Will we ever see another LegoFeet release?

possibly, we still have a pile of decent material from that era, we could have done another CD easily

what we have more of tho is stuff from between LF and Incunabula (mostly stuff Warp didn't want for Incunabula cos it didn't fit the AI theme or whatever)

Are there any plans to release a compilation of soundboard recordings? I would pay handsomely for such a thing...

we were discussing this recently (milking it for all it's worth)

the main barrier is the sheer amount of it we would have to go through, it's a few months work i reckon, if it was going to be comprehensive (and that's hard cos  the archive is WELL patchy)

and we were debating what we'd actually do with it as well

ie. whether it's better to stitch the best bits of different gigs together (like a lot of 70s/80s live albums did) or to release them slightly edited (george lucas), or to touch them up here and there sonically, or leave them totally untouched

it's our style to release them untouched really - but they would sound a bit weak if we left them 100% intact cos they were mixed for a live rig, and what sounds good mixed in a venue can sound terrible as a 2 track master played at home (a bit better really loud on cans but never quite right)

the fact that we would prob end up messing with the sound sets off my autism and makes me want to make other changes

also there is a bit of a source consistency issue, as in the gigs that were recorded were prob not the best examples of any given set (it was always venues doing the recording, we would just be given a DAT at the end), and a lot of the best captures were actually by fans, so we'd have to try tracking people down to get WAVs of stuff we only currently have as MPEG or whatever

Have you ever been asked to compose a soundtrack for a film - if not would you consider it, and what kind of feature would best suit the Ae aesthetic ?

we have been offered stuff but soz i can't talk about any of it cos NON DISCLOSURE

big fan of shane carruth and neill blomkamp

and loads of retired or dead people

hollywood is in a kind of creative whirlpool atm

Have you ever felt tired or bored of doing these kind of albums and styles? I mean, have you ever thought of taking a rest, or collaborate with other artists? If not, what's the secret to keep releasing the same amount of music after 20 years and still wanting to experiment, being fresh, and making fresh and bound-breaking tunes?

bit of a leading question, but thanks

we're not trying to be bound-breaking but we are interested in new things (basically novelty is really subjective)

and novelty takes a lot of different shapes, ie. a familiar thing can sometimes seem good in a new way, because of some change in perception or association

i dunno how other people get bored tbh, maybe they're just approaching it differently

Any live events planned?

not dates but we're working on it

Will you ever come to Rochester, NY??????

ask local promoters

but nah prob not, you're too close to nyc

Have you ever felt tired or bored of doing these kind of albums and styles? I mean, have you ever thought of taking a rest, or collaborate with other artists? If not, what's the secret to keep releasing the same amount of music after 20 years and still wanting to experiment, being fresh, and making fresh and bound-breaking tunes?

i tend to think we're onto something quite different each time we return to the studio after a tour or whatever, cos we seem to need a break from it (at least in the past its become a pattern i suppose). and also having been involved with making music with mates all these years, like say gescom and all its varying contributors, i feel my best time working is in this way, don't like the idea of being ported to a studio to get on with producing work with others unless i'm comfortable there. so tend to stay at home, (last of the bedroom producers hahah)

If you guys had been born, like, 20 years later & first formed Autechre around 2009/10ish, how might the internet/free software/etc have effected how things played out?

hard to say, we'd be using everything differently

What do you think about the all the hip-hop that has been getting a alot of people have been talking (hudson mohawke, drake, asap, kendrick, odd future etc)? do you like any of it? Basically I would be interested to hear a new hip-hop song you like (if any)!

 

Thanks

haha such a plethora of sub styles in hop hop, hard to be specific and therefore completely straight up...

but, say with really big artist like Drake, i'm 50/50. cos i like the things he's doing in tracks like headlines, but mbe the 'craig david-10 years-too-late' isn't so fresh.

heralds of change - spotted is an all time favourite, but theres not much as good as that in the rest of the cannon

IMO

do u have future plans to produce musics with the mick harris? 

 

i'm rather fond of the tracs of yr musics that have bits of warm natural sounds in them, such as water or marbles or these types of things. do u think this might occur more frequently in yr future sounds?

 

do u like jug band?

no plans to work with mick but we love his stuff he's a legend

yeah maybe on the warm natural sounds, we are getting pretty good at faking things now but it gets old fast so we usually end up fucking it up somehow

tbh it's hard to make any predictions about what i'm gonna like hearing in a few weeks never mind long term

the only jug band thing i know i ended up finding cos gilliam used it in one of his python bits (dixieland jug blowers?  awesome track actually)

This advert from the early 00s always sounded spookily similar to Yulquen - did you guys have a hand on it, or is it someone in the advertising agency that's a fan !

maybe the ad was originally cut to Yulquen but they didn't budget for it, that happens

might just be a coincidence

This advert from the early 00s always sounded spookily similar to Yulquen - did you guys have a hand on it, or is it someone in the advertising agency that's a fan !

yeah strange that one, i would def stop what i was doing if i caught it on tv, but its a bit fishy, another one for John Lewis Partnership around the same time (only Xmas tho) was another close copy, more 'tradDM'.

Have you ever considered "going back to the roots" for an album, and make it heavily inspired by your earlier works? (Incunabula, Amber, Tri Repetae etc.)

it's kind of impossible, we're not the same people, it would be a pale imitation

leave it to people who find it natural

I haven't had the good fortune to be able to see you perform live, but I have heard that you play in the dark. I'm guessing that you do that because you want the audience to focus on the music itself. But releasing music means that you have less control over how people experience it: do you have an ideal set of conditions that you would hope people will listen to your music in? 

no

partly the decision with the live thing is about removing the identity of the space

what became of the zoviet*france / AE collaboration - any chance of hearing any of that material (if it actually exists) ?

ben's got the DAT

every time i ask him to send it over he goes 'yeah' and then doesn't, so i haven't heard any of it since we did the gigs

 

This advert from the early 00s always sounded spookily similar to Yulquen - did you guys have a hand on it, or is it someone in the advertising agency that's a fan !

 

yeah strange that one, i would def stop what i was doing if i caught it on tv, but its a bit fishy, another one for John Lewis Partnership around the same time (only Xmas tho) was another close copy, more 'tradDM'.

 

lel i think that was tipper

Couple of questions - 

 

- It's said you were involved with getting Boards of Canada noticed and on Skam, now that your cohort of artists have matured, do you still take an active interest in upcoming electronic artists and scenes? (don't make music myself just curious). Would also be curious to know what electronic artists you listen to these days (I think the rap question was already covered)

 

- the Quaristice era seemed unique in your catalog, both because of the shorter more eclectic tracks, but also because you released both Quadrange and Versions, something you hadn't done so explicitly before (in terms of "alternate takes"). Do you also see that period as sort of unique, and is there any backstory to it, apart from just trying to capture a live feel? 

re quadrange, we'd been wanting to do something with variant mixes for a while, in some part due to having a wealth of Eps and extra B sides from artists like Depeche Mode in the past - some of their deepest tracks were unique alternative mixes nothing like the singles or LP versions, and they came across as more intense or over produced even, it was a really nice way to feel what they were doing behind the usual framework they set out in the mainstream…..like a real treat.

Whilst being prolific in terms of bespoke software design for your own music (i.e. Max/MSP patches for Confield, Oversteps, etc. etc.), have you considered designing a manufactured hardware product? It's been interesting to see what The Black Dog have done with the CS X51.

tbh it's tricky cos part of the reason we make software is so that we can hack it easily, and save tons of versions.  and the way everything integrates is bespoke as well, the protocols etc; that's such a big part of it that it's hard to make a one box solution or something that integrates with midi (or other equally lame or ancient protocols) that well.  

we do bounce ideas a lot tho.  we'd probably use fpaa and fpga pretty heavily if we did anything, so it could be part modular analogue but still have decent patch storage.

What's it been like collaborating with Andrew McKenzie over the years - he seems like quite a formidable character ! How does the collaboration with such a geographical distance between you guys ?

we use the internet

andrew's a really top guy, he might seem formidable but he really gets it. maybe i just share some of his upbringing being a northerner but i always found him really 'relatable' 

- I believe the cover art for Confield (which I think is great) was made by you two...do you continue to experiment with visuals in any form? 

 

- Do you keep up with the fan-made videos of your tracks? (thinking here of ones like Plyphon - http://vimeo.com/9105827)

yes

Couple of questions - 

 

- It's said you were involved with getting Boards of Canada noticed and on Skam, now that your cohort of artists have matured, do you still take an active interest in upcoming electronic artists and scenes? (don't make music myself just curious). Would also be curious to know what electronic artists you listen to these days (I think the rap question was already covered)

 

- the Quaristice era seemed unique in your catalog, both because of the shorter more eclectic tracks, but also because you released both Quadrange and Versions, something you hadn't done so explicitly before (in terms of "alternate takes"). Do you also see that period as sort of unique, and is there any backstory to it, apart from just trying to capture a live feel? 

yeah i had just moved house and everything was in boxes, so i was half messing with bits of the live set that were in the elektrons and half progging in max on the side, so it just kind of happened that we recorded a ton of stuff that way cos live tracks are fast to do.

the max stuff then became the system we used for oversteps and later morphed into the oversteps live setup, and then the exai setup. or part of it anyway.

Given that's you gus have been at the leading edge of sonic explorations for 20+ years have you developed any personal alternate theories and postulations about what music actually is?

yeah music = speech - text

at least roughly - i reckon it's a kind of super-developed version of the pitch and intonation parts of speech (the aural bit that doesn't contain textual info)

What were you guys thinking when you made Cichli, if you remember that is. Thoughts or emotion. Especially the underlying melancholy melody thing, and how it lasts throughout the end.

I don't know why but it makes me very emotional, sad, and it feels cold, distant, yet somewhat warm and hazy. It's a strange sensation that I've not felt from listening to any other track.

just sitting at a dx tapping keys, i have no idea, just felt right at the time

How do you feel about your fans? Public image?

you're gonna have to be more specific than that

What do you think about our constant "sean pls" jokes and the tumblrs with album cover parodies like http://bullwalletversions.tumblr.com/ ?

i liked the one with rob on the drums

also - watmm pls

FM or subtractive synthesis?

tough but i'd go with fm cos you can blag acid using fm

- Oversteps had a couple of tracks that seemed like particularly unusual experiments, known(1) and d sho qub. Any stories about what inspired you to make either of those tracks? 

known(1) happened cos i was messing with tuning and karplus-strong, and i liked the way the upper octaves were sounding, typical kind of a leads to b thing

 

What do you think about our constant "sean pls" jokes and the tumblrs with album cover parodies like http://bullwalletversions.tumblr.com/ ?

 

i liked the one with rob on the drums

 

also - watmm pls

FM or subtractive synthesis?

 

tough but i'd go with fm cos you can blag acid using fm

 

the fact that many stem from an actual WuTang rekkerd, is just perfect

"the Elektrons", do you still use them a lot? Sounds like they are used on Exai, but more heavily processed than on earlier material?

nah they've been in a box since the quaristice gigs

I see you said you're still experimenting with visuals. Have you ever considered to take part in any kind of visual arts festival? (I can't think of many, but I would love to see you play at MIRA Festival one year in my city).

not really, vis serves as a great aural detox sometimes

It sounds like you really have a predilection for FM synths, Is this true, and if so, to what extent?  Favourite gear?

 

Your work inspired me to develop a plugin that does audio controlled phase modulation, so thanks.

fm is really flexible so yeah i cane it. also the sound of it does something to me, it can sound like it's inside my head or something - prob cos of the harmonic symmetry being a bit unnatural.

fave gear - i dunno at all, i would prob be really boring and say computers, cos flexibility

most of the music you release - while being rather 'abstract' and always innovative - is still clearly rooted in popular music genres like hip hop, electronica, techno etc.

do you ever produce stuff that tends towards a more rigidly 'experimental' or 'academic' tradition of electronic music (like GRM, dockstader, xenakis etc)?

lol rigid

see that's the problem innit, all that freedom and they go and buy a strait jacket

Your work seems to lead some music journalists to really go off the deep end with speculation and bullshit. I've always imagined that this is due to the largely abstract nature of your work, and they way you guys leave a lot to interpretation. But are there any articles that really stand out to your mind as being the most full of shit? I instantly think of a couple, but I'm curious whether you guys give any thought to what these "professionals" say about your work, if at all. 

can't remember

it's hard for any pro writers to get too deeply into things cos their job makes it difficult to specialise

that and SEO 

What advice or criticism would you give to today's electronic musicians? Like, what are we doing right and wrong? What important elements are being underrepresented?

only advice i can give is do what you want

Sure. How do you feel your music has been received over the years by fans/critics?

in various ways

Your work seems to lead some music journalists to really go off the deep end with speculation and bullshit. I've always imagined that this is due to the largely abstract nature of your work, and they way you guys leave a lot to interpretation. But are there any articles that really stand out to your mind as being the most full of shit? I instantly think of a couple, but I'm curious whether you guys give any thought to what these "professionals" say about your work, if at all. 

it looks like none have the time to sit and try to enjoy it - they get so much to check out weekly, i can't imagine they get even close to the situation we anticipate our proper listeners reach. so mostly blunt surface level face valuations occur

Many on the forum really enjoyed your Quaristice era live set with the elektrons in full swing. Is there a possibility of it being released? There are so many awesome melodic hooks in that set.

can't rem if there were any recordings

i think not actually

guess you had to be there

When was Cichlisuite made?

Do you have mutant sound thigs? If so; Does it happen in between the transitions of release material? I mean, tracks mixing gear and techniques used in Tri Repetae and Chiastic Slide, for example.

cichlisuite was done in 97 (i think it was 97 anyway), after the tour we did with edgar

yeah we have tons of mutant half-things, but quite a few are on DATs that won't play without glitch hell.  one day we'll get round to mothballing it all

Edited by Sean Ae, 02 November 2013 - 10:21 AM.

heat or night?

night

Hey guys, ever consider doing something acoustic, with non electronic instruments?

only fleetingly, we usually realise we can't manipulate the harmonics enough and abandon it

Have you already started work on a potential new release? Are the sounds you're experimenting with now in the studio an evolution of Exai/L-event or do you now see yourselves heading into a very different direction in terms of the next album? I'm curious to know how much planning is involved when you're in the earliest stages of producing a record?

past lp's are made from tracks that just get made, not to fit a specific brief so early on in the cycle between releases, these forms take shape later as the tracks can often suggest a path, roughly speaking

In one interview/documentary in the 90's you said more or less that "in ten years, music will be nothing like nowadays". Do you still think that same affirmation, or do you now feel that, seeing 80's and 90's revivals and people getting samples from old songs and imitating previous styles, music is becoming "lazier", repeating or lacking originality?

god no, everyone got blinded by options and retreated into fitting in

i was young and naive, what can i say

Did you guys ever record anything with the late Peter christopherson and jhon balance of coil? Am I mistaken?

no

we did send them some beats once for a potential collab but they said they listened, enjoyed, and thought they couldn't add anything without spoiling it

which i mean, it was cute but i really hoped they would hack into it somehow

so nothing came of it

Have you already started work on a potential new release? Are the sounds you're experimenting with now in the studio an evolution of Exai/L-event or do you now see yourselves heading into a very different direction in terms of the next album? I'm curious to know how much planning is involved when you're in the earliest stages of producing a record?

at the moment we're working on getting our programs to be reliable and flexible enough to use live again.  we added a ton of functionality after oversteps tour but as usual there's that tradeoff between functions and stability (not to mention portability) going on

next batch will probably relate to this somehow, hard to tell. we recorded a lot of test files recently and we might use bits but tbh i reckon we will dev it a lot more before we start recording properly again

Do you ever fall out over music?

usually over really ego things disguised as autistic detail-oriented things, usually we snap out of it once we see that 

doesn't happen that much, maybe like once a year we disagree on something, and it's always some tiny detail or transition

What is your favourite track from Exai?

currently cloudline

- am pretty curious about how you choose track titles, sometimes they seem a  bit casual, like just your personal shorthand for how you name different versions of a track, or to downplay the importance of the whole idea of track titles (similar to playing live in a dark room). Other times they seem more carefully chosen or tongue-in-cheek (eg., reniform puls). Are they always carefully chosen? Are any of them more personal? 

 

 

- to what extent do you think your local environment plays a role in your sound? I seem to recall around the time of Confield there was talk about how you had moved to (London?) or were no longer working together in the same studio (sorry, fuzzy on the details, it's been a while!), and that that might have informed the tone of the record in some way. Something that also comes to mind is in a more recent interview I think Rob mentioned listening to Oversteps repeatedly during train commutes (sorry if I'm mangling this, again memory is a bit fuzzy). Do you just find yourselves making music wherever whenever, or are there any places you like to go to for inspiration...? 

 

- I think one or both of you may now have families, do you find it hard to manage family time vs. creative time, and any tips?

originally autechre was a track name, and i guess we have always disturbed a real word or shimmed it into what fits with a track if it will work well, some are literally file names for tracks - iterative or whatever, or just like when we used to do graf, the letters looks better a certain way its an aesthetic choice, so yeah we care but we do it a few different ways, so it may seem more disparate

Edited by Rob Ae, 02 November 2013 - 10:36 AM.

The recent proxy link mahem http://p.autechre.ws...p://factmag.com via autechre.ws was a really fresh and weird spin on album marketing IMO. It genuinely freaked me out at first as if my machine had been infected with AE! :)

 

Care to divulge any thoughts on this? Was this a tDR or Warp marketing idea or something you guys initiated?

both

they had the idea for hacking other sites (inspired by our myspace antics), and originally wanted to use it on things like .gov sites - we had the idea of using the referer and gave them a list of URLs, as well as making a lot of aesthetic contributions

Weird question, and probably impossible to answer, but: Would you ever do an entire album without any drums/percussion sounds? Quaristice especially had some sweet stuff, like notwo and altibzz.

Quite good

maybe, depends what we have at the end really

it's unlikely i would spend a cpl of years doing non beats tracks but if we ended up with a few, and some way to separate them off onto their own thing, then yeah. just hasn't quite happened that way yet 

holy shit hi rob and sean!!

 

Autechre is the most amazing music ever on a psychedelic drug like mushrooms, did you guys ever experiment with it and if yes have drugs influenced the music of autechre??

 

i love autechre!!!

yes, but sometimes when on certain substances it will really distract u and make u do shit music, so sometimes the only memory of use is all it takes to get things turning out just right. 

