off the project - almost 19 minutes of downtrodden, sloggy 2-step with minimal melodic elements

bqbqbq - like being stuck inside a telephone exchange. I think this is a nice idea but it kind of outstays its welcome and doesn't do an awful lot

debris funk - does exactly what it says on the tin. the scrape and grind of spacejunk

l3 ctrl - love the crystalline cavernous intro - a brief but welcome piece of light relief after the dirge of the first three tracks. It doesn't hang around long, and gets interrupted by this crazed lazer gun sound. Big chords in this one. It just gets crazier and crazier as it goes along. Something strangely Lovecraftian about this one - like that story about the explorer who goes into a cave and just gets deeper and deeper into this lost underground alien city

carefree counter dronal - minimalist footwork with all the beats taken out. a bit of a meditation on one sound more than anything else

north spiral - we're in classic Autechre mode here. Super-detailed drill'n'bass. Mad as a box of frogs. Lots of variation compared to some of the previous tracks.

gonk steady one - the world's most complicated tin can-opener

four of seven - BANGER! Pretty outro which reminds me of empirial-phase Autechre (Cichli, Garbage, Rae)

32a_reflected - ambientish track. a nice extended mood piece that's apparently a palindrome?

oops didin't mean to post the video in there, just the link

Autechre's imperial phase is right now, xp

well... each album has been an imperial phase. i guess that's the point of Ae: each album seems to top the last in terms of scope.

Great post, dog latin

Haha dog Latin, I've been trying to do the same thing you did there, but haven't gotten so far yet.

My notes on first 3 tracks:

t1a1 - ambient noise gives way to a stroll through a humid swamp. A flatulent giant lumbers through a cloud of midges. The ground shudders under his steps.

bqbqbq - my Nintendo is glitching and it's making me nervous. Maybe I ate too many power-ups. Switched to 2 player mode and now I'm seeing double.

debris_funk - I keep sticking my finger in the socket and getting shocked. My nervous system is a jumble of zaps and jolts. Deep in my lonely basement, I dream of unleashing my electrical energy on the unsuspecting city.

^^ hahaha, this is one of the fun things about this band. highly-outlandish subjective flights of fancy whilst trying to describe various blips and bloops

Very true. I'd say that heavy walking and electric zaps are the two most recurring themes that come to mind when listening to this.

Does "13 ctrl" sound like a deeply remixed version of "Bine" to anyone else? (Sorry if that's been mentioned before, I'm listening to this for the first time.)

lol i love that post moodles

People. People. It's "l3 ctrl" (lowercase L) not "13 ctrl". Why that matters, I've no idea.

On a similar note, it is donk steady one

Ok now you're just messing with us

casual donk

every time i listen to bqbqbq i remember what someone typed in the chatroom when it was playing live: "sean's doing the bleeps and rob's doing the bloops".

i'm trying to choose between l3 ctrl and gonk steady one. first is more epic, second is more kitchen sink crazy.

I feel like there's no way for me to properly assess what the best track is before the poll deadline. I need another year or two I think.

a la Georges Schwizgebel's Rapture of Frankenstein

Well now I know where the cover of R Plus 7 came from!

l3 ctrl ftw btw.

bqbqbqb is like quirky late 90s nintendo mario game music. which i love.

l3 ctrl is alien w/ sigourney spinning out of control and breaking the fourth wall shouting in my face me going holy hell: p neat.

gonk steady one is sooo laidback it's everything i'd want from autechre. 4/4 beat outerspace. i do not know how they do it.

These 4 sessions have been my life since they arrived. A new favorite on any given day.

a la Georges Schwizgebel's Rapture of Frankenstein

Well now I know where the cover of R Plus 7 came from!

These 4 sessions have been my life since they arrived. A new favorite on any given day.

― lbi's life of limitless european glamour (Le Bateau Ivre), Tuesday, October 9, 2018 6:35 PM (forty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

+1

gonk steady one is sooo laidback

laid back? there's about 100 things happening every second!

going for l3 ctrl

xp I know! And yet it still has got such a groove. It's a blessing.

This really hits a stride in the 2nd half, getting into series of deep grooves before dissolving into bliss.