 

 

- to what extent do you think your local environment plays a role in your sound? I seem to recall around the time of Confield there was talk about how you had moved to (London?) or were no longer working together in the same studio (sorry, fuzzy on the details, it's been a while!), and that that might have informed the tone of the record in some way. Something that also comes to mind is in a more recent interview I think Rob mentioned listening to Oversteps repeatedly during train commutes (sorry if I'm mangling this, again memory is a bit fuzzy). Do you just find yourselves making music wherever whenever, or are there any places you like to go to for inspiration...? 

 

over the years we both moved a number of times, we've been living is different cities since late 99

local environment def plays a role, in terms of aesthetics, attitude, vibe 

we can work anywhere but tech and room sound has a role as well so some kinds of work happen more while travelling than others 

making sequencers is easier to do without good speakers than making synths, but a lot of our stuff isn't strictly one or the other so it tends to happen incrementally in weird stages based on circumstances

- Do you take an interest in neuroscience and how music stimulates the nervous system and our physiology (not just in terms of emotions)?

 

- Is your main goal to produce music that is emotionally appealing to yourselves, or do you lean more towards the sound designs/textures that music can be manipulated into without having the emotive element in the forefront of the music making process (or maybe a mixture of both)?

tbh i think everything has some emotional element, but we're not really thinking about that when we do stuff

it's not that we don't feel like emotions are important, more that it's hard for me to imagine a sound that doesn't convey some sense of something, and quite often when people discuss emotions in music they only think of happy or sad as being emotions, when imo emotions are a lot more than that

e.g. if we put out a really angry track, then people rarely describe it that way. they would more likely say it was unlistenable or difficult, the emphasis moves from expression to design, maybe they just fail to recognise it as expressive if they think it's very technical

 

 

Did you guys ever record anything with the late Peter christopherson and jhon balance of coil? Am I mistaken?

no
we did send them some beats once for a potential collab but they said they listened, enjoyed, and thought they couldn't add anything without spoiling it
which i mean, it was cute but i really hoped they would hack into it somehow
so nothing came of it

Did you end up using those beats on any projects you can remember?

 

no, they got archived in the vain hope they may one day become something

Is R M I Corporate ID 2 the raw file of Mira Calix's Humba loaded into a wave editor ?

no it was the residual ram contents of an ensoniq eps, revealed by making the loop length too small on an unrelated sample (an ensoniq glitch we exploited a few times)

those samples hadn't been loaded into that sampler for months but they were still there living in the ram

- what's the weirdest/most unexpected door that being electronic musicians has opened for you? 

 

- the Anti ep may be the only time in your discography that mentions something political (Criminal Justice Bill). Do either of you consider yourselves political or socially active? 

tbh not too many doors, none weird enough to mention anyway

re politics, not active in any visible sense, nothing connected to autechre

 

 

Weird question, and probably impossible to answer, but: Would you ever do an entire album without any drums/percussion sounds? Quaristice especially had some sweet stuff, like notwo and altibzz.

Quite good

 
maybe, depends what we have at the end really
it's unlikely i would spend a cpl of years doing non beats tracks but if we ended up with a few, and some way to separate them off onto their own thing, then yeah. just hasn't quite happened that way yet 

Sweet. as long as you keep releasing stuff, I'm a very happy person.

Also, for the next tour, come back to Denmark-land. That'd be very nice!

 

ah i love denmark 

Can you think of any other legendary musicians in the 'genre' that are long overdue for a new release that you'd quite like to hear new music from?

Sorry if this has already been asked, but who influences you this week?

other than our stuff i've not been listening to much apart from old stuff lately

not for any reason -  just the relative amounts of new and old stuff in a lib spanning 90 years (well not really more like 50) tends to weigh in favour of the old

What do you think of the whole all-of-our-communications-are-being-surveiled-by-the-US-government-under-the-guise-of-anti-terrorism thing?

a necessary phase in human development

 

What do you think about cheeky fans creating fake Autechre tracks in the lead up to an album release in order to fool leakers?

yeah what do you think of awepittance?

 

clearly a thoroughly nice chap

Can you clarify when the Japan earthquake track 6852 was made? Was it an older track dusted off, or something created fairly close to the time of the quake? (fantastic track by the way)

really close, was made like a few weeks b4 iirc, but unrelated until we were asked, and it seemed to fit in some way

How do you create your sounds? Do you create them completely in your minds or do you discover them tweaking the knobs?

discover

i get ideas for things to try out, but rarely get ideas for actual whole finished things which i then have to approximate

i read interviews where people say they did that and then when i check their tracks its like, i can't even figure out what the idea was half the time. like the track is often something i already heard, at least from a formal point of view

A lot of artist turn "mellow" with the years, going into dad-rock and stuff like that.  Others create their best work as they age (architects, classical music composers, etc...).  After all these years, what are your plans for the future?  Is the duo something you would like to continue for another 25 years?

no plans, just see what we feel like doing

the future is the kind of 'elephant in the room' of mysteries

Do you guys like italo disco?  New beat?

if i had to answer with a word, nah to both

i mean there are bits i hear and like sometimes, but there's a slight element of shitness to both genres

plus they are often liked (as an entire genre) by awful tasteless people who can't seem to discriminate the good tracks from the shit ones

i mean i'm pretty uninformed tbh, i grew up with american electro so to me italo and newbeat sound a bit wrong somehow and i ignored them for years

Which team do you support?

none

 

 

Many on the forum really enjoyed your Quaristice era live set with the elektrons in full swing. Is there a possibility of it being released? There are so many awesome melodic hooks in that set.

can't rem if there were any recordings

i think not actually

 

guess you had to be there

When was Cichlisuite made?

Do you have mutant sound thigs? If so; Does it happen in between the transitions of release material? I mean, tracks mixing gear and techniques used in Tri Repetae and Chiastic Slide, for example.

 

cichlisuite was done in 97 (i think it was 97 anyway), after the tour we did with edgar

 

yeah we have tons of mutant half-things, but quite a few are on DATs that won't play without glitch hell.  one day we'll get round to mothballing it all

 

I meant to say hybrid, not mutant.

 

mutant is better

after years of techno/noise gigs, my ears are kinda damaged, bit deaf (grandpa style), so how is your earing ? 

better on the right

lost top end on both but you just eq your monitors and boom, new ears

this whole "questions only" approach ends up feeling a little one-sided, just want to say thanks again for doing this, and also I can confirm Awepittance is indeed a nice chap - we went to your SF Quaristice show together!

 

Question: What is a question you've never been asked in an interview, but always wished you had? 

can't think of anything i want to be asked

i mean i can write anything here so it really doesn't matter what the questions actually are

Did the collaboration with Venetian Snares inspire you at all? Was it an over the internet thing? Are you into his music?

What you do is so unique - I often get the sense that in your music you are making something which has it's own life separated from this reality, that interacts with itself in it's own space, is that deliberate?

Some of your tracks (particularly on Exai) make my legs feel kind of epileptic, do you get any of those kinds of reactions?

Do you consider your music to have a stoner sensibility?

Do you have a sense of trying to make something 'different' or 'other'?

yeah i love aaron's stuff. he's one of them - when i hear it i think 'god why isn't all music this good'.  we did some jams over the web a while ago, passing .rns files back and forth.  they would get really fucked up really quickly it was hilarious.  he's really good at renoise, he should wear a special renoise crown or something

he's amazing at relating things to each other

well those last 4 questions all relate

something about detail and being in a state where you're able to notice it, or at least not having the blinkers on that usually determine what info is relevant

i like considering things from different angles so sometimes i can get really into a normal thing just by fucking with the way i perceive it

I shall revamp my questions:
 

Will we ever see any footage from ATP '03 in a formal way?

 

Do you get tired of people saying your music is weird?

 

Should we as musicians strive to make the world a better, more interesting place to exist in?

atp 03 footage?  i never heard of such a thing, u got a source?

no we know it's weird

no just concentrate on making good tracks, the rest will follow

whats the 'chre drinking culture like? what is your opinion on pimms cups?

i'm a silver patron person, also like slivovitz and sometimes palinka

lately i've been getting into auchentoshan (which is like babby's first single malt, but the lightness reminds me of patron)

re-listening to Amber, i find some stuff in there very cinematic (Silverside), if offered would you guys do a soundtrack for a film (kind of like what plaid are doing)

 

were you ever offered to do a soundtrack?

answered this somewhere already

except for exai/L-event what is the best release this year you heard

i'm just scrolling thru by date added and tbh it's like 99% old stuff, i do keep buying things but there are so many old things still to be heard

with the occasional splurge of bass tracks and industrial techno

i've been caning vladimir ussachevsky lately

and there was a collab between asmus tietchens and moebius that i liked a lot

oh and i only head binray really recently as well but really enjoying his stuff, in a kind of remote 'it was another era' way

Have you ever wished trying to compose a piece with anything other than electronic instruments?  Say, a choral-only work, or using a classical ensemble, piano, jazz trio, a single string instrument, anything?

Edited by Sean Ae, 02 November 2013 - 12:05 PM.

holy shit hi rob and sean!!

 

Autechre is the most amazing music ever on a psychedelic drug like mushrooms, did you guys ever experiment with it and if yes have drugs influenced the music of autechre??

 

i love autechre!!!

yeah

yeah

thanks

@Sean - I remember reading in an interview somewhere that you lived in Suffolk for a while. I'm from Ipswich - I'm curious to know what brought you to Suffolk since there's not a lot going on over here!?

we were both living in sheffield but rob moved to london and i was like 'fuck london' so we moved to sflk to be near-yet-far

was alright for the first 3 years then it started driving me mental

 

 

except for exai/L-event what is the best release this year you heard

 

with the occasional splurge of bass tracks and industrial techno

 

what new bass and industrial tracks have you been caning?

 

oh more of a buying splurge than a listening one

i listen to the first 32 bars and then, well that's the whole track

tbh i only buy it cos i think i might like it later but then it just sits there, coming on shuffle once a year or something

what role do you see computers and mainstream technology playing when it comes to music production in the next 10-20 years from now? will they constantly be taking the labour and time away from the production processes and not permit experimentation/flexibility which seem to be inherent in the subjective human approach to music making?

no

they don't even do that now

what's the last book you read? who are your favourite writers?

valis

pkd

What's the story behind the "Second Bad Vilbel" name - have you ever been to Bad Vilbel? I think I know some people who live there.

 

Also, have you ever read Alcofribas' Lego Feet review and how do you feel about it?

humbled

any plans to reissue/repress past releases on vinyl in the near future? 

ask warp

I've always been curious how the lengthy Autechre webcasts are put together... are they mixed and recorded in sections, and then stitched together? Or is it 10 hours of the pair of you arguing the toss over what track goes on next?

bit of both, some live mixing, some prepared mixes shoehorned together. we tend to have something prepared waiting to go for if we enter a zone of pure fuckup

How much influence does randomness have on your music if any?

 

Aleatoric is the word I think

given that neither of us had any say in our genetic code, i would say quite a lot

What kind of Movies do you like? What is your All-time favourite Movie/Director?

Are you inspired by any Movies?

kubrick, lynch, tarkovsky

yeah mostly dystopian 70s sf, nothing too obscure just stuff we saw on bbc2 as kids in the early 80s

we're not librarians really but we did tend to soak that stuff up as kids

overall, what is your most listened to album that you have produced - the one you have kept going back to the most, and why?

no idea, i don't keep track really

right now i like chiastic but it might just be flavour of the month or something

Inspiration? Any possible ways other than drugs to encourage the positive , adventurous, purely inspired state of mind.

no idea it's not something i ever had to work on

i dunno about inspiration, i mean i tend to find it when i'm in the middle of something, so i guess just 'get stuck in and see what occurs to you'

I am curious about the sound in We R Are Why and Gantz Graf.

At which released Autechre era do they belong to? Are they mutant? By era I mean LP release periods.

we r are why were the first two tracks we did on the ry30

they're both entirely done in the ry30  - with a bit of fx on the diff channels maybe, can't rem

gantz graf was done before ep7 was released but it was too distinct so we held it back, then it occurred to us to get alex to do a vid for it cos he'd already sent us some test vids so it got held back even longer

For me, Treale has been a real highlight of your recent output. Is there anything you can tell us about that track?

Also how many North Face jackets between the two of you?

i don't own any and prob never will (i'm not the right shape)

i think rob might have about 40 or 50 of them though  :D

Do you guys see a parallel between what you do and what classical composers or jazz musicians do? Do you like any of that stuff?

yeah sometimes i hear jazz and i like it a lot but i'm not digging into it or anything

like - phil washington (cygnus) sent me this album called yellow fields by eberhard weber which i reckon is amazing, silky smooth strings, but when i tried to follow it up by going thru other things he did or other ECM things none were as good.  it tends to be a really occasional thing, where the sonics are just right or something.

classical, same thing really, it depends on how it was recorded a lot for me.  like, i like shostakovich chamber works but only when the strings sound really grey, somehow that sounds like i imagine he wanted it to.  i might be way off there tbh i know so little about him really

I'll try not to ask too many questions... but here's another one:

 

Even though I love Exai and your recent stuff (except Oversteps, that one totally misses me), one of my fav track of yours is Tazmx - I never really see this one get mentioned anywhere, but it's just such an honest, nice and atmospheric little piece. Do you have like an archive of some other old drafts or out-takes that you're not embarrassed about and might release some day?

 

And, if no release is scheduled anyway and Warp doesn't have their claw on it, would you be so kind and maybe even leak a track or two at some point?

warp actually own every sound we make (true story)

but yeah maybe some retro thing might happen one day. i dunno cos like, stuff like that never sounds as good to me as it apparently does to you lot

i do like how fsol keep doing those archives albums totally under the radar tho, they released like 10 albums without anyone noticing. i keep buying them as well

With the rise in prevalence in the 'alternative'/indie videogame scene, are there any games that you're interested in? I'm thinking of games like Memory of a Broken Dimension and Fract -

they both look totally wicked and no, i know nothing about them

Is improvised jazz a point of reference for the way you approach your live sets?

 

Edit: Doh a similar question was just asked..

nah, i mean our main inspiration was ppl like 808 state doing live acid tracks, and mantronik before that (he was using a studio 440 or an sp12 on stage)

we just thought that was how you did it, just plug the gear in and see what comes out rather than playing a song, we thought it would be more fun to store a ton of patterns and then manipulate the gear to create the arrangement on the spot

we weren't interested in jazz at all, more the idea of being able to do what a dj does but a lot more deeply

Grant Wilson Claridge has said he doesn't think Aphex will release any more records, because he has given out enough of his music already.

What motivates you guys to keep releasing?

that interview with grant is weird, it's like he genuinely doesn't understand why people release music

maybe someone fucked up his brain

when you say you make sequencers/synths, what's your preferred way of development? do you prefer clicking boxes in max or juggling your RAM in C?

i was getting quite into c a couple of years ago and then gen came out so i dropped it

i way prefer using max to coding

In music and generally in anything that is designed, what do you think about technique, both by itself and when compared to theory (meaning any sort of reflection on technique), and what do you think about the way advances in electronic music are organised nowadays, where developments in both technique and theory seem to be something private, a particular musician's chops, or something tied to a very particular scene or genre?

 

What do you think about facelessness in techno in respect to this?

 

Thanks a lot to both of you for answering our questions!

well theory is a bit stifling in some ways cos it gets in the way of nuanced development by forcing people to quickly apply categories to things and it can blind people to aspects of what they're being presented with, ironing out subtle differences or even preventing people learning their own techniques

facelessness was more about people not wanting to be famous, because connotations

btw i think u got trolled a few pages ago when he asked u a question about questions 

you seem to be implying something

I would like you to tell me how you feel about "see on see"

surprised

Yes, any curiosities about that song? It's one of my favourites all-time.

just a lucky combination of parameters

i was talking to this friend the other night and he told me that when u hold yr finger up and move it from one point to the next its not really like pushing space out of the way or occupying new space but its more like pixels where your fingers disappearing and reappearing very quickly in the interim of that movement  . (like thats what it would look like if u were to view the smallest individual things in the finger, u feel me) so first of all was he telling me the truth and if he is and thats the way the universe works then what can be said about things like biological systems that function on this macroscopic scale where things obey different rules ? what is the cause-determinant of the macroscopic thing and is this what they mean they say the universe is fine tuned? what is the fine tuner ? 

bluefin

Sean pls, any light you can shed on this Boards of Canada interview quote:

"We were in Germany with Autechre and we were all pissed off 'cos we hadn't been provided with a trailer. Sean from Autechre broke into someone else's trailer and stole loads of champagne, distributed them to everyone then got so plastered that he rugby-tackled a certain electronic artist into the mud!"

yeah it was really muddy, like insanely muddy, and i was already somehow covered in mud, and i was really beyond drunk at that point cos we didn't have to play (our tent was flooded and cancelled) and i had already downed a couple of bottles of champagne -  i thought it would be a really good idea to try and push mike paradinas into the mud (he seemed to be really concerned about getting any mud on him at all). anyway it failed and i ended up face down in a load of mud next to him, but he got pissed off about getting some mud on his wrist, so I WIN

Hi Autechre, your music has defined my past 10 years of electronic enjoyment and helped me escape trance music clubbing. Tru facts!

Thanks for agreeing to do AAA, so far it has been very exciting to read your thoughts and really cements you as proper top geezers.

 

Here's my question.

 

Do you actively enjoy the live tours and festival gigs, or would you prefer to stay locked up in the studio making sounds?

In terms of UK festivals I cannot really see a specific festival that autechre could play at now.  With the demise of Bloc and Glade over the past few years, UK electronic festivals seem to be in a pretty shit state.

 

On a side note, there is a great little club in Oxford called The Bully, I really think you should do a gig there.  Hoofing soundsystem, and its basically a dark back room of a pub. 

 

Cheers thanks

 

PS

 

Spoiler

yeah we love touring but it's hard to stay out for long periods cos of the physical toll

we get uk festi offers but we usually turn them down, i don't really care where we play tho, the lineups are becoming the same across europe (a kind of annoying and weird level of sameness)

Who does the descending bass lines?

which ones?

both of us do that

How do you store and organize your own music? If you have a half finished track you might want to pick up later, where does it go, and what is it called?

it usually gets a descriptive filename and goes in the 'current' folder

Was there anything more distressing for a child in the UK growing up in the 80s than Threads? -

prob not tbh

i mean that and being repeatedly told while in primary school that we would prob never be able to get jobs 

How was to use Mac/ PC Supercollider or Max/ MSP for sound processing back then? Were there any major annoyances like lots of and catastrophic crashes? How was the audio latency? Did you record stuff played in real-time or you had to render that in a sound file?  What sound quality you could get the most in real-time?

we would never use sc live back then cos it could only really handle doing one thing at once on a laptop, apart from boring things like sound file playback etc.

it was good for realtime fft tho, and a few other things so u could load up a patch and do like 2 min of stuff with it, but you couldn't realistically do a full set unless your work was really boring

we got into max originally to make midi sequencers and so the first few years using it were crash free, but then we started making really simple synths in there so we could run the same midi patches without hardware and that was when it started crashing (just cos of poor/naive design really)

Have you guys noticed how the first tracks on several of your albums (probably all) sound like boats, ships, seas, water, pirates, wooden decks, sailing and  basically evoking an overall nautical theme of adventure on the high seas? A classic example of this being Xylin Room?

oh that's interesting

we also have a background in pirate radio

Will there be any project with Cunningham again ?
and do you guys like my interpretation of Eutow ?
wish you all the best

yeah we'd love to work with chris again at some point, and alex

both of them are visionary geniuses imo

Is Gen~ as useful as cycling 74 make out ?

i dunno what they make out

it's prob more useful than reaktor core

(i will prob get flamed to fuck now for saying that)

Whats your favourite album, of your own and of someone else's work.

i find these kind of Qs impossible

depends on context and timing

Is improvised jazz a point of reference for the way you approach your live sets?

 

Edit: Doh a similar question was just asked..

no not for me anyway, i would like to think there's a bit more organisation involved, we do bounce off each other yeah - loads more every time we go out live, compared to old gigs, but i wouldn't like to totally jazz out on stage, it seems like the wrong kind of indulgence.

Are there any tracks that were released under the Autechre banner - specifically your own work, not remixes for others - that you've since listened back to down the line and thought "I wish we'd have done that one differently"? Not necessarily from the point of view of finding your earlier work being 'of simpler times' or when you had less production knowledge compared to today... more perhaps that you felt you could have improved a track by re-working elements of it, spent more time to achieve what you originally meant to do but were constrained by time, technical limitations, etc?

not usually anything to do with tech limitations, but sometimes i think about decisions i would make differently now.  time is a weird thing, esp when it comes to music.  it's usually to do with something i didn't notice originally.  i try to learn from it when it happens

Do you guys plan to or want to work with Alex Rutterford again? 

we want to, i think he wants to, but we've not been in touch for a bit

but yeah i reckon yes to both

sean, do you have pets? like a cat that just lies there when you're making sounds? cats are awesome pets

i used to have a cat

not presently but i reckon i will again in the future

yeah cats are mental, really 

Will there be any project with Cunningham again ?
and do you guys like my interpretation of Eutow ?
wish you all the best

oh sorry u asked about the eutow vid , i wasn't blanking you I'm just being hasty

yeah i mean, its kind of fun, the footwork is kind of electro-ish

Thanks a lot for your answer! I'm also interested in how developments in electronic music are shared and become developments rather than personal preference... I was asking about facelessness because in architecture and industrial design there's a lot of talk about humbleness and ego and most of it is just a load of bollocks to be honest, and electronic music while also being a form of design seems to do things in a different way, the community and the way innovations are received seem to be different, and I thought it could be interesting to study different structures of how design is organised.

 

i'm a #1 shit talker anyway so sorry about that

 

By the way, what do you think about Amiga demos, that kind of aesthetic, that kind of product and that kind of community?

architects are worse than rockstars

i think the main difference is the social element is more readily acknowledged in music circles, but architects (and to an extent designers) position themselves above it or outside it a lot. i think that's why there's been this drive toward functionalism again lately (altho even by framing it as an -ism they still manage to achieve some kind of intellectual superiority)

ok so i know nothing about architecture, pls disregard prev paragraph

as far as retro computing - well i like it if i see people doing new things with old machines, same as i like new things on new machines

it's more about the actual output for me, if it's too much about the computer itself or about the past i get bored (that's more like a fashion thing really tho)

Have you considered releasing a remix compilation and what do you think of the bootleg Laxir compilation thats all over the net? I for one would prefer good quality versions of all of these tracks.  A 7-CD box in a similar vein to the EPs box a couple of years ago would make me gush.

licensing nightmare

we suggested it to warp back when there were only about 40 of them and they passed on it

if any labels wanna do it, contact us (if you want it to be above board that is, cos trademark issues)

When you guys are organizing files and revisions do you do the recursive ocd thing where you make a 'finished' folder and then a 'finished finished' subfolder and then a 'finished finished finished' subsubfolder? ...or any such tendencies?

nah tbh i just have a load of archive, and then i have one current folder for tracks, and another for jams (which is a lot more full and hectic)

 

 

How do you store and organize your own music? If you have a half finished track you might want to pick up later, where does it go, and what is it called?

it usually gets a descriptive filename and goes in the 'current' folder

 

Is the 'current' folder huge? Presumably you have reams and reams of outtakes, alternate versions(like the Quaristice eps), and tracks that didn't really go anywhere. Do you bother to organize them at all, listen to them, or do they just get sorted by year and forgotten about?

 

well it can get pretty huge when we're close to release but then after release it all gets mothballed and yeah, sorted by album usually, sprawling huge folders

Serious question: the L-event EP were outtakes from Exai, or same-level songs that you wanted to release separately? Because, totally in my opinion, I find them a bit not so good to be on Exai. I mean, Exai songs have something L-event songs don't have, I repeat, In my opinion.

the tracks are from the same sessions but they got separated out when we compiled exai

basically it was all compiled as a series of 12" records, and l-event was the one that didn't fit, so that became a separate entity

it was originally going to come out before exai but warp flipped the release order

having said that we see l-event as interchangeable with any of the 12"s in exai (which we see as a box of four 12"s)

What was it like to be making the beatless and more drone-oriented stuff for the Hafler Trio collab?

 

You were saying earlier that you'd have a hard time making more 'academic, rigid' music without beats or flexibility but some would view those recordings as that.

 

Also, are you pleased with the end result? Seeing as, on here at least, quite a few people were a bit wtf over them.

 

I love them btw.

well we approached it as though we were temporary members of the hafler trio, formally deferential to andrew

if we had put beats over it that would have made it more boring for us

working with him on that gave us the opportunity to explore some of his territory without plagiarising him too much (while simultaneously plagiarising him too much)

he's a brilliant man

inb4 awepittance says something petty

 

 

I mean, Exai songs have something L-event songs don't have, I repeat, In my opinion.

 

Here's a question for you: why would you say something so dumb?

 

Hey mate, I said it was my opinion. More accurate: my feelings.

 

yeah don't feel like you can't say negative stuff ITT, i might not respond directly but that's just cos it's hard to answer if you don't agree sometimes

Do you guys ever name your gear?

 

 

p.s. can you please please name my MPC4000 for me?

your mpc is now called 'derek'

What are your thoughts on Grime? Think you have mentioned liking Terror Danjah before, what other producers and MC's are you into?

where some of the tracks on exai influenced by heavy sub/bass music?

Edited by Sean Ae, 02 November 2013 - 02:45 PM.

When you make music do you also have some kind of visual or physical object around you (like a lavalamp,trees outside or pictures etc)?



 

depends, theres usually a screen somewhere but anything could be on it, sometimes i just put films on silently

i actually made a few jitter patches around exai time that i would leave running on another computer with some midi and audio hookup from the patches making the tracks, that was pretty nice

Valis is indeed an amazing novel!

 

Have you read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch?

 

mind blowing stuff....

 

and I with Lumpster on having my mind blown that Gantz Graf was written during the EP7 sessions, wow!

 

You guys waited for the perfect opportunity to release one of the greatest tracks ever.

not yet, i will next, thanks

Have the recent net genres (witch house, future bass, vaporwave, etc) caught your interest at all, and will they possibly (or have they already) affect your music? How do you feel about them? Have you ever thought about trying to do things with the artists from it, like Fatima al Qadiri or Vektroid? Or even Oneohtrix Point Never?

i got diff opinions on all them genres tbh, some aspects of vaporwave make sense to me, others don't

witch house makes me laugh. it's like, there was a time when that would have just been one record, but anything can become a bandwagon now, so many people producing

i like 0pn a lot

- have you ever tried your hand at rapping over your tracks? 

you really don't want a detailed answer to that q

Have you ever released music under a pseudonym that we do not know about?
 

probably

For both of you I suppose - What's it like to meet another person who really understands and complements your aesthetic sense? Did the creative potential between you two click immediately? And what is it like to work with said person for over 25 years in a serious productive capacity? Do you both find this easier and more encouraging than simply working alone - quality control but also a dialog back and forth? I'm jealous...

 

Sean, you spoke about architects and their awful egos briefly and I recall you had some architectural training. In what way do you see your music composition as a construction of space? Do you think of yourself as an architect of sorts? The cover of Draft brings to my mind Lebbeus Woods, and even early Cavity Job graffiti style lettering reminds me of 80s-90s Morphosis diagramming. Other electronic musicians have also studied architecture. Kouhei Matsunaga and Jeff Mills spring into my head. Mills especially has an ability in tracks like "Paradise" to create an almost static room of sound. Art historians have tried to connect architecture and music since the ancient greeks; do you think electronic music has brought itself closer in conceptual thought to architecture and space construction than previous musical styles? Is that interesting or important? lol I dunno - it's either you guys or maurizio when I'm at the drafting table - I think of these two art styles as one and the same.

ok so

yeah i mean we learned about making tracks at the same time so we didn't really come to the table with pre-formed ideas as it were, just a mutual understanding of what tracks that were out at the time had things we liked going on (and tbh there were other people around us who liked the same thing)

i think it was the weird way that we learned about what we were doing that we shared, and that's the main thing that marks us out (if anything)

dave hanal was doing amazing graff back in 87, he was a huge influence tbh (and all the things we all liked like 2000AD, ridley scott etc)

but you're right you see the same line and angles popping up all over, some kind of basic shared understanding of dynamism i think

you know how some angles just look cooler than others, i never studied any visual art but the same kind of principles apply to music i think

and you can tell when other musicians have a sense of that, moritz is def one of them, and mills. i would put afx in there too, and gerald simpson, stakker, they all have a kind of angular thing going on

kind of hard to explain cos i never bothered coming up with a decent textual way to describe it

do you know who killed Phobs?

i haven't been there for so long now

how is it still online?

Whoa thanks so much guys, this is a real treat!

 

Your use of reverb on the last few albums has been mind-blowing. Listening to d-sho qub for example, on good headphones, I feel like I'm in a chamber constantly expanding and contracting - totally mental. It's really inspired me to start messing around with weird arrays of comb filters and all-passes in max/msp, modulating delay times to try and toe the lines in between delay and reverb and harmonizer.

 

So my question - do you do most of your reverb experiments in Max? Are there other hardware/software techniques you like to use these days for lush atmospherics? And how important is the sense of space in your music?

yeah max  - and gen now as well is ace for anything feedback related

loads of my reverbs end up sounding nothing like a reverb, but that's why i got into it, cos there's all that grey area as you say, tbh that's one of the most enduring things for me, all the overlaps between physmod and reverbs

was using kyma for it a decade ago, well worth a try if you can get your hands on a capybara cheaply

As a fellow Manc, I find a really distinct synaesthetic connection between the structures and architectures in your work and the atmosphere of Manchester and the Pennines. Would you say your work is connected to the local landscape in that way?

yeah def

the water as well, the way the air smells

all that grey

are you playing any video games or old video games?  

lately just dodonpachi on my phone

have you guys ever considered producing a whole album devoted to hip-hop, with various guest MCs? would love to hear krs-one, kool keith and others like that rap over autechre beats!

i still wish krs had joined ultras

yeah i mean

thing is i rate ced gee so highly, i would feel a bit weird probably

but i would love to work with keith, and krs if he would stop fucking shouting

Do you think knowledge of 'process' or 'history' enhances art or is superfluous and beside the point?

 

 

Also, how much musique concrete (vs. pure gen) is in your process these days?

it's more that categorical description generalises the past into oblivion, and people even manage to fuck up teaching that properly, and i reckon we stand a better chance just picking gear up and fucking about

but it's not necessarily pointless, just depends on what you're actually trying to achieve, why, who for etc

it's mostly generated. like 95%

still using occasional samples but it's just nature telling us who's boss

- I'm guessing most of us fans, rightly or wrongly, organize your discography into certain periods with "transition" albums and "new direction" albums. Some people even suggest they can be grouped in 3's, so that for example Incunabula, Amber, and Tri Rep could be grouped together, then Chiastic/LP5/EP7, then Confield, Draft, Untilted (I don't think this really works, just saying). I'm wondering if you ever see certain albums in a similar light, meaning that when you finish it you think "well, we've taken that approach to its logical conclusion, not much more we can do with that sound, time to move on", or "I think there's more to dig in this vein, let's keep pushing it"?

 

If this at all applies, which albums do you yourselves see as the most groundbreaking? (and I don't necessarily mean in the sense of the global music scene, but more in terms of personal "eureka!" moments)

we don't really chart progress by album, it doesn't really work like that from our point of view

there's lots of stuff going on besides what ends up on the albums, and things aren't always released in sequence

but i can think of millions of tiny little realisations, i have several a day usually

hard to know which are the important ones

 

 

Thanks a lot for your answer! I'm also interested in how developments in electronic music are shared and become developments rather than personal preference... I was asking about facelessness because in architecture and industrial design there's a lot of talk about humbleness and ego and most of it is just a load of bollocks to be honest, and electronic music while also being a form of design seems to do things in a different way, the community and the way innovations are received seem to be different, and I thought it could be interesting to study different structures of how design is organised.

 

i'm a #1 shit talker anyway so sorry about that

 

By the way, what do you think about Amiga demos, that kind of aesthetic, that kind of product and that kind of community?

 

architects are worse than rockstars

 

i think the main difference is the social element is more readily acknowledged in music circles, but architects (and to an extent designers) position themselves above it or outside it a lot. i think that's why there's been this drive toward functionalism again lately (altho even by framing it as an -ism they still manage to achieve some kind of intellectual superiority)

 

ok so i know nothing about architecture, pls disregard prev paragraph

 

as far as retro computing - well i like it if i see people doing new things with old machines, same as i like new things on new machines

it's more about the actual output for me, if it's too much about the computer itself or about the past i get bored (that's more like a fashion thing really tho)

 

 

I understand where you're coming from in regard to architects and designers (i'm a graphic design and my brother is a architect but we do not try to remove our selves from the politics of our work, that in its self is a political statement anyway.) forgot where i was going with this, anyway, do you like the work of architect peter zumthor or graphic designer karel martens? two people i adore

 

both of you obviously know how to use synths and music programs very well, i find some people dismiss music if it doesn't show a certain level of technical know how which gets on my nerves because early wiley (i think he now has a good technical undestanding) or tracks like more fire crews 'oi' i love as much as autechre tracks. i doubt you do this. this is a statement not a Q, currently filling out a application form for a job, needed a break.

 

edit: complete rambling mess from me...

 

oi is unreal imo

still sounds futuristic to me now, prob still will in another 20 years

is the sample in deco loc david bowie?

 

(i'm too hi)

nah

i keep waiting for someone to get one of them but no one has yet

there are 2 main ones

do you or did you have recurring problems with acne? what were those experiences like?

i didn't

Any plans to release another AV DVD?

not plans but yeah would be cool in principle 

what is your favorite food?

 

edit: for unteleportman

i don't deal with these favourites Qs very well

but

probably unagi

I've always had ideas for music in my head but never tried to make any tracks, what are one or two things I would need to start making tracks?

Even just one thing or program.

 

Btw, loving Exai and L Event ;)

ableton is quick to learn if you want to do looping stuff

logic is better for more complex arrangements, also quick to learn

or any daw to be honest they all steal each others' features eventually

During the Oversteps warehouse gig in London I swear I heard the drums from "Lcc" at one point.  My mate passed out in the skanky portaloo's at the back after Haswell's insane set and missed the entire show. Lol at him.
 
I was also at Bloc festival so heard a massive difference in sets across the Oversteps tour; Bloc was very bass heavy with very little melodic content (or was that just the soundsystem?), Bocking St. was lush and full spectrum (ala the awesome Domino recording).  Do your live shows evolve organically as you tour between places, do you respond to how audiences react, and do you perform differently to different nations?
 
Basically, i'm really interested in your live shows and hope for more. 2010 was a long time ago.

is it ok to play home made video's with an autechre track

 

yes this is allowed

are you fans of Law and Order? Do you find SVU to be the superior show?

yeah my gf watches both, def prefer svu cos the dilemmas are way more weird

 

 

inb4 awepittance says something petty

Man, you know this place too well

 

which makes me wonder...Sean, do you remember answering "Watmm? What's Watmm?" to an interview back in 2008? Guess you've been dipping in a bit since then 

 

i was trying to be polite

yeah i mean, i come here, not as much if we don't have anything out but around release

everyone does it, they're all in here

have you ever met Gaz and Brian of FSOL? Are they really pompous, or just insane?

actually yeah

in 88 i was in salford college and brian was there, i would see gaz but like, down the corridor waiting impatiently

a guy on my course booked them to play at the riverside in hyde as stakker, and there were tapes going round college as well, they were college celebs for a brief time

i left college to buy gear after that, partly cos of their stuff being so good and him making it at home (rather than in the college studio)

they were key to us even existing, looking back if they hadn't been there i would prob be an engineer in some studio by now

Do you consider it a challenge that while you are working on a track, you have to be listening to it a lot? Or do you ever create without listening? Do you have any methods to avoid prematurely tiring your ears of a track and getting into situation where you can't see the forest for the trees? Is it enough to simply step away from the studio and go do something else, or is that the point at which you pull the oblique strategy cards out of your sleeves? Do you ever obliterate tracks to see what will happen (or is this an irrelevant analogy in an organic system of bifurcating iterations)?

just leave the room, do something else for 10 mins, go back in the room

yeah sometimes, completely destroy it, save as

Are you listening to any Music while you type your answers? If so what? (Or are you watching the X factor like I am right now!)

Are you going to retire these accounts after this thread and go back to being Troon and LUDD, or do you plan on posting occasionally under these aliases?

paranoid much?

Do you consider it a challenge that while you are working on a track, you have to be listening to it a lot? Or do you ever create without listening? Do you have any methods to avoid prematurely tiring your ears of a track and getting into situation where you can't see the forest for the trees? Is it enough to simply step away from the studio and go do something else, or is that the point at which you pull the oblique strategy cards out of your sleeves? Do you ever obliterate tracks to see what will happen (or is this an irrelevant analogy in an organic system of bifurcating iterations)?

just leave the room, do something else for 10 mins, go back in the room
 
yeah sometimes, completely destroy it, save as

This is great and feel much more personal than a Reddit AMA, or something similar. Thanks for doing this!