Here are my thoughts on the next few songs.

l3 ctrl - I drift off to a gentle slumber in a crystal cave, only to be violently awakened by a  swarm of angry wasps. I run down mirrored passages to escape their stings, hopelessly lost among the infinite reflections. The painful venom swells the flesh, and brings on hallucinations that flatten and negate my consciousness.

carefree counter dronal - the butterfly garden is filled with a wash of fluttering color. Step through and feel the pattering wind disturbances on your cheeks as thousand of jeweled wings flit together.

north spiral - power skiing down city streets, navigating the urban slalom course. All sorts of vehicles and obstacles crowd around and whiz. I ramp up to the upper city platform, searching for a short cut. As I spiral ever higher to each new level, the other racers grow more distant, just tiny dots now, zipping along the cluttered grid far below.

gone steady one - the damn TV is on the fritz again. I slap my hand on it, and images flicker in and out, just barely coalescing for a moment before dissolving into liquid static. Somewhere within the scattered pixels a hint of meaning lights up. New languages unfurl, revealing themselves in the cathode cool, organizing subconscious thought, splitting the self from itself, producing a multitude of new personalities. I now take my orders from the disruptive light.

well-reasoned post, supported by data - i concur

From a voting perspective, I'm still trying to decide, but I think it's probably down to either north spiral or four of seven.

Writing these little stories while i listen to this has actually been pretty helpful in making the tracks easier to digest and recall.

it's the only way i can process a lot of their music, especially these days when the track titles are so numerous and gnomic. Even on the 'classic' albums, I know Under BOAC is the one that's like being trapped in an enormous spring-loaded contraption; Pir is the sound of a musical toilet flush/car doors slamming underwater etc..

I haven't been able to absorb all of this really but I think T1a1 is an awesome opener and a fitting mission statement for the project so I voted for that.

to stick up for my choice more seriously, bqbqbq's dryness and clarity are arresting and unique. after the lumbering monster of a mission statement of t1a1 it feels like you're suddenly in a bright maze of start-stop-silence phrases. you're trapped, drawn in and easy prey for debris_funk.

yeah that's otm. whoever described T1a1 as a "lumbering robot waking up" or something way upthread (karl?) was otm. it's 10 minutes of "here we go >:)"

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

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

Lol, I didn't manage to vote in my own poll. Probably would give one more to four of seven.

I think "l3 ctrl" is overrated here and "bqbqbq" is underrated, but otherwise, good poll.

On to Vol 2! I have four or five tracks on Vol. 2 I could easily vote for. I think it'll be the toughest one for me to rank. Fortunately, this will give me an excuse to listen to this again.

weird that carefree counter dronal got 0 votes here but is somehow the most listened to song from the NTS sessions on both spotify and last.fm. (probably it just showed up on some popular spotify playlist, I guess)

> l3 ctrl - love the crystalline cavernous intro - a brief but welcome piece of light relief after the dirge of the first three tracks. It doesn't hang around long, and gets interrupted by this crazed lazer gun sound. Big chords in this one. It just gets crazier and crazier as it goes along. Something strangely Lovecraftian about this one - like that story about the explorer who goes into a cave and just gets deeper and deeper into this lost underground alien city

in the various writeups of l3 ctl why does nobody mention the table tennis that's obviously going on towards the end?

> carefree counter dronal 0

mystery, yes. i guess this is too radio friendly for the heads

weird that carefree counter dronal got 0 votes here but is somehow the most listened to song from the NTS sessions on both spotify and last.fm. (probably it just showed up on some popular spotify playlist, I guess)

I imagine a lot of people who weren't previously familiar with Ae who wanted to check it out logically went with the shortest track to sample. Attention spans and all.

carefree counter dronal is ok, i'd rate it above t1a1 and bbqbbq but it's like an interlude that goes on for 5 minutes. four of seven would be my radio friendly pick!

13 minutes though. it's like punk never happened.

carefree is a bit boring to be honest

champing at the bit for poll 2 here.

Been a bit under the weather, so I haven't gotten to it. I plan to do one, but if someone else does it first, that would be fine.

ok, get well soon!

Autechre - NTS Session 2 POLL

oops, put it on ile. mods requested.