 

Do you ever feel that you have locked yourself in a musical style, even though you invented this style yourself? I guess your fans expect your music to sound a certain way, so is this ever an issue or do you simply just make whatever you like and that's the music we get?

yeah we just do what we like, we just ended up here by moving point to point, occasionally hopping branches

we didn't even make a style, it just seems that way from over there

What is my 2 week old baby thinking when he's listening to fleure?
 

Long winded rambly drunk post. It's saturday!

 

Do you think of yourselves as apart from the electronic music 'scene', or part of it?

There was a time, as referenced upthread, when you sound like you thought that you were very much part of something big, something new that was evolving and going exciting places which then swiftly turned out to not be the case.

I think of Autechre as an entity being somewhat outside the sphere of music in general. Your sound is singular; you're pretty much a subgenre of your own. But what about in relation to contemporary music and recent styles? We all know about the influence of hip hop on you, but do you hear your influence trickling through to anyone else? Are you/Would you be happy about such an impact? Pale imitations are ten a penny of course, but do you feel as if other artists have taken on board your output as you see it and run with it?

they might have, it's hard to tell from here

as far as impact is concerned, if anyone wants to adapt it that's cool, that's what it's all about

i don't think of our sound as being that singular, i just see a web of connections and us linked to a few of them, in the way all other music does the same thing (only maybe people take it more for granted with things like genre music)

what do you think of OPN new album (R+7)?

brilliant, weird as fuck

like he folded vaporwave inside out

context got obliterated, music just got handed a ton of new parameters

One more question. Have you ever had sounds in your head you haven't been able to "get out" musically, that you haven't been able to recreate?

not sounds so much as whole tracks

usually after some drugs trying to get to sleep i will get whole full morphing tracks going on, but i can never remember specifics, like dreams

i dunno about recreating

One more question. Have you ever had sounds in your head you haven't been able to "get out" musically, that you haven't been able to recreate?

 
not sounds so much as whole tracks
usually after some drugs trying to get to sleep i will get whole full morphing tracks going on, but i can never remember specifics, like dreams
i dunno about recreating

 

For both of you I suppose - What's it like to meet another person who really understands and complements your aesthetic sense? Did the creative potential between you two click immediately? And what is it like to work with said person for over 25 years in a serious productive capacity? Do you both find this easier and more encouraging than simply working alone - quality control but also a dialog back and forth? I'm jealous...

 

Sean, you spoke about architects and their awful egos briefly and I recall you had some architectural training. In what way do you see your music composition as a construction of space? Do you think of yourself as an architect of sorts? The cover of Draft brings to my mind Lebbeus Woods, and even early Cavity Job graffiti style lettering reminds me of 80s-90s Morphosis diagramming. Other electronic musicians have also studied architecture. Kouhei Matsunaga and Jeff Mills spring into my head. Mills especially has an ability in tracks like "Paradise" to create an almost static room of sound. Art historians have tried to connect architecture and music since the ancient greeks; do you think electronic music has brought itself closer in conceptual thought to architecture and space construction than previous musical styles? Is that interesting or important? lol I dunno - it's either you guys or maurizio when I'm at the drafting table - I think of these two art styles as one and the same.

 

Hey, dr lopez, how did you survive through arch school? Yesterday I decided I'm dropping out, I'll be working on a degree in philosophy, but I'm very frustrated because I'm not too bad at designing actually, and I wasted a few years, also I come from a working class family and university has basically ruined us, it's just nerve wracking and it's got me nowhere.

 

Ae, what do you think about architecture and music, not in the sense that music could be a construction of space, but in the sense that designers in general, not just architects, can have different ways of installing an order in a given place, or even inventing orders from preexisting conditions, and music can be structured in similar ways? I mean, the different approaches to form, and the many possible kinds of orders behind form, imply lots of things and you can sort of make a big deal out of them, so how do you approach structure? I mean, scrap the part about architecture, I just wanted to ask about form and structure.

 

I agree that architects are full of shit, by the way...

 

Also, could you tell me something about 4-op FM synths? I know it's a silly question (at least it's not as pretentious as the others) but I'm really attached to my DX21...

 

yeah the 4-op model lends itself well to some kinds of modelling and i think its cos of the number of surfaces and their diff harmonics roughly correlating with a physical object

structure i dunno i just try to make things that appeal to me stylistically, a bit like sketching out some graffiti (i never tried any other kind of design or drawing much, i got pretty into messing with letters, maybe the rules of form appealed to me)

music is a bit like that, at least the kind of music i like that has usually some sense of movement in space to it, it's usually fairly restricted structurally and i like flexing the structures but not quite breaking them, it creates a kind of tension

During the Oversteps warehouse gig in London I swear I heard the drums from "Lcc" at one point.  My mate passed out in the skanky portaloo's at the back after Haswell's insane set and missed the entire show. Lol at him.

 

I was also at Bloc festival so heard a massive difference in sets across the Oversteps tour; Bloc was very bass heavy with very little melodic content (or was that just the soundsystem?), Bocking St. was lush and full spectrum (ala the awesome Domino recording).  Do your live shows evolve organically as you tour between places, do you respond to how audiences react, and do you perform differently to different nations?

 

Basically, i'm really interested in your live shows and hope for more. 2010 was a long time ago.

oh yeah that bloc gig was terrible

some people think that if you just fill a room with f1 that it will sound good, that was one of those times

altho tbh we never really sound very good on f1

but that was horrible. there wasn't a lot we could do with it

do you look forward to the day when Benn Jordan  makes Diet Coke versions of your music?

as long as he does the beats on his guitar i don't care

This may be an annoying question, but I'm curious. Do you feel that you had to work and put effort into finishing your music at any time, particularly with incunabula and tri repetae when things were less well accepted?

I'm wondering if there is ever tedious work in the creative process.

not really

but i don't mind spending ages fiddling with something to make it good, that's how i learn stuff

 

 

Have the recent net genres (witch house, future bass, vaporwave, etc) caught your interest at all, and will they possibly (or have they already) affect your music? How do you feel about them? Have you ever thought about trying to do things with the artists from it, like Fatima al Qadiri or Vektroid? Or even Oneohtrix Point Never?

i got diff opinions on all them genres tbh, some aspects of vaporwave make sense to me, others don't

witch house makes me laugh. it's like, there was a time when that would have just been one record, but anything can become a bandwagon now, so many people producing

 

i like 0pn a lot

 

 

i noticed you all put a sam tiba song in your radio mix earlier this year. what do you guys think of the music coming out on marble records (if you're familiar with them enough to say)?

 

i'm not really

but i like that record for not being squarely in any genre -  and still being highly functional and stylish

how much did it cost 2 get the vocalist of uterus on Osla for n

 

toplel

What did you think of Grischa Lichtenberger's album "And IV (Inertia)"?

 

It fucking rules, if you have not heard it.  Get him to support you on the next tour, pls

 

 i like his stuff, nice aesthetic usually

who do u think is the funniest rapper? have u heard quelle chris yet  hes good 

 

do u think that a scene/concert/event being mostly full of dudes has an effect on the longevity of the 'scene' or whatevr?

it prob makes it last longer

 

is this how you envision yourselves creating music?

yes 

" naivete" versus "maturity, straight reasoning" regarding production ?

 

i think the more you grow accustomed with production techniques, the more you lose a kind of simple approach to making music, which can lead to boring or overly intellectual music.

 

is it important for you, whats your opinion  ?

 

if yes, how do you preserve an unsophisticated playfulnes?

 

keep moving out of your comfort zone

soon as you feel like something is easy, change things to taste 

follow taste where it leads you

You talk about seeing normal things from different angles...can you site an example of this? I'm really curious what this means to you exactly...

 

 

p.s. thanks so much for naming my MPC! Can you name my sh101 too? (It's grey, of course... )

say you're listening to a 303 and it might be part of an acid track but for like 20 seconds it sounds like a perspex sheet being hit with a spoon

your 101 is now called maca 

 

What is my 2 week old baby thinking when he's listening to fleure?
 

 

 

^ Literally lol.  Amazing. +50 internetz.

 

yeah it's ace

i wonder how much more synaesthetic babies are

are his eyes even fully working?

if you had a "Magic 8-Ball" right now, what question would you ask it, and why?

wtf are orbs?

do you wake up in the morning and sometimes just feel 'lush' ?

sean do you like Flep the dolphin? is it 'mental' ?

have you enjoyed the madness of bull wallet? http://bullwalletversions.tumblr.com/

yeah flip is correct in more or less every way, a masterpiece of shared modal processing

did you guys ever see this:

a fine example of quality journalism

 

 

is the sample in deco loc david bowie?

 

(i'm too hi)

 

nah

i keep waiting for someone to get one of them but no one has yet

there are 2 main ones

„Being Boiled“ by Human League? read that somewhere in a review...

 

nah

It has come to my attention that the beginning of Rsdio sounds very familiar to the percussion in this Merzbow track from Ecobondage, somewhere between 1:47 and 2:55
 


 

I asked on this forum if you guys sampled the Merzbow track, but the response was lukewarm, lots of doubters. I even went to whosampled.com and they rejected it.

If it's not from Ecobondage, then it's from another Merzbow track called Enclosure (from Enclosure / Libido Economy, Merzbow CD24) , which has similair percussion at some point



My question, so that it is made clear once and for all: Did you guys sample Merzbow's Ecobondage for Rsdio?

no it's a tiny click going thru a Boss RSD10, i only heard that when we got asked to remix him. pretty similar sound though

Are there any upcoming gescom plans?

nothing concrete, few things that might happen

what do you think of fl studio

never used it

kouhei uses it i think, his stuff's wicked

What is one track, by any artist at any era, that you listen to and enjoy every time?

acid eiffel by choice

Are you listening to any Music while you type your answers? If so what? (Or are you watching the X factor like I am right now!)

i'm testing my theory and listening to acid eiffel

it's good, it's doing it

Here's something that's more of personal interest to me, but I'll ask anyway - How did you get in touch with the directors for your videos back in the day? Did you know them before, or did Warp suggest some to you, ... ?

 

There haven't been any official ae-videos lately, and I don't know whether there are any plans for the future, but I'm wondering whether you ever look at "submissions" of wannabe- or low-profile-directors and such? Let's say, I have a showreel or something, send that to Warp or directly to you - would you even consider working with someone you haven't met or is it a waste of time?

I'm not thinking of anything in particular right now, I don't have anything, but your music is quite "visual" for me and I like to do music videos (ones that aren't just After Effects plug-ins..), so I'm thinking it'd be pretty neat to make one some day - Just a thought for the future.

 

If not, just tell me to fuck off now, I can take it.

Especially after I just got "removed" from the position of directing an upcoming video on Not Not Fun records (long story, it was porn-related ... )

chris was introduced to me by caroline, who is mates with chantal, in a club in london in 94. alex lived with chris at the time.

yeah pm me 

Edited by Sean Ae, 02 November 2013 - 05:33 PM.

Not sure if intelligible: Are there any artists who have works which came after yours but are similar in style/build to yours that you enjoy/admire/are flattered by?

tbh the way we chuck things about we overlap with a fuckload of things and it's hard to unravel where people got things from, often it's nothing to do with us

like someone like slugabed, when i first heard that i really got it but i could tell none of it had come from us, cos the references were pretty clear. with some things you can't tell at all.  even more mushy cos things that we used to do that required weird combinations of gear are now possible using one bit of software or kit, so hearing it on a record isn't so weird, they don't need to have heard of us

 

 

During the Oversteps warehouse gig in London I swear I heard the drums from "Lcc" at one point.  My mate passed out in the skanky portaloo's at the back after Haswell's insane set and missed the entire show. Lol at him.
 
I was also at Bloc festival so heard a massive difference in sets across the Oversteps tour; Bloc was very bass heavy with very little melodic content (or was that just the soundsystem?), Bocking St. was lush and full spectrum (ala the awesome Domino recording).  Do your live shows evolve organically as you tour between places, do you respond to how audiences react, and do you perform differently to different nations?
 
Basically, i'm really interested in your live shows and hope for more. 2010 was a long time ago.

iirc bloc was quite early on in that particular set, i remember not being able to hear the system properly, and the gig ended up a bit more ad hoc. Some venues have impeccable sound system and we get full confidence in what we hear is what you get, so it tends to fully kick off at those shows, domino was one of them, bloc turned out well under the circumstances tho.

 

last two times you played berlin at berghain had absolutely terrible sound unfortunately... you could virtually hear nothing but the bass, really annoying crowd there too. and way too much light.

that's not a question though - so: maybe next time you come around you could choose another venue pls?

 

yeah ok

Hello!

 

I hope these few questions are not too intrusive:

 

If you had to pick one, what is your favorite Max/MSP object?

 

What were a few barriers, or failures you two had to break through in Max/MSP before you could really start flowing with music creation?

 

Do you use RME converters?

 

Your rhythms in your last few albums have been entrancing to me because of how natural they sound. Do you program your sequences in a gridless format, with a lot of steps (64, 128, etc) or are you doing long jams with velocity sensitive pads to keep yourselves interested?

 

Just a few random questions, thank you for any answers! You two are both my musical heroes. =)

zl

it happened really quickly cos i was coming from being really into logic's environment window, so i was making tracks within a couple of weeks

yes we do

most of the rhythm is generated, there is no grid as such but we use grid type divisions to do some things 

What's the best scifi movie you've ever seen?

Alien

Sorry to push the question Sean but would you and Rob consider putting out the Quaristice live set for download? Or a purchase release?

i don't think we recorded any

- Do you often revisit your old tracks? if so, do you tend to revisit unreleased material or certain released work more?

 

- Are there any tracks of yours or periods of work that immediately remind you of some important moment in your life? If so, do you care to share it with us? 

both, it depends

yeah loads

How many unreleased tracks do you have?

depends on what you mean by tracks

actual finished tracks - just a few hundred, but got tons of jams that need an edit

done about 350 hours of jams since april this year

Sean, was that your previously-mentioned cat at the end of Tewe?  

 

And this is probably way off the mark (sorry, I know nothing about production): was there any conscious decision to sort of explore and widen the stereo/imaging aspect of the music on Exai/L-Event?  Seems like a lot of older Ae output had a very effective use of, like, a predominant mono backbone with interesting stereo events fleshing things out a bit spatially on occasion, whereas Exai has this massive sense of exploration all around the stereofield.  Some really cool psychoacoustic stuff going on.  Sorry if this is full of shit, and seriously, thank you both.

yeah that's winterbottom, first cat i lived with, he was ace

yeah i'm getting more into having two speakers again. we used to do it more early on as well but more crudely

 

Sean, was that your previously-mentioned cat at the end of Tewe?  
 
And this is probably way off the mark (sorry, I know nothing about production): was there any conscious decision to sort of explore and widen the stereo/imaging aspect of the music on Exai/L-Event?  Seems like a lot of older Ae output had a very effective use of, like, a predominant mono backbone with interesting stereo events fleshing things out a bit spatially on occasion, whereas Exai has this massive sense of exploration all around the stereofield.  Some really cool psychoacoustic stuff going on.  Sorry if this is full of shit, and seriously, thank you both.

Yes, there are multiple tracks in LP5 that are almost entirely in mono - was this a conscious decision to concentrate on harmonic and rhythmical content rather than spatial imaging ?

 

yeah exactly, across a different dimension 

Hello to the Great Britain and please excuse my English,

 

I have a specific question as I am interested in music production for several years and making an album for few years now. I am thinking of this very often while listening to your music:

 

Do you spend a lot of time choosing and crafting reverbs for your tracks? Or is it something that you make intuitively - not thinking too much?

 

I am asking because many of your tracks like Xylin Room or Tilapia sounds fairly dry on the first listening but yet they have very distinct vibe and depth as if some super-gentle reverbs and delays were used to craft the space as there are no obvious echoes and reverb tails. Xylin Room sounds claustrophobic yet very 3D but the mix is almost mono. Tilapia sounds very spacious, some sounds are distant but again it has this vacuum feel into it. I simply absolutely love it (not even mentioning the incredible compostion). This question unanswered seriously affects my sleeping everytime I mix some "to be dry" track but if some "secret" techniques are involved I will respectfully and diligently continue trying to achieve it by myself :-)

 

Please, take this question also as my big "thank you" for your incredible work and tons of inspiration and emotions you gave me. I am a proud owner of most of your discography and you have seriously changed my view on music in all ways. You have also made me to register here on WATMM and pay their basic subscription for this single post.

 

All the best from the Czech Republic.

 

PS: I am very sorry I could not be in Brno while you played in Fleda during Oversteps tour, I was more into Orbital that time and had known only Amber... :-))

 

Jev

tbh a lot of that on draft was done with amp envelopes, but there are some really light touches of quadraverb and lexicon on select parts as well, usually with some feedback matrixing thru quite brutal eq and really quiet in the mix

we were also doing stuff like making 2 melodies with slightly different notes or in a different order and then sending the muted one to the reverb and mixing the reverb quite low so you almost can't tell

after 20 years of insane music crafting, is this the best videoclip for newbound?

 

i love that one flash where she's looking to the left

Is this really one of your patches or is it someone just aping your methods ?

it's been modified a fair bit

tbh the original was pretty messy though, nothing was encapsulated cos i kept rewiring bits

A few questions here. 

 

What are your favorite kinds of tea? (Mine are Japanese Green Tea and Lapsang souchong <- now that I think about it that looks like a track title lol) 

 

Do you guys like Autumn?

 

Is there a dog barking in IV VV IV VV VIII?

 

Why is Theme of Sudden Roundabout so catchy and also why is the melody so fucking weird?

 

Any cool tips or things I can do in Logic? Been using it for many years but was wondering if you guys have found some weird stuff that can be done within it.

 

Your guys' favorite fruit?

 

Will you name my Machinedrum and Axiom 61 keyboard? (Jealous of Limpy :< )

genmaicha

yeah loads

no

dunno, dunno

logic still has the event list from creator, which we used to cane

and the environment window is really useful for doing odd things with midi

strawberries, not really cos they taste the best just cos it does my head in that it is a natural flavour

it's so much like a man made thing, like a sweet or something

There's a thread on this forum somewhere titled "Is autechre relevant anymore?"


And all I want to know about that is....


Have you guys ever read my Autechre's Relevant Career Text Adventure?

yeah i kind of wish this was real

and i don't at the same time

Just want to give a massive thanks to AE for all the music over the years. Very cool to do this!

Sean, in reply to your comment about Grant / Rephlex, what do you make of Rephlex' recent output and the strategy behind it (or: do you like or follow any of the recent Rephlex artists/releases)? How secretive does a label/artist need to get to let it be just about the music? Is there a point behind it that you can identify with on the theme of it being ´just about the music´ and how do you act on that idea (for example, around Exai and L-Event there was only 1 or maybe 2 interview, a lot less then with previous releases I think?)

 

And because you put a Necrophagist track years ago in a mix: black metal or death metal? Any faves? What do you prefer about it, the complexity, atmosphere/feel or melodic side of metal?

ah man it's like

just let people present things the way they feel comfortable

rich was always hiding behind tables and things

we didn't want to discuss exai on release at all we wanted to see what people could figure out

i really like sleep terror, it's so flattened and designed, like hyper futurist

i like the precision of the good technical stuff and really into the angles of it all, the geometry of it appeals to me

 

after 20 years of insane music crafting, is this the best videoclip for newbound?

 

 

yes, how do you feel about people excessively dancing to your music, and girls in particular, seeing as this seems to be one of the rare documented occasions?

also, how would a modern ae dance track sound like?

 

but we are making dance music

thanks for answering all these questions! this is great.

 

I'm curious, have you heard boc's early works like acid memories, hooper bay & play by numbers?

 

I read somewhere once, that soon after you first listened to 'twoism', you contacted them, which eventually led to them recording 'hi scores' for skam. 

so I thought maybe you've heard some of their earlier recordings. If you have heard them, what did you think?  

nah i just got old tunes vols one and two

and box maxima later

brilliant tho, still cane them

hello ae!

wanted to ask about Metroid Prime. where you involved in it?

also does the "Autechre" track still exists?

will it ever see the light of day?

 

Thanks

sorry we signed an NDA

Btw, Sean or Rob, are you aware of a radio broadcast in the Netherlands back in 2008 where your music was played for 30 minutes (listeners have a chance of 'reserving' 30 minutes to show and tell their fave music) which pissed off the host beyond belief? He only allowed it because it was the basic rule of the whole program, but he was really bummed out by it and said that this would lose a lot of his listeners. Also, they continuously tried to pronounce AE track names and he literally warned listeners about how long the tracks would last before playing them.

that sounds ace

is there a recording?

If the are Elements Of Hip Hop are:
1. Bboying
2. MCing
3. Graffiti
4. DJing
5. Knowledge, Culture and Overstanding

What are the elements of IDM?

ask someone who makes idm

Do you think that in a distant future electronic music will eventually replace all human-acoustic-instrumental music? Do you think that computers will ever replace hardware completely? And, in that distant future, would you consider yourselves to be "early" pioneers of the genre, or be regarded as one of them?

computers are hardware, just highly configurable

nah we're not pioneers of anything, we're just using stuff that's around us

Do you guys like Osla for n alot?  I don't understand how it fits into L-event at all

it's like when there's a word in a sentence that you don't recognise

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand you guys toured in Japan back in '05. What were some of your favourite things about being in Japan in general? (like the local food, the shops, etc) I'm curious cos I used to live in the north (Hokkaido).

we're never there long enough to get familiar with it

i think tbh that's what i like, how weirdly impregnable it is

like an impossible game

that and the shape of everything

talking about deco loc is the percusion a sample of wood or did you make out of bits and bites?

 

i'm sorry i have no idea about production

yeah it's wood and rubber

eletronic musicians tend to be quite anonymous 
but have you ever thought incorporating fans in to the creative process may it be creating beats or just something as simple as a cover art?
oh btw. would you consider your music accidental?

technically everything is accidental

yeah we do that already via feedback loops like this

Sean will u use MAX again?

the majority of oversteps and exai tracks were done using max

Can you name my Boss SP-303 sampler?

your sp-303 is now called agnetha

having the internet around nowadays people either make autechre influenced tracks, make autechre music videos or even spend some time analysing your music and doing some type of essay

do you feel flattered by that or does it make you feel uncomfortable?

neither

I had no idea this was happening today.  Thanks a lot to everyone involved to make this happen.

 

I didn't read the whole thread yet, so maybe this question's already been answered:

Do you guys mix in quad or 5.1?  I have to assume that playing around with the textures and sounds you guys produce must lend itself to 5.1 mixing.  It seems to be made for it at times.  And of course it would be great to have Autechre 5.1 mixes as well as LtRt's in the future sometime.

Thanks again.

not yet but maybe in the future for something, depends

did you ever regret making a track? if so which one? would you change them if you could?

i made some shit ones but i don't regret making them cos i learned how not to make shit tracks by doing them

Here, have a 13x13 pixels Exai cover art.

haha this is so awesome

thanks

so you like the venue to be dark, but what about over-the-top visuals like Amon Tobin's ISAM? (did you see it?) do you think something similar would work for an autechre set? i mean obviously the identity of the space is still there, but the crowd gets really focused on an object etc that's in front of them - so in that sense it gets removed..right? 

it's not just about removing identity it's about occupying the space with sound

it's something that used to happen in really dark clubs and warehouses, the sound became more physical and tangible, it works my synaesthesia more

what i like about sound is how it surrounds you, you are inside it even if it's coming out of one speaker

visual things can't really do that yet

oh not to mention the cheesiness of using projection mapping, it's like a corporate presentation or something 

do you like germany? would you do some kind of tour here?

yeah a lot, yeah we will

Hey guys, you've been a huge inspiration for me to make music, so thank you!! The possibilities of aural combinations and sound-scapes are virtually endless now with computers, which can be quite scary when you step up to a blank slate. You can go in ANY direction with any sound on a given track, and that just makes my head spin sometimes. I guess as a fellow explorer of the limitless electronic nebula my questions are:

 

• Do you go through a whole bunch of ideas/sounds/doodles before finding one worth polishing?
• How to you keep that "momentum" for a track going when you have to save it and come back to it the following days?
• Do you run into dry spells... times when you have all kinds of creative energy and drive but are unable to make anything decent?

I can't help get discouraged sometimes when making tracks, like I'll have a ton of lush individual sounds but no way to link them, or just a 10-20 second "clip" that I'll be unable to flesh out into a whole song. I get the sporadic drive to bang out a song maybe once every 50-100 ideas or sketches I make. This isn't something I plan on giving up on, this is a life path, something that I'll do until I'm dead because nothing beats that moment when things just "click" and you're bobbing your head to your own stuff. I'm just wondering if you had some tips for those times when nothing seems to be working out.

i tend to get into building something, usually when i'm doing that i'll notice something weird along the way and go off on some tangent exploring it, follow that trail where it leads

personal question and it feels weird typing this but here we go...

so the reason I asked multiple questions re elektron gear earlier is, I've been working on reverse-engineering their kit (MD & A4) and writing an app which uses the MIDI sysex interface to generate & remix patterns & kits/sounds on the fly, basically multiplying your hands & doing arithmetic-based things one likely wouldn't put into the sequencer by hand.

now, frankly... a big inspiration for doing this, and actually for coding in general, was and is your music. It likely wouldn't have occured to me that code can be a design tool at all if it weren't for Draft 7.30...

you said you're not using elektron kit anymore... would you be interested in having a look at that software i'm doing nonetheless?

i can't run it tho cos my elektrons are on loan atm

Edited by Sean Ae, 02 November 2013 - 07:22 PM.

anyone you still want to collaborate with or remix?

yeah, DM

Has Ae done any recent remixes? Anything that will see a release?

yeah, oberman knocks, out sometime soonish

was the way of doing flutter a one-off experiment or ever thought of doing something like that again? Also, would you mind and sharing a bit o the process with flutter IT IS a complicated track to begin with...we DO know what its purpose was...still...nothing more

it's just a roland r8 doing the patterns and drum sounds, quadraverb doing the delay and reverb, sampler on melodic duties, all written on pads

You may have answered this before, but of what gear does your home listening environment consist?  Have you put a lot of time and effort into creating an optimal listening area?

 

oh, and thanks for answer my earlier question.

nah i listen to stuff all over the place

but in the studio i'm still using dynaudio bm-15a's, set up pretty nicely but not too bothered about reflections, loads of gear in here

did rdj really go into your studio and take your sample tapes and mix them up or something and you got mad lol

sounds like chinese whispers

sorry if this has already been asked (still reading the thread but wanted to get this question out!)..

 

Can you shed some light on the composition process for Oversteps? It almost seems as though the main melodies/chord progressions were composed traditionally with a generative process used to add flourishes to the existing melodic content—is there any truth behind this? It's also quite a strange album in your discography since it doesn't seem to share a similarity to anything before or after (besides Move of Ten, but I consider that and Oversteps to be a package deal); are there any plans to re-visit this sound or build upon it? 

most of it's markov chain stuff done in max, with conditionals forcing scales and harmonies

we still have those sequencers but we developed them a fair amount since, they're not as trad as they were then

Just came across the thread and am still catching up so I apologize if these questions have been asked already:
 
The first webcast stream you two did in April of 05 had about 45ish minutes of ambience. Where did that come from, and did it get put into any released tracks? If not, you should do more heavy ambience like that. It's pretty great in the right moods (much like Perlence subrange 3-63).
You mentioned the We R Are Why EP was all done on a ry30. Are there any other EPs or perhaps some single tracks that were composed almost entirely on one piece of equipment? If there's a bunch, just maybe one or two examples would be cool!
How many Bronchus' are there?
Do either of you listen to much metal? There was that one track in the FACT Mix...
About a minute into Pro Radii there's the vocal snippet that sounds like "break;" is that a sample or not?
Have you ever come across a recording you did and had no clue how the hell you got those sounds? Any examples of this in tracks we know?
Thanks for the consistently great music. Feel free to ignore any questions if you just want to answer one or two.

I heard a friend say that 10ish years ago you played at a venue called the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio. Will any shows in or near Columbus happen again? Every cool electronic act seems to be going towards Europe these days, and I can never get a chance to see them.
 
Related but not entirely: do you ever do house shows, and have you considered doing more?

Hi Guys
1. How does it feel knowing that your music is being played by people/fans all over the world in so many different scenarios/settings?
I remember hearing your music being played on a ghetto blaster by some woman. I was riding the Sakura Jima ferry to attend a wedding that was being hosted on the island. It was 35 degrees and I was sweating my ass of in my suit, all of a sudden I hear this insanely loud music coming from the other end of the deck, and I realized it was one of your tracks. It was so inappropriately loud and awesome at the same time. This smoking hot girl was playing your music and she didn't give a fuck what anything thought about it. It was an unforgettable moment. I realized how cool it must be to make music with that kind of reach or impact on people.
Thanks
Adam

as a listener/fan of your music, i've found that your music changes how it sounds and opens itself up the more you listen to it. even with confield or draft, released 10+ years ago, i can listen to these albums and still notice something new or different despite it being my billionth or so listen. like an effect or synth somewhere in the mix will come upfront and play with the rhythms and sounds and entirely change how i listen + appreciate the song. 
 
you mentioned earlier that you still sometimes listen to your earlier albums. and i'm wondering if your perception of your own music changes much after the album has been released. 
or if being involved in the creative process has more or less set in stone what the songs sound like to you?
 
also, is there anything in particular you would like to ask watmm? 
 
(also, thank you for coming to australia and playing an amazing show from your oversteps set, and thank you for doing this ask autechre anything!)

Are you big into Scrabble?  If so, what was your highest scoring bingo?
 
What should I listen to on my way to the studio this Tuesday afternoon?

do you think about emotions when making tracks? becuase I played VLETmx for a friend of mine and he found it so emotional that he literally broke down and cried

What is one track, by any artist at any era, that you listen to and enjoy every time?

 
acid eiffel by choice

Thanks again for doing this. You guys are the best.
 
Do either of you consider Gescom - ISS-SA a part of the Ae discography? (I ask because I separate my albums by artist)
 
Als0 u may haev the hono(u)r of naming my kalimba andor Akai HR-16 (his current name is Dusty)

Hello Ae,
 
I was wondering if you have a piece of hardware (instrument/effect, not computer) which you rely on and use frequently as a 'go to', due to the character/magic it brings.
 
Also wondering what your worst hardware disaster was - as in, spilling orange juice on a computer type of disaster.
 
Cheers

also have you ever thought of doing an aduio/visual collab like you do the tracks and then someone else (or even you) create visuals ...like videos for every track of an album? would it be something you would want to try or is it something you don't want to get your fingers dirty with?

it would prob take a while, but yeah if it was feasible there's no reason we wouldn't

when you make music ...before you release the tracks to the public do you get some third party with a fresh ear to comment or is it more like "We do what the fuck we want" kind of approach?

when you ask a question is it always in the form of a false opposition or do you sometimes forget?

Oh and yet one more question for you, Sean:

 

Do you know Dabrye's (Tadd Mullinix) music? If yes do you enjoy his work and would you consider colab/remix with him?

 

Thanks.

yeah i love his stuff

i dunno about collab tho, he does p well on his own imo

L-event is on crazy rotation. You guys rule.

 

I'm also curious - it was asked, but I'll chime in again: do you guys have dayjobs too or is it Ae 24/7 for the most part?

 

Thanks!

we don't have jobs other than ae

Would you guys like to collab with Clark? Think his unique sounds + your guys' would turn out lush.

 

Sean will you not name by machinedrum and axoim 61 keyboard? 

Without a name they will have no personality.

Without personality they will have no sounds.

Without sounds I cannot make the musics.

Without the musics there is no me.

your machinedrum is now called santander

your axiom 61 is now called joey

why do you think that some people perceive your music as noise (to quote someone, "are your speakers broken?") but others find it incredibly beautiful and emotionally stirring? this also goes for experimental electronic music in general.

no idea

different kinds of brain maybe

 

 

anyone you still want to collaborate with or remix?

 

yeah, DM

 

You mean Depeche Mode?

 

yeah

how much stuff in autechre is about mocking ...what I mean by that is autechre has always been about anonymity...and also having strange tracktiles...it almost seems as if you name tracks simply because of the fact that you have to do so...am I just incredibly spaced out or is any kind of truth in that?

how is autechre about anonymity?  

Do you remember asking me "watmm? What's watmm?" When we did a phoner interview in 2008 just before Quaristice release. And here we are now... :) you also personally made my day back at the time by stating that you'd listened to some of our old tunes - Rubens 'bank holiday'. Pure magic. We talked about Ruth from Krush who worked for Sound control in Sheffield... I was interviewing you for sound controls mag at the time. Anyway... Latest EP is your most polished since Envane or Anvil Vapre. Top marks for still slinging massive left hooks.

yeah that was a good interview 

i forgot that about ruth joy, it's mad that she worked there

If you don't live near each other, do you only see each other when you go on tour? If so are you ever surprised how skinny/fat/old the other has gotten? 

 

(disregard if you video chat)

lolno, we work together on stuff as well, we're only a couple of hours apart. i mean that's probably a lot to people who never leave the uk but it's trivial for us, anything over an hour kind of needs 3 day visits anyway.  

how did you teach yourself? did you read up on computer programming? dsp reading? have you ever read old books like the allan strange synthesis book, did you have to re-learn Maths to develop your custom patches? Stuff like your aleatoric sound, did you just do it trial and error? Did you have to educate yourself in any specific way to build your sequencers? 

i just learn stuff as i go, but patchily and not in terms of high level techniques at all.  i did have to learn some new physics a few years ago but usually i just need tiny bits of info to get on with what i'm doing.

lots of trial and error as well.  

How do you personally view Quaristice? For me, it marked an end to a period that started around Confield where sound design was a much more critical element of your released output. Oversteps marked a transition to more mature review of previous ingredients. Sonically familiar but novel style and still hitting the nail right on the head, despite passing of more time. Do you recognise the so-called periods of work or fans appreciation of a given release?

i recognise that they recognise it, but it's not as strictly delineated as i often read

still, who wants to read a paragraph every time

They taught themselves with tape deck edititing

this is true to an extent cos i didn't know anything about how machines worked but i learned a lot about how rhythm works just by doing tape edits

Hello Ae,

 

I was wondering if you have a piece of hardware (instrument/effect, not computer) which you rely on and use frequently as a 'go to', due to the character/magic it brings.

 

Also wondering what your worst hardware disaster was - as in, spilling orange juice on a computer type of disaster.

 

Cheers

over the years there have been several pieces that we've fallen in love with for one reason or another, but atm it's mostly stuff we built

which i guess is kind of weird but it's just turned out that way, i have goto modules now instead of bits of hardware

oh yeah once i knocked a whole mug of tea over mat steel's new atari

he was surprisingly cool about it

Edited by Sean Ae, 03 November 2013 - 07:10 AM.

do you still think UFOs are real?, ever had a sighting/close encounter?

 

 

yeah

yeah

I felt a solid Miami bass/electro vibe in some of your earlier albums/eps.  Any truth in that? 

yeah - dave storrs, andre manuel, egyptian lover, aldo marin, arthur baker, juan atkins

Any healthy living tips for those of us who, like you guys (I imagine), are stuck either by choice or necessity inside in front of a computer or LCD screen for long periods of time working? Get up often, take breaks, get some sun, etc?

 

Is there an Ae workout plan or diet regimen you’d recommend? I am actually not joking, btw. Personally I’ve been experimenting lately with a mostly gluten-free diet, which is a pain but seems to be treating me much better. 

standing desks are good if you can handle them

altho tbh asking me for health tips prob isn't the best idea

Can we get explicit confirmation 

nah

hi autechre Dont you think Another world was cooler than Flashback ? I could never get past the start of that + I think they were made by the same people or something

 

 

 

thanks

i just picked that av cos i expected flashbacks (i was right)

tbh i feel a bit like conrad right now

Hey guys,

 

So first time I saw you was around this time of year in 98 in NYC at the Other Music warehouse party for the launch of their website (!!). I remember it being pretty mental (w Plaid and Stockhausen+Walkman).

 

Was this set recorded? Any memories of that night?

 

Also: I was super excited when you played that Herb Alpert track in the radio mix. One of my favorite jams. Production is deep as fuck for some 80's balaeric jazz.

 

jazz

yeah there's a bootleg of that floating around, taken from the mixer

ask watmm i'm sure they can find it somewhere

yeah that alpert track is so good, i dunno what it is about it, that mid section where it's just looping the low notes for ages is brilliant

are you into any classical composers or periods? 

i'm not very knowledgable about classical music but i really like ligeti 

Why do you concentrate on new techniques and gadgets instead of concentrate on creating beautiful content? Is it because you favour commercial success over artistic success? Or is it because you like sound editing techniques more than music itself? Do you like the music on Record Label Records?