Thanks!

t1a1 is really doing it for me now. I'm hearing it differently, like a magic eye picture. it sounds like so quite a bouncy hip hop track as opposed to the lumbering beast it was before... and also I'm sure there are some cat meowing sounds in there too

it's the time of year for this classic summer jam again!!

ain't never been out of rotation son

saw someone on twitter posit that NTS 1 is the "real album" and 2 thru 4 are the B sides. bs! 4 is the best one

pfff, there are blockbusters in all 4

that little bass line at the end of "four of seven" is totally taken from the Mario 3 match game music, it almost sounds like it was lifted directly

In retrospect I think this is my favorite of the four sessions. Every track here feels iconic in its own way

listening back this afternoon.

going back to the NTS Sessions after SIGN/PLUS affirms how dense and exhausting these records are. It's not that they're not without their merit, but it's a tough old listen no matter what.

NTS 1 is especially monolithic, starting off with a plodding 18-minute track that mutates as it slowly drags itself along like a lumbering monster. Lots of lovely squelchy voices on this record.

going back to the NTS Sessions after SIGN/PLUS affirms how dense and exhausting these records are.

maybe why 4, specifically column 13, is what I go back to most often

wow, I was going to post that the new ones are nice and all, but they don't give me the visceral thrills of the NTS tracks - violvoic, north spiral, four of seven, 9 chr0 - I love it when they really stretch out and disintegrate into madness

there are a lot of great tracks in there, but energy, availability and interest all have to align for me to listen to those monsters. whereas SIGN or PLUS I can just chuck on in the background.

1 might be my favorite too, it has my fav track on it, l3 ctrl

i agree with matthewk, the horizons they reach on this collection are thrilling and invigorating and it's still my favorite release of theirs.

xp column thirteen is definitely the best track on the NTS Sessions, period. Inexhaustibly deep

I found that you can get each set on 3xLP for about $35-40 a pop, which is pretty good value but do I really need 3 sides of "all end" in my life

lol hmmm. i will always associate the 8 hours of this with the year i spent running on sandstone in the desert so i don't think i need it on vinyl, i just need to be able to drop on to my phone every few months to recreate that experience.

I don't know why I even buy these albums on vinyl when really they work so much better on headphones than speakers

same reason you buy anything on vinyl, it's really cool

I've spent too much time listening to these weirdos to not own a little wax

... or at least SIGN/PLUS are, but maybe with denser, busier sounds perhaps they unfurl better over speakers? I dunno just some two bit theory

Yes, opening the artefact is admittedly one of the reasons I like records

Owning, not opening

wow, I was going to post that the new ones are nice and all, but they don't give me the visceral thrills of the NTS tracks

feel this way about PLUS, less so about SIGN, but the enthusiasm of listening to the latter streaming live (and posting in real time here on ILM with some of you) was seriously one of my favorite days in a very sad and brutal year

I know that sounds hyperbolic but even with the distance of a few years NTS remains one of the greatest single pieces of music I've ever heard. I really can't express in words how much I love that music!

yeah the SIGN livestream was so great.

so was the NTS livestream! will always remember my 40th birthday, dancing in my kitchen like an idiot to gonk steady one \m/

I remember it being announced, and bringing up the stream, happy to hear a mix set like their previous streaming radio ventures - then we got about 3 minutes into t1a1 and I thought hey wait this is not just some intro, it's a new Autechre track, then it went on and on and then the NEXT one was a new Autechre track, and for two hours I was so excited and happy, wondering what will they do with the other three slots? replay this? mix sets? and up came the next and when I realised it was 8 hours of new music my brain kind of melted. Probably the happiest I have been for any album release ever. I bought all the formats because I could afford to at the time, and I wanted to thank them for one of the best experiences of my life. It came out while I was going through some pretty heavy shit personally and the hourlong catharsis of "all end" was such a release.

oh man I forgot that you have to play All End loud enough to hear the melodies that aren't there, this is great

I know it's not NTS 1 but I just told my partner that 9 chr0 sounds like hip hop played on a speaker trapped inside an MRI machine. I miss reviewing (and I think Glenn McD could claim subconscious plagiarism there).

when i first started listening to Autechre i was really confused about how people would always talk about the strong hip hop influence in their music. how was "vose in" hip hop?
but it's a bit like one of those old Magic Eye pictures - you can't see the image for ages and then one day you cross your eyes (or your ears in this case) and suddenly you can see/hear it in almost everything they do.

yes! that's a good analogy