Edited by Sean Ae, 03 November 2013 - 09:00 AM.

each of your albums have their own unifying 'vibe' or identity that comes both from the hardware / software used as well as the compositional process:

 

untilted - densely programmed step sequenced kit.

quaristice - looser & sparser live jams with hardware.

oversteps - evolving generative melody (i'm assuming sequenced via Max?).

 

i'm curios what the process/vibe was for Exai? what was the hard/software situation that the album grew out of and how were those early experiments refined and evolved to get the 'Exai sound' ?

the software used for exai grew out of the software we made for oversteps

mostly realtime stuff so, long jams edited down

not all of it tho, some of it was worked on more compositionally (the software can do both)

 

 

Whats your favourite album, of your own and of someone else's work.

i find these kind of Qs impossible

 

depends on context and timing

 

 

How about at present.

 

past and future you will answer different, but I'm asking now.

 

of ours - chiastic slide

others - residents - intermission

that's today mind you

sorry Rob and Sean. I didnt mean to come as disrespectful

my english is bad and I try to make up for it

oh

i don't think you did

tbh i don't rem what you asked

ol dirty, gza or rza?

anyone better then rakim, if so, who?

I'd love some insight into your role in the design process of the last few album identities that tdr had the pleasure of making basic shapes for.

gza obviously

they're not basic shapes, you're seeing it wrong

 

 

Given that's you gus have been at the leading edge of sonic explorations for 20+ years have you developed any personal alternate theories and postulations about what music actually is?

 

yeah music = speech - text

 

at least roughly - i reckon it's a kind of super-developed version of the pitch and intonation parts of speech (the aural bit that doesn't contain textual info)

 

 

you should check out this book:

 

http://www.amazon.co.../dp/0199755302/

 

thanks

do you have any interest in making / releasing computer apps or audio plug-ins?

not yet

so we picked up on the vague album numbering system. Someone here said you should name your next release "twelb", is this up there with some of the hot favourites?

Also curious about the whole Kiosk thing, did someone orig just pluck it out of thin air or did it actually exist as a project?

twelb is hilariously bad

i doubt anyone will ever top that, but peely almost managed

we don't know how kiosk originated

Do you think Hip-Hop is still relevant as a Culture?

I mean a lot of people confuse Rap with Hip-Hop nowadays and don't know about the cultural thing behind Rap Music anymore.

 

Also, Sean would you please name my MPC2000XL?

your mpc2000xl is now called shaquanda

Edited by Sean Ae, 03 November 2013 - 07:40 AM.

Any chance on collaborating with a Japanese singer again? The track with Mari Hamada is beautiful.

 

Have you used Renoise beyond the experiments with Venetian Snares?

maybe, it was a laugh, altho they remixed the hell out of it. the original mix we did was better imo (unreleased)

yeah we used renoise a fair bit, haven't personally for a few years tho

Have you ever seen a ghost?

don't know

Can you guys name some of your favourite VST plugins you use and find inspirational?

not used it for ages but i really like zebra (nice sound)

 

I heard a friend say that 10ish years ago you played at a venue called the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio. Will any shows in or near Columbus happen again? Every cool electronic act seems to be going towards Europe these days, and I can never get a chance to see them.
 
Related but not entirely: do you ever do house shows, and have you considered doing more?

Columbus wexner centre was a life saver show, great acoustic treated black cube, and their tech guy repaired our 1210s

We would probably return :)

 

yeah that room was insanely correct for our sound on that tour

Hello Autechre!
Just wanna to ask, is there any meaning or purpose behind track title, like, Osla for n? And how should I say L Event, like event "L", or something different?
Thanks for the answer!

i can't get into specifics really regarding titles

you can say things however you like

why does Exai sound like it made using an Analog Four? 

Do you think Ben of zoviet france lost the dats and/or messed up the recording and just doesn't want to tell you? 

Why was your Dalglish remix never officially released? 

i got no idea, i never owned one

but i take it as a compliment cos it means you're hearing some of our dsp progging as analogue (which was the intention)

yeah maybe, or he just doesn't want us to have it, or he doesn't like it or whatever

no idea, ask chris

Autechre doing a Q&A is reason enough to finally join watmm. Hello everyone.

 

Where did that "Voice of the Chinese People" sample you used in your last webcast come from? 

That was the first thing I heard when I tuned in (I had late shift back then and wasn't able to tune in earlier), and it was such a great moment.

Thank you for that, the webcast was one of my favorite music-related things in 2013.

 

 

 

Oh, and since you're naming devices and everything, would you like to name my future child?

One male/female name pls.

that sample is from B.E.D. 34 by Forevereaction

female - Cleopatra

male - Photon

Dunno if this is a stupid question. I am about the same age as you guys and my job relates to an interest which is kind of a deep core of my personality. When I burn out or feel overstressed, I think "fuck it all" but I can't help getting interested again after a little while. Is music like that for you? Like something you can't escape?

 

I can't decide if that's a good thing or not.

 

Or if that's too indulgent - over the years Ae has had a very consistent "taste" and I don't know (nor am I interested) in who does what. But do you both "know" Ae when you hear it? Ever had to talk the other into including something on a release?

 

And - fan moment - I expected to be a little let down by the live set I saw in 2010, but the sound and the dark room pretty much blew my mind, got to the point where I kind of hallucinated sounds as rising textures in the space in front of me. No hallucinogens involved although I was pretty tired. That was outstanding, thanks.

yeah i mean

it's kind of in my system, i've been messing with sound for so long now i don't think i could do much else, i get itchy if i haven't made anything for a couple of days.  hate going on holiday it just stresses me out not being able to make things.

yeah we know it when we hear it.  really hard to explain but u seem to know already.

yeah sometimes we have to talk each other into using each other's tracks.   like, it's always me trying to talk rob into including one of his tracks, or vice versa.

almost never happens the other way round

do you remember that gig with fennesz & roedelius ? i've seen pictures & always wondered about it, like some all star game or something. 

that was actually a bit of a weird gig

i think roedelius had expected us to do beats like amber, and we were at that point where we had dived headlong into doing algo stuff, and we were giving him really weird rhythms. he kind of gave up halfway thru and starting playing solo piano stuff, so we all had to kind of back off and let him get on with it, cos he couldn't deal with the weirdness in the rhythm.

so it sort of happened in 2 stages, with us jamming with christian for a bit (going really well i thought), with bits of roedelius, and then a big solo section of roedelius playing sentimental piano stuff.

he shouted at us afterwards, i felt really bad.  huge fan getting told off by elder statesman.  he actually thought we had deceived or tricked him somehow.  it's a real shame, we felt like we had fucked it up by being too adventurous. 

Edited by Sean Ae, 03 November 2013 - 08:19 AM.

wow, this topic exploded!  no idea if any of this is covered but like heck i'm going back thru 26 pages...

 

Sean and Rob, just wanted to thank you for your Australian tour a few years back - i'm sure there was little commercial gain but it made a lot of us fans very happy.  Hope to see you back out here sometime :)

 

You guys are huge on generative music; ever considered releasing an album of puredata patches or something along those lines, rather than prerecorded audio?  I recognize the issues with doing so, but it'd probably blow some peoples minds to have that happen.

yeah this comes up every few years

maybe in the future

I love how Lcc develops into a beautiful melody after sounding harsh for a few minutes. it happens in 6IE.CR too. is their a particular reason for it other than it be fucking cool? i interpret it as beauty from chaos.

   

i see that LCC transition as a bit like a dream where you drive off a cliff and find yourself flying

 

 

are you playing any video games or old video games?  

 

lately just dodonpachi on my phone

 

 

Do you play/prefer Resurrection or MAXIMUM? Resurrection is great, but MAX has that cool minimal graphics vibe going on (if you can even use the word 'minimal' while describing a CAVE shooter!)

 

not tried max, i'm playing R

will check it, sounds good

Nice suprise  No questions from me but awesome reading.

 

I suppose I could ask what you're favorite beers are, but that just seems embarrassing and a bit dumb.

 

Autechre!!!!

not fucking stella

it's always on riders and we always roll eyes when we see it, but we end up drinking it again

and getting that headache

omg this wasn't a draem! sup autechre!!!!

 

what do you think about flying lotus his music? imo i think he's great and has a lot of talent he uses well

why didn't he ask you for a track for gtaV that would have been awesome

i really like the track he did with earl

hoping he does more straight up hip hop stuff tbh, he's good at it

In terms of music, do you think that hardware manufacturers and/or software devs are charting a path of diminishing returns? By making the process of creating music arguably 'easier' and more accessible, is music in danger of becoming less experimental, compared to the past where experimentation was perhaps led by hardware/software limitations?

 

And seeing how this has become a (very WATMM) thing: please could you name my MPC1000? it has JJOS installed, if that helps 

i think the main problem is really people being blinded by options and having to compare everything, so like, someone wants a compressor, they try out every single one and then pick one that suits their needs.  which is all cool etc but there's that thing missing where back in the day they'd have been more limited and would just have plumped for one of them and then later maybe found some quirk or weird way to exploit it.  it's not so much about the limitations of the actual gear itself, more about the way the market forces behaviour.

your mpc1000 is now called 808

what was the hardest track you made, like when you afterwards say: that was impossibru but we fucking did it!

errr

probably an early one cos they used to take fucking ages

something like destroyer (but you probably never heard that unless you were an IBC listener, it's unreleased)

edit:  actually destroyer is on that bojangles youtube

Edited by Sean Ae, 03 November 2013 - 08:44 AM.

you have been a musician/artist for more then 20 years, every release you made was an improvement, i don't even think frank zappa did that and yet you don't get all the praise (and money) it deserves in the world. does it bother you or are you punks in the heart??

it's kind of inevitable, the industry prizes youth

but yeah of course we're basically b-boys, very close to punk ideologically

Did you ever have very little sleep (Like what RDJ said he used to do)?

Did you ever heard Caustic Window LP (Cat023)? If so; How it was?

I forget to say this yesterday but, this is so cool of you to talk with us! Thanks!

yeah sometimes i work with next to no sleep

rae was made in that kind of warm fuzzy state

yeah i like almost everything richard's done

 

re quadrange, we'd been wanting to do something with variant mixes for a while, in some part due to having a wealth of Eps and extra B sides from artists like Depeche Mode in the past - some of their deepest tracks were unique alternative mixes nothing like the singles or LP versions, and they came across as more intense or over produced even, it was a really nice way to feel what they were doing behind the usual framework they set out in the mainstream…..like a real treat.

 

Those early 90s DM mixes were my gateway drug to electronic music I suppose...they sent me off on quite a few different musical paths.

It wasn't long after those that I heard your Skin Up You're Already Dead remix of St Etienne...what a heid-burster that was...I still play it a lot now, 19 years on.

 

So, I guess this is probably like having to choose between your offspring, or whether you prefer June to July, but do either of you have a favourite remix/reworking you've done?

 

for me it's probably the buck tick remix, an enduring favourite

 

Could you please name my Casio VL-1 VL-Tone?

 

 

your casio vl-1 is now called zeus 

Is the Ae ident music part of a longer unreleased piece or was it specifically made for the DVD ?

i.e. this one -



Plus mentioning Shane Carruth yesterday, I've always thought how similar his film titles/logos are to this, merely a typeface coincidence or was it the same graphics designer?

we actually did the design on those releases, and it wasn't us making shane's titles

the id for the gg dvd was custom written around alex's animation

Do you travel a lot? What are you favorite destinations?

 

Sean, you mentioned before that you like Germany, what do you like about it in particular? Have you been to Bad Vilbel?

Oh and could you name my backpack please? It's an Arcteryx Bora one in case that matters.

You're so good at naming things.

never been to bad vilbel but it's twinned with glossop which lies on the manchester end of the A57, or snake pass as it's known locally (the road that goes from manchester to sheffield)

your arcteryx bora is now called graham

is your approach different when you do an autechre album track and if you do an remix...of course it is different that you have source material to work from...but from that point on...does it make a difference to you?

yeah fully

if the source is such that we need to change loads of things to get something that we like out of it then it ends up being more like an ae track then it would otherwise, and sometimes we like it too much to want to change much at all, in which case it's more like pruning and adjusting things than like making a track or whatever

all depends on the source and how we react to it

can you name my first born son pls?

your first born son is now called ian

I can see you are pretty good at naming synths and similar gear so I have a bit of a challenge for you. Can you name my electric guitar? I tend to use it mainly as a source of sound for some very processed and textural things if it helps. And I think it's "she" but what do I know.
 

your electric guitar is now called hilda

Is it actually possible to add too much reverb to a track, or is that simply a myth? 

no

 

 

so you like the venue to be dark, but what about over-the-top visuals like Amon Tobin's ISAM? (did you see it?) do you think something similar would work for an autechre set? i mean obviously the identity of the space is still there, but the crowd gets really focused on an object etc that's in front of them - so in that sense it gets removed..right? 

 

it's not just about removing identity it's about occupying the space with sound

it's something that used to happen in really dark clubs and warehouses, the sound became more physical and tangible, it works my synaesthesia more

what i like about sound is how it surrounds you, you are inside it even if it's coming out of one speaker

visual things can't really do that yet

 

oh not to mention the cheesiness of using projection mapping, it's like a corporate presentation or something 

 

 

haha fair enough (wasn't a fan of the ISAM set musically anyways - what do you think of Amon Tobin other than that?). the oversteps set you guys did in AB (Brussels) is still pretty much the most mind-blowing gig I've ever been to.. but anyways recently saw Tim Exile, not sure if you're familiar with what he does but it's pretty much all improvised on the spot with a lot of interaction with the crowd which is an entertaining dynamic to say the least. musically not as interesting as what you guys do live - but still good fun and in a way on the same track. but you actually see him press buttons/pads, tweak knobs etc .. don't you feel that's something what is missing in your sets? (well you probably don't, but don't you think a crowd sort of needs some visual feedback of the band they went to see play?)

 

tbh i haven't heard much amon tobin so i can't really comment

i think tim's excellent tho, really talented

nah i mean, we're not doing the same kind of display, hopefully the details are all audible enough not to require gestural accompaniment or illustration

 

- do you guys ever pull any practical jokes on each other? 

 

- is there any "myth" about ae that you'd like to dispel? Or any myth that has been kind of fun or useful so you let it stick around (I'm thinking along the lines of the BoC myth of cultlike activity, or the Aphex myth of sleeping in a bank and driving a tank around, etc). I can't think of any ae myths offhand...maybe something to do with generative music doing all the work for you? Is there any myth you'd like us all to propagate for you? 

 

no

What is your take on the latest trend of toylike synths that are coming out at the moment? I'm thinking about the Korg Volcas and the likes, and to some extent the teenage engineering OP1 (although that is pretty much it's own thing). Are you mainly creating your audio in computers or do you play around with outboard gear as well? Any new musical gear that has you all giddy (software or otherwise)? I get the impression that you're mostly building the stuff you need in max and that's that. 

yeah p much

not bought anything new for a bit but i like the look of tempest, might get one just for sport

 

do you have any desires to release more ridiculously long pieces of music in the future?

i ask because perlence subrange 6-36 is really fucken incredible. the way it plays with perception is sort of amazing, and the length of the track plays a big part into how well the track works overall. 

 

i was also thinking, the longest track on an autechre album is sublimit, which is the length of a record side. but you've also released through your webcast an 18 minute version of uviol. 

do you have any preference for longer more drawn out versions of your tracks, that don't make it onto an album for whatever reason?

thanks:)

 

not really a preference, but often if we're recording in realtime we'll go way over time just cos we're into it and we know we can chop it later

the long versions that we play on radio or whatever are (parts of ) the realtime jams usually

Hello guys, I have been making music till 7 AM here today. I often find out that stuff that I really enjoy making at night often suck a lot when listening in to them in daytime. Obviously it has something to do with how brain works. Do you know this situations too? How do you "combat" it? Are you limiting yourself in this situations when to do music and when not?

 

Another question,

 

I know that you used to, lets say, "not use deliberately" musical theory approach with your music when composing. But have you ever been in a composition of a track that you could not figure out at all (because of so many notes in complicated compositions on different tracks and so on) that you had to use some of the classical, methodological approach to complete your track? For example looking up the scales for notes in question? Or is it mostly trial and error? OR you have developed some software that can check it for you?

 

Again, excuse my English.

1. yeah night tracks are just different to day tracks

i find the deeper stuff works better at night

no idea why, i just make both kinds of tracks and that's that really

2. it depends on how we're working.  if it's some rule based thing then it can take care of itself usually, but we might still tweak events here and there if we think it needs it. otherwise we just go by feel.  it's not like there are many options to try out with there only usually being 12 notes.

Edited by Sean Ae, 03 November 2013 - 09:09 AM.

Autechre tracks are a bit unique for me in that for the most part I have literally no idea how they're made. I'm really curious what the process is, especially on the later stuff like oversteps and exai. Whenever you drop little snippets in interviews (like the beat in pen expers coming out of a sample-loaded md player on random) it's always pretty much the opposite of what I expect. Would you be willing to talk us through the creation of one of your more recent tracks, or is that giving away a bit too much?

it would take too long cos often the programming is something that happened in weird increments over years, and then the actual track might have been done in a day or something, realtime.  it gets too fuzzy to be able to explain what led to it

do you guys still build synths in Max or just use it for sequencing hardware?

we use it for both, and as a hub for connecting other bits of software, and sometimes hardware but increasingly less

the line between sequencing and synthesis is pretty much gone now.  textures are sequences, sequences are like harmonies.  it's all the same thing when you get down to it.

do you think about what people will think of your tracks while you make them or is it just about pleasing yourselves

also I saw that my questions sometimess come across weird...english is not my first language so that might be a factor

we make stuff for ourselves, each other and mates.  it's easy to have a person in mind when you make a track cos they have their vibe and you can easily make something you think they might like.  i mean you might be wrong but it's a good starting point, and it can become a good game making tracks for people and not telling them you did that, and seeing if you can get it right eventually.

making tracks for people you never met is basically impossible without resorting to some lowest common denominator tactics

which i mean, that works for some people but for me it doesn't really go deep enough

 

 

ol dirty, gza or rza?

anyone better then rakim, if so, who?

I'd love some insight into your role in the design process of the last few album identities that tdr had the pleasure of making basic shapes for.

 
gza obviously
 
they're not basic shapes, you're seeing it wrong

ha ok. I've been in the design world for a long time, I'd really love some insight as to how you work with creating the album art recently. do you guys give a set if parameters or just look at some options they come up with and shape it from there?

 

we usually go to ian with something. either some ideas, images, or actual instructions. sometimes we are ultra-specific about it, sometimes we give him a lot of freedom to see what he comes up with 

the last couple of albums were quite different, for oversteps we gave him very little but for exai we gave him tons of written stuff

just depends really

Do you have other creative outlets besides music? If so, what are they?

yeah i mess with visual stuff, so does rob

and sometimes i do other programming/related stuff that somehow relates to music or generation/composition

while we are at album naming: was it something you planned all along or just got carried away with?

neither

k I wanna be in on that gear naming thing,

 

I would be honored if you guys would give a name to

 

--- my E.Machinedrum

---- my (modded) E. Analog Four

 

(I can baptise them myself then)

your machinedrum is now called keith

your analog 4 is now called pierre

 

 

Any chance on collaborating with a Japanese singer again? The track with Mari Hamada is beautiful.

 

Have you used Renoise beyond the experiments with Venetian Snares?

 

maybe, it was a laugh, altho they remixed the hell out of it. the original mix we did was better imo (unreleased)

 

yeah we used renoise a fair bit, haven't personally for a few years tho

 

How such artist as Mari Hamada comes to an idea to have her tracks remixed by you? I mean, I would expect Tortoise to be really into experimental music or Radiohead, given to Thom Yorke's admiration of your work, but Hamada? It is quite surprising for me.

 

labels

some thing that confused me loads...do EPs that you do contain tracks that did not fit for lack of space on the CD,  or couldn't you finish them in time?

neither

How many people are or have been involved with Gescom over the years? Has there been a release were neither of you have been involved?

 

I missed your gig in my town in Finland for the Untilted tour, which would have bummed me out since I had just moved to Ireland at that time but it all worked out as I caught you in Dublin during the same tour, which was great. Hope you enjoyed your Finnish visit, even if the gig was during the day and hopefully you will be back in the future.

prob quite a lot, i'd guess about 15-20, it's hard to say cos so many are fleeting or were just around for one gig or something 

thanks

if some fan asked you to remix one of his own tracks...would you do it?

iirc that happened already

Do you ever get together with friends and jam (kind of like the folky gatherings with a pot of shrooms you mentioned here) or has it been mostly the two of you?

yeah that's how a lot of gescom stuff happens

You stuck (finely placed lol) in a death metal track into your brilliant FACTmix.

 

I've always been a bit fascinated if you, (Aphex, BOC and Squarepusher as well!) like metal and if you did what were you're favorites. You're love for hip-hop is pretty obvious but metal/alternative guitar music less so. Do you get up on a Sunday morning and play Reign in Blood at 11?

 

So maybe you could give us your thoughts?

 

Regards,

 

Beerwolf

my dad was well into sabbath, and in secondary school one of my mates was really into metal (this was in like 86) so he'd sort me out with tapes of megadeth, helloween, metallica, iron maiden. i only ever really liked metallica and slayer back then tho. i liked the way it sounded, seemed really advanced compared to the other stuff, or maybe it was just closer to hip hop somehow, having more bass and heavier rhythm aspect to it.

yeah what is it about sunday mornings and metal. my dad used to do it too.

1. do you still make tracks like amber and the video of you guys live in sheffield? you look at each other and say "time for a dance off" and bang out a wicked club track.

 

2. i plan on getting a english mastiff one day, it will be as majestic and mournful as the one in the attached image, will you name my future english mastiff?

 

3. luv u guys

 

edit:
4. Do you guys like the smiths? favorite track?

1. yeah we think we're doing dance tracks all the time.  i guess we grew up at a time when dance music was seen as being more flexible, before the 4/4 kicks took over

2. your mastiff is now called dmitri 

4. nah i never got into them.  i do like how soon is now tho

What are your desert island discs? (let's say 5)

coil - love's secret domain

808 state - newbuild

beefheart & magic band - mirror man sessions

mantronix - music madness

kraftwerk - computerworld

i have an amplifier with 2 speakers and a sub but in my new house i have wires through to wall for 5.1 can you recommand me some awesome speakers to listen to autechre

i'm not very good at this but i have a mate who works at richer sounds who i could put you in touch with

What's the worst or most annoying piece of gear you've dealt with.

prob something i don't own and never got my head round so it's like, not fair

anything i bother to stick with i usually have that fallback of whatever made me like it in the first place

the prophecy always seemed annoying but i think it was about just the number of pixels tbh

what's the deal with the photo of you guys kicking the snow?

we just don't like snow much. no big deal.

i have been lucky enough to see you live quite a few times. i first saw you at warp 10 and new nothing of you work but have been buying your martial and going to gigs ever since. 

my question is. would you ever consider playing a classic set or sets you did using the old gear you used?

also any chance your playing glastonbury?

 

thanks for taking the time to chat on hear and answer some questions.

i have to say the last few years of your live sets have been amazing and some of the best live music i have seen to date.

 

thanks 

like, in principle i don't really mind playing old stuff as a one off, but it would be near impossible to do it properly, half the gear is on loan, requires rewiring for each track, there were loads of non-storable patches on analogue gear, plus reasons

the really old stuff was done on 4 track so we'd need like 7 of some things, 4 of others, etc.   and 8 hands

do you think about what people will think of your tracks while you make them or is it just about pleasing yourselves
also I saw that my questions sometimess come across weird...english is not my first language so that might be a factor

do you have a favorite uwe schmidt release? ever met him?

nah, we emailed a bit ages ago

i love this

http://www.discogs.c.../release/104173

- Sean or Rob, my machinedrum is on the verge of gaining sentience. Could you give it a name?

 

- I wonder what the design process was like for the Exai album artwork. Did you approach tDR with a loose concept or a few key references? Or do you let him generate a few concepts interpreting what he hears in the music?

your machinedrum is now called felicity

we gave him lots of text and he made something

he kind of grew concepts around ours. it was spot on actually how he did it, way better than we could have

is there any audio available from the last gig at DOUR festival belgium, it was amazing and i was stoned like helll while people in front of me were puking out their drugs, it was with VxSx and otto von schirach i would like to hear that again

 
Farkin' lol!
 
Kinda like Glade 2006 for me, first time I ever saw Autechre live.  Rob Hall nailed it DJing beforehand (as standard), but when Ae came on it all went pear shaped and I completely span out.  Think the daytime heat had got to me, proper roasting that year.    Wish I could hear that set again, it made no sense at the time and really shit me up.
 
So a question, do you plan a set differently for a festival gig? Sometimes festivals are part of a larger tour where I guess you just carry the same sound on, but (iirc) the Glade gigs were kinda separate?

How about Mark Fell's Composing With Process PodCast?

in the upcoming second part of the first episode they will play a track by Sean Booth called Horizon

31:44 Sean Booth 'Horizon', 2004 (20 min)
'Horizon' is a generative piece composed in the BBC BASIC programming language. It was composed for the rand()% generative internet radio station in 2004 but was never broadcast. The aim of the piece was to use as little code as possible and be interesting enough to hold the attention.

Where is it?

oh yeah

basically we're exclusive to warp, but we can do stuff with mates as gescom (but we can't do solo stuff or use any other names, particularly our own names)

mark just didn't know so he put my name, and we couldn't put it out then even if he changed the name.. it was my fault for not saying

happened w/kouhei as well but that was already produced when i found out (oops)

 

 

Did you ever have very little sleep (Like what RDJ said he used to do)?

Did you ever heard Caustic Window LP (Cat023)? If so; How it was?

I forget to say this yesterday but, this is so cool of you to talk with us! Thanks!

 

yeah sometimes i work with next to no sleep

rae was made in that kind of warm fuzzy state

 

yeah i like almost everything richard's done

 

But Cat023 was made available to only a couple of guys (Cylob, Mike Paradinas and a few others I think).

Do you work standing up, sitting down?

Do you make music in nature, gardens or places like that?

 

oh right i don't rem things like cat numbers

i work both sitting and standing

sometimes gardens

but tbh surroundings aren't the thing for me, i get lost in the sound so it's not really important what the room's like, the sound becomes the space

 

 

each of your albums have their own unifying 'vibe' or identity that comes both from the hardware / software used as well as the compositional process:

 

untilted - densely programmed step sequenced kit.

quaristice - looser & sparser live jams with hardware.

oversteps - evolving generative melody (i'm assuming sequenced via Max?).

 

i'm curios what the process/vibe was for Exai? what was the hard/software situation that the album grew out of and how were those early experiments refined and evolved to get the 'Exai sound' ?

 

the software used for exai grew out of the software we made for oversteps

mostly realtime stuff so, long jams edited down

not all of it tho, some of it was worked on more compositionally (the software can do both)

 

Is this software that's part of something else (Max/Msp or whatever) or software that you two've created entirely on your own?
 

 

we use max as a hub really, with c externals and gen, few bits of hardware

we don't program in OSX Assembler (would that count?)

I wanted to ask this for years:

How can someone learn to compose great melodies?

Do you start tracks by loading midi files of tracks you like and start to manipulate until they sound like you like them?
Do you generate your melodies using tools or do you jam them on a keyboard?
Do you take melodies of tracks you like and change them?

What is your favorite key?

don't know

no

both

no

don't know

what ae track has the lushest pad?

drane 3

i remember an interview with russian film maker Andrej Tarkovsky, he said that as an artist, he did not fear anything, but as a man, he feared for his family and beloved ones. do you have that same confidence regarding your creativity ? 

yeah

why would anyone fear making stuff?

is there any audio available from the last gig at DOUR festival belgium, it was amazing and i was stoned like helll while people in front of me were puking out their drugs, it was with VxSx and otto von schirach i would like to hear that again

no idea, we never heard anything

Hi

How do you guys agree wich each other  on the "sound -style" for your next album ?


for example Untilted is very hardware related and harsh , oversteps is more software i guess and sounds friendlier and happier for me.

or does is simply evolve ?

thx for the answers !
 

it just happens, over time something grows and as we become aware of it we shape it

 

 

so we picked up on the vague album numbering system. Someone here said you should name your next release "twelb", is this up there with some of the hot favourites?

 
twelb is hilariously bad
i doubt anyone will ever top that, but peely almost managed

 

Who is peely? Are you referring to John Peel?


(Btw, I came up with Twelb. If you two have any other albums or objects lying around that need naming, just let me know.)

 

yeah john peel

ok 

 

is there any audio available from the last gig at DOUR festival belgium, it was amazing and i was stoned like helll while people in front of me were puking out their drugs, it was with VxSx and otto von schirach i would like to hear that again

 

Farkin' lol!

 

Kinda like Glade 2006 for me, first time I ever saw Autechre live.  Rob Hall nailed it DJing beforehand (as standard), but when Ae came on it all went pear shaped and I completely span out.  Think the daytime heat had got to me, proper roasting that year.    Wish I could hear that set again, it made no sense at the time and really shit me up.

 

So a question, do you plan a set differently for a festival gig? Sometimes festivals are part of a larger tour where I guess you just carry the same sound on, but (iirc) the Glade gigs were kinda separate?

 

yeah usually with festivals they're more sporadic, we usually have the same setup as the prev tour but with fresh ears  

sometimes we change things a bit first but usually it's like a subtle remix of the tour set

 

 

Hello guys, I have been making music till 7 AM here today. I often find out that stuff that I really enjoy making at night often suck a lot when listening in to them in daytime. Obviously it has something to do with how brain works. Do you know this situations too? How do you "combat" it? Are you limiting yourself in this situations when to do music and when not?

 

Another question,

 

I know that you used to, lets say, "not use deliberately" musical theory approach with your music when composing. But have you ever been in a composition of a track that you could not figure out at all (because of so many notes in complicated compositions on different tracks and so on) that you had to use some of the classical, methodological approach to complete your track? For example looking up the scales for notes in question? Or is it mostly trial and error? OR you have developed some software that can check it for you?

 

Again, excuse my English.

 

1. yeah night tracks are just different to day tracks

i find the deeper stuff works better at night

no idea why, i just make both kinds of tracks and that's that really

 

 

2. it depends on how we're working.  if it's some rule based thing then it can take care of itself usually, but we might still tweak events here and there if we think it needs it. otherwise we just go by feel.  it's not like there are many options to try out with there only usually being 12 notes.

 

 

Interesting, L-Event is very night-time stuff for me. It seems to not have enough impact during daytime, especially Osla for n. I mean I can hear the, lets say, compisitional logic in those tracks during daytime but at night real emotions come into it and everything seems more enjoyable.

 

One of my theories is that brain tends to make up more things into the tracks yet in reality those things are not there. I mean sleep has to have effect on the brain comparable with passing out because that is how brain defends itself and the body so that you don't feel pain anymore etc. So maybe the brain is making up things to "sound better" then they really are? But I am not saying that L-Event suck during daytime :-D not at all.

 

:) daytime is just noisier imo

osla for n was made at night

I am going to keep on the Gescom theme. What makes a Gescom track? Is it something you fuck around with and end up liking but does not go with current Autechre and it gets filed under Gescom. How does this Gescom thing even work? A group of individuals make their things and share and let others mess around with it and then something eventually gets released?

 

This is top banana, btw. Thanks.

as far as our stuff goes, gescom =  the involvement of a third party (altho that can get tenuous sometimes)

but the other gescom people sometimes use the name without us as well

Man, I log off from WATMM for a few days and this happens.

 

I should do it again see if richard does something.

 

Q: Do you guys like Jungle?

 

Q2: Do you like owls?

 

Q3: 

 

Is it possible to see a musical collaboration involving you & Oneohtrix Point Never in the future?

 

Thank you for this! love the music! 

Q1: yeah bits

Q2: yeah

Q3: dunno

I believe in this Q&A you said you didn't keep any quaristice tour soundboards. But I believe during that tour you also had some guy expressly shooing away any fans that tried to plug in to get a soundboard (or so I heard). We speculated that maybe you didn't want people ripping the soundboard because you planned to have some sort of live release later, or planned to keep the bits for later use on an album. It sounds like that wasn't the case, after all. Do you think you'd make a different decision now, re: keeping soundboards or letting fans record them, or do you like keeping the live stuff strictly live?

on that tour we wanted to keep it as live as we could. just depends, on the oversteps tour we tried to record as much as we could, we have soundboards for over half of them. no plans for any of it we just wanted to try recording everything

in the past whenever one got recorded it was the venue doing it, so now and then we would be handed a DAT at the end of the night, as a result we don't have anything like a comprehensive archive

and usually the mix sounds wrong cos it was mixed for the venue

Appreciate you taking the time to do this guys.

 

Rob & Sean: You listen to much Actress stuff? Guy is pushing boundaries, feel that he has a similar aesthetic to AE in that his music operates somewhere in the outskirts of the (avant garde)techno-continuum. A lot of stuff he's done sounds really electro too. Same thing in regards to his live sets and yours, in that they're usually pretty dancefloor. 

 

Please name my casio CZ-1000 (i found it in a skip if that helps)

yeah we like actress (controversial)

your cz-1000 is now called samantha

Thanks again for doing this, guys! Hope you feel comfortable enough with it to stick around regularly, or at least consider doing a session like this again one day.

How the hell did y'all get the main synth in Glitch (the one that starts the track) to sound so random, pulling in and out? I can guess as to how I'd replicate that sound now with current software, but I can't imagine how the hell you two figured it out back in 94 or whatever.

 

Do you remember where the sample/s at about 24 minutes into the infamous Radio Mix (...the police are gonna raid you!) come from? I'm guessing some old radio show or another....

Were there any outtakes from the Peel Sessions you guys did?

 

I've got a live rip of a New York show from 2000 supposedly at a venue called 10 degrees. What drum machine/routing of drum sounds are you using in the first bit of that set? The sounds it morphs into are fucking amazing and I've always loved them. I cannot wrap my head around what the hell y'all were doing there.

 

Did most tracks on Untilted start out as different bits of tracks that you then patched together?

glitch = 202 and quadraverb

that sample is off some korean film, i can't rem

er not outtakes as such but maybe some versions, can't rem

i don't rem playing in nyc in 2000

some of them did but most were written serially

Why didnt you come to the Elevate Festival in 2005  ? (if you dont remember just ignore)

I recognize you have been often to Austria , you have some relations with Austria ?

just curios !

there was a good audience in vienna who really got this kind of stuff, in the 90s there was a long line of excellent stuff coming from there imo

Do you see your tracks as 'songs'? Or perhaps more impressionistic?

just tracks really, dunno, that seems open enough

- Sean or Rob, my UC-33 midi controller is still alive after 10 years of intense use (seriously, i was pretty sure it would be my first piece of gear to die, but it won't). Could you give it a name ? :)

are you sending CV/ Gate out of your computers to external synths with these new computer cv boxes like expert sleepers? or is it Midi or native computer synthesis on the computer in your last couple releases?

we have a motu interface that can send cv but most of my stuff's internal

we don't use midi we made a better protocol. midi is stone age really

You didn't come to the U.S. for your Oversteps tour.  Was there a reason, and will you likely be coming back to D.C?  Please do...

 

 

k I wanna be in on that gear naming thing,

 

I would be honored if you guys would give a name to

 

--- my E.Machinedrum

---- my (modded) E. Analog Four

 

(I can baptise them myself then)

 

your machinedrum is now called keith

your analog 4 is now called pierre

 

 

Any chance on collaborating with a Japanese singer again? The track with Mari Hamada is beautiful.

 

Have you used Renoise beyond the experiments with Venetian Snares?

 

maybe, it was a laugh, altho they remixed the hell out of it. the original mix we did was better imo (unreleased)

 

yeah we used renoise a fair bit, haven't personally for a few years tho

 

How such artist as Mari Hamada comes to an idea to have her tracks remixed by you? I mean, I would expect Tortoise to be really into experimental music or Radiohead, given to Thom Yorke's admiration of your work, but Hamada? It is quite surprising for me.

 

 

labels

 

 

Oh I see.

 

By the way, what was the reason for not going on tour with Radiohead? I mean, was it a collision of two different music approaches (in case they wanted you to colab with them on stage) or was it because you were offered being just an opening act for their show (in that case I would fully understand - to play for people that are not really interested...).

 

Don't you regret the decision a little? I mean, money offered surely must had been good! :-)))

 

And what do you think about Radiohead's takes on making electronic tracks like Everything In Its Right Place and Kid A? I personally think they are very well produced, the vibe is strong.

 

Feel free not to answer of course if the questions are too much. I appreciate your time :-)

 

we didn't want to play in stadiums to radiohead fans really. just seemed a bit superfluous

i dunno i mean they were good at writing songs and then they got into our stuff and their stuff didn't seem to improve much, i thought they would take it off in some mad direction but the critics bit hard, everyone around them got upset and they retreated.  whatever

 

 

omg this wasn't a draem! sup autechre!!!!

 

what do you think about flying lotus his music? imo i think he's great and has a lot of talent he uses well

why didn't he ask you for a track for gtaV that would have been awesome

 

i really like the track he did with earl

hoping he does more straight up hip hop stuff tbh, he's good at it

 

is it this earl?

 

 

nah i don't know if it came out actually

it was ages ago, i saw a youtube i think

which artists / abstract paint do u enjoy?
 
quick, name 3 films u've enjoyed in the theater within the past 10 years 
 
for driving, which musics pop to mind as being ideal when operating the motor vehicles?
 
what do u think of this trac?
 

 
 
what about this trac?
 

Edited by Rob Ae, 03 November 2013 - 12:48 PM.

Sorry for all my questions, I'm writing them as I come up with them...

 

What's with myslb? Would you divulge what it stands for at least?

 

Do you keep detailed files of tracks, or is it more of a 'well that's track's done, who cares how we got there' sort of a thing?

nah we don't keep files other than things like undo history

with programming i make backups really regularly tho, nightly builds usually, so i can get back to any date if i need to. the files are tiny.

Would you do something like this topic inside the EKT Subforum? Giving tips to producers about their tracks or lecturing them based on a track you did?

What is the best record label besides warp?

i always liked mego so they get this shout

You didn't come to the U.S. for your Oversteps tour.  Was there a reason, and will you likely be coming back to D.C?  Please do...

no reason just thought we'd leave it out for once

we'll be back

Do you guys use kyma at all anymore? Also what are/were some of your favorite things to use it for? I saw you mention earlier about the reverbs and totally agree. For me the samplecloud + reverbs are worth the price of admission alone.

nah we gave it to daz fitton

i wasn't using it and i don't like having stuff just siting there

it's ace for reverbs tho, mainly just cos the outputs on the capybara are so silky

also amazing for fake analogue stuff with a high degree of control, and realtime fft stuff

 

You mentioned synaesthesia on page 22. What kind of synesthesia do you have? Is it sound-to-color synesthesia?

 

(Hello WATMM, I'm a new user and signed up to make use of the chance of asking questions here).

 

auditory/tactile and spatial/sequence

Does 11 is have any relation to Snorkel by Gescom?,

Later on in the track it sounds like Parhelic Triangle, were these deliberate things?

not deliberate

Does 11 is have any relation to Snorkel by Gescom?,
Later on in the track it sounds like Parhelic Triangle, were these deliberate things?

 

 

How about Mark Fell's Composing With Process PodCast?

in the upcoming second part of the first episode they will play a track by Sean Booth called Horizon

31:44 Sean Booth 'Horizon', 2004 (20 min)
'Horizon' is a generative piece composed in the BBC BASIC programming language. It was composed for the rand()% generative internet radio station in 2004 but was never broadcast. The aim of the piece was to use as little code as possible and be interesting enough to hold the attention.

Where is it?

 

oh yeah

basically we're exclusive to warp, but we can do stuff with mates as gescom (but we can't do solo stuff or use any other names, particularly our own names)

mark just didn't know so he put my name, and we couldn't put it out then even if he changed the name.. it was my fault for not saying

happened w/kouhei as well but that was already produced when i found out (oops)

 

This seems ridiculous

 

You're one of Warp's top acts and they can't give you a little bit of freedom?

 

they pay us for it, and it wasn't too important at the time we negotiated it

you mentioned earlier that you use markov chains as a method for generating things...
while one could apply these to sequence basically any data, i guess they can be especially useful for melodic/modal and rhythm transforms...
 
that jazz-solo-like (for lack of a better word) melodic interplay in irlite (get 0) around 3:00 - 3:50ish, is this an example where you used the chains to generate the notes, prominently?
 
dunno, the way the melody moves in irlite somehow strongly reminds me of this lush piece by Miroslav Vitous:
 


 
you dig? hear/feel any relation?
i recommend to check out this record if you don't already know it....

Would you ever rerelease Quaristice Versions or Quaristice.Quadrange.ep.ae on vinyl? I am sure a lot of people would buy it

are you? based on what?

We spoke yesterday about the tracks you sent to coil that have been archived. Also mentioning that chiastic slide has been getting some spins lately as well. I love that 97 vibe you guys had going, is there any other unreleased stuff archived from that era that may see the light of day?

yeah there are some bits, i dunno about releasing it tho

maybe i suppose, never say never 

- Sean or Rob, my UC-33 midi controller is still alive after 10 years of intense use (seriously, i was pretty sure it would be my first piece of gear to die, but it won't). Could you give it a name ? :)

your uc-33 is now called adrian

 

 

Do you start tracks by loading midi files of tracks you like and start to manipulate until they sound like you like them?
Do you take melodies of tracks you like and change them?
 

 
no
no
 

so what exactly do you mean in this interview when you say "modifying what existed"? Sampling? 

 

 "At this stage we weren't really thinking about making music that was our own. What we did was modifying what existed. We didn't really think about ownership of the music either. It was a few years later, when someone said, 'Oh, these tracks are good, are they yours?', that we recognised that we'd almost stopped making sounds that were recognisable. It seemed as if we had been in a grey area for ages, and then suddenly we were aware of actually creating music and playing it to other people, and they were saying it was ours. I think these congratulations satisfied our egos so much, we decided the music was ours!"

 

yeah, we started out doing pause button mixes of other people's tracks and then that turned into using samplers and drum machines, eventually we stopped sampling so much

Can you guys elaborate on how you feel out the structure of a track? Like how do you decide on the intro, and what elements to bury away, which ones to tease at throughout the track.

Also what's the one track you think took the most amount of effort to finish? Any tracks that stand out in your mind as being particularly frustrating to pull off?

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk

i dunno we just get a feeling for what's better and go there really, sometimes things occur to us but in terms of narrowing down why we make choices it gets harder the closer you are to it i suppose.   it's like when you're a kid and you realise you can keep asking 'why?'

In regards to Japan-only Autechre bonus tracks:

 

- Do you mind them being included at the tail-end of an album, especially if you have put a lot of consideration into the running order/length of the album 'proper'?

 

- Is there any specific criteria for the bonus tracks, or is it more a case of "this was knocking around in the 'current' folder at the time we were working on this album, let's use that"?

 

- Some of these tracks are very well regarded outside of Japan, certainly '18 (keyosc)' is a fantastic piece in it's own right. Will we ever see them released domestically somehow, or are they forever lost to international licensing only?

really it's just the fact that CDs are so expensive there that they need something exclusive, otherwise everyone buys the import

as far as putting them at the end goes, i dunno why, it just seems like the place that will fuck up the album the least

"so what exactly do you mean in this interview when you say "modifying what existed"? Sampling? "

 

prolly mean like they were modifying ideas from other trax from other people that already existed in the patterns they were making

 

yeah that too to a point, and taking established forms, things like that

1. can you name a specific track where you thought 'we've reached another level!' and maybe hi-fived each other in the studio while popping and locking?

 

2. do you guys push yourselves to explore 'unconventional' melodies? say someone creates a simple catchy pop hook- do you mess with it so its more subtle and perhaps less immediate? imo, I would say that the early albums were more explicitly melodic.

 

3. do you ever go back to old stuff and think 'aahh i wish i used a different snare sound'? I would imagine its inevitable with such detail-oriented music.

1. lol another level.  i mean nah but we do look at each other sometimes with that bateman pursed lip face when a good bit's on

i mean just select any track at random, we're always doing it

2. nah we don't deconstruct that much, we tend to build things up these days - rather than taking normal things and altering them

3. not really. the tracks are sort of whole things by now it's hard to separate it out, it would be like getting scissors out on your family photos

I love the "EPs, 1991-2002" box, but the collector in me is a bit disappointed that the Basscad EP isn't complete (it's missing the beaumont hannant and seefeel mixes). And I'm also a bit miffed by the fact that EP7 was spread over two discs, instead of keeping it on one disc as I assume it was intended.Why were some Basscadet mixes left out? Why was EP7 split like that? Were those your decisions, or was is Warp's decision and you had no say in the matter?Also, the OCD filetagger in me is confused about the Garbage EP. Originally the tracks were named with numbers (Garbagemx36, PIOBmx19, etc...) But on the EP compilation box those numbers are left out of the tracknames. Was this a mistake, or a conscious decision?

Edited by Rob Ae, 03 November 2013 - 01:37 PM.

 

How do you organize yourself to be able to come back to an unfinished track when it relies on a complex setup, a mix of softwares, hardware and specific routing. Do you write notes ?

 

Did you ever considering using Ableton - Live and Max for Live for you gigs.

 

Also I would like to tell you thanks for such amazing music! Sometimes I 'am so in your music than I lost interest for any other music artists.

 

I really hope there will be a exai tour! See you in Paris!

 

yeah usually we record it as soon as we can, but if we might need to change something analogue later and there's no patch storage, as a kind of last resort we'll make notes

we use max on its own cos ableton is like bolting on a load of functions we don't need tbh

i mean it's good for certain kinds of stuff but we have what we need already

 

 

is there any audio available from the last gig at DOUR festival belgium, it was amazing and i was stoned like helll while people in front of me were puking out their drugs, it was with VxSx and otto von schirach i would like to hear that again

 
no idea, we never heard anything

 

The recording was posted here a way while back. I can send it to you guys (autechre) if you want.

 

cheers yeah pm me

I don't have any musical equipment, can you name my toaster?

I don't have any musical equipment, can you name my toaster?

hey guys... just out of interest what hardcore labels are you favs? 

r&s, radioactive lamb, kickin', jumpin' & pumpin', moving shadow

Was the snare rush in Doctrine from Incunabula tongue-in-cheek?

it's a kick rush

a kick rush is always deadly serious

Hi Sean and Rob. Love you music, thanks for doing this, etc.

 

1. Oversteps really jumped out at me as having to do with counterpoint, the interplay between multiple voices talking to each other. I noticed this particularly in O=0 and redfall.

 

Is this something that you intended? Is this something you noticed?

 

 

2. Is Pro Radii based around samples of a sporting event? If so, what kind of sport. Basketball?

yeah oversteps was programmed that way

yeah sports

not basketball tho, wrong continent

Favorite Islay scotch?

Also, tac Lacora is amazing, my favorite autechre track in like 10 years!

dunno i only recently started on whisky

recc me some

 

 

are you sending CV/ Gate out of your computers to external synths with these new computer cv boxes like expert sleepers? or is it Midi or native computer synthesis on the computer in your last couple releases?

 

we have a motu interface that can send cv but most of my stuff's internal

we don't use midi we made a better protocol. midi is stone age really

 

Will it be published for free or commercialy in the future or is it already available somewhere? How does old hardware recognize this better protocol? Does it behave significantly better when syncing software (DAW, or MAX) with external hardware?

 

nah we're only using it with our own stuff. it's incompatible with anything external, if we need midi we have to convert and we use sysex to do that usually, it works well enough

i'm not using any midi gear atm at all, rob still uses a bit but not much these days

An old interview mentioned you had some ideas for instruments or hardware that hadn't been invented yet, but hoped might come along someday. Have your feelings changed on that?
Has there ever been one new piece of equipment that really expanded or changed how you work?
Still using Nord's?

Your music has brought me great happiness and inspired me to do interesting things. Thank you for doing all of this. And for the great show in Phoenix several years ago!

rob is a bit

i have a g2 here but i've not used it at all, it's just there to run his stuff

we used them pretty heavily on the oversteps tour (basically every sound was nord)

are you a fan of outdoor actives like trekking? (considering you preference for northface clothing)

nah i just wear that stuff cos i like the build on it, lasts forever and works well

if a man came to u and asked u to fix him 2 sandwiches made of rotted mushrooms, soggy newspapers and peely caulk, would u attempt to suggest an alternative or would u fulfill the request?

 

if plants could communicate with human language, what plant would u prefer to talk to first?

 

how many fingers am i holding up?

 

name something u consider strange about yourself 

 

hypothetically, if u were to choose an alternate record label to release musics, which would u choose? it can be past, present or future

 

if u take a moment to think, what would u consider to be yr most precious belonging (gollum) 

i would not make the man a sandwich at all

i would talk to oak trees. they just look friendly 

2

i dunno what I'm doing

mego

laptop

 

we don't use midi we made a better protocol. midi is stone age really

could you elaborate on that? what did you improve exactly?

 

baud rate, resolution, the type of messages

it's not really a good way to ask the question tbh cos it wasn't designed as an improvement to midi, it's a different kind of protocol

but it makes midi redundant apart from for talking to old gear

Sean - what were/are your favourite machines on the Elektron Machinedrum and MonoMachine?

And with all the gear naming going on, could you please name my MD and MnM?

either the fm ones or the physmod ones

can't even rem the names now it's been so long

your machinedrum is now called wolfgang

your monomachine is now called john

Was AE ever requested for a Red Bull Music Academy lecture? If not, would you consider it?

prob not

those things always seem weird

esp when the artist plays a track and everyone sits there nodding earnestly, it's like those acting masterclass videos but worse cos of the weird tension

what are your graff tags back in the day mine was VEXER do u reckon that sounded/looked threatening ?

i lol'd

i'm not putting my tags here man :)

last two times you played berlin at berghain had absolutely terrible sound unfortunately... you could virtually hear nothing but the bass, really annoying crowd there too. and way too much light.

 

that's not a question though - so: maybe next time you come around you could choose another venue pls?

yeah ok

 
Yeah, they actually have a pretty neat sound system. But they just push everything to the limits so it's all over the place. And moreover, the audience is not there for the artists but for being at Berghain. Just a trendy (even if cool), tourist location. Quite a pity because the venue itself is great.

Hi Sean and Rob. Love you music, thanks for doing this, etc.

Np, sorry for all these edits, my browsers being a dick
 
1. Oversteps really jumped out at me as having to do with counterpoint, the interplay between multiple voices talking to each other. I noticed this particularly in O=0 and redfall.
 
Is this something that you intended? Is this something you noticed?
 
 
2. Is Pro Radii based around samples of a sporting event? If so, what kind of sport. Basketball?

 
 
yeah oversteps was programmed that way
 
yeah sports
not basketball tho, wrong continent

 
What do you mean by 'programmed that way'? Were the voices programmed to directly influence each other in a generative type of way? Were they programmed independently, but in such a way to compliment each other?
 
I guessed basketball because it sounds indoor on a hard floor. My first guess what tennis, but the space sounds wrong for that. Squash or racquetball?

Edited by Rob Ae, 03 November 2013 - 02:30 PM.

 

 

Hi Sean and Rob. Love you music, thanks for doing this, etc.

 

1. Oversteps really jumped out at me as having to do with counterpoint, the interplay between multiple voices talking to each other. I noticed this particularly in O=0 and redfall.

 

Is this something that you intended? Is this something you noticed?

 

 

2. Is Pro Radii based around samples of a sporting event? If so, what kind of sport. Basketball?

 

 

yeah oversteps was programmed that way

 

yeah sports

not basketball tho, wrong continent

 

 

What do you mean by 'programmed that way'? Were the voices programmed to directly influence each other in a generative type of way? Were they programmed independently, but in such a way to compliment each other?

 

I guessed basketball because it sounds indoor on a hard floor. My first guess what tennis, but the space sounds wrong for that. Squash or racquetball?

 

yeah the voices were independent but communicating

it's just conditionals really nothing too fancy

nah

Are you in contact with Steven Wilson from Porcupine Tree or Robert Fripp from King Crimson? Steven somewhere said that he would be interested in collaborating with you but I always thought his music (even the electronic one - Bass Communion) would not be interesting enough for you.

 

Also, were you influenced by Einstürzende Neubauten's early albums?

you mean toyah's husband robert?    nah we're not in touch, but i rate king crimson

don't know porcupine tree at all

i dunno any einsturzende neubauten either, i think rob checks them maybe

Dear ae,
 
Do you think there is something about your music that is obtuse, and if so is that something that you embrace or do purposefully? It seems like a defining feature of the autechre sound to me, that it requires some level of effort to appreciate.
 
Is there an effort to make the music more accessible when performed live? I personally found it easier to connect with it in the live scenario but that might just be a result of being forced to listen to it very loud and in the dark,
 
 
Thanks!

My missus really wishes she was present for this but can't get to the net right now. She's a really big fan of you two, your music means so much to the two of us. Could you please give me a nice message I can pass on to her?

Let's say you could have just 2-4 pieces of hardware (excluding your laptop) to record your guys next album, what gear would you choose?

What influences how you order the tracks on an album? Are you thinking in terms of LP-side 'chunks' of music, or is it different for different LPs, one maybe where you'll have CD in mind and think of all the tracks together as a long-form sound experience? Do you have any albums you've thought of in terms of one-off files, where you would be indifferent to the order the tracks are listened in?
 
Also, this is my favorite bit from the Glasgow Art School soundboard -- I would be over the moon if you released this as a full track on something!!
 

I know absolutely nothing related to music production but I have listened to your whole discography for many-many times and I enjoy it as nothing else in the music universe, so my question is: do i still miss too many elements in your music due to not knowing anything about music making?
 
Any chances of a gig in Russia? There sure is an established fan base here in Moscow.

I remember in an interview you said that Confield 'is like pop music compared to some of the stuff we had considered putting out', do you condense whole new sounds and whole ideas into single tracks and try to make that track as distinguished and individual as it can be, before moving on to the next track? Like try to maximise its quality? Bine for example is pretty unique on the album and in your output as a whole, and the darkest track on there imo, is there more like that? Like the other music of that period when making that album (or any album really), are there fully completed tracks that have not been released or are they covering the same ideas as the ones on the album? Is there a distinction between music and a track for you, like a point where it starts to take shape from the discovery and experimentation?

Just wondering about the creation process because the strong contrast from one track to the next is one of the aspects I like most about your music, and your albums. Few do it as well, or as [seemingly] intended.

it's something we end up doing by default cos after doing one thing we rarely feel like doing the exact same thing again, unless they're really fast to do and then we might do a few in one go

Take it you guys have seen this dude
 

I'm also going to throw it out there Cus it's in style right now, that it'd be nice to give my Electribe EA-1 synth, which I bought from a nice gentleman named Tony off Craigslist a few years back (gotta give that shout out man), a name:)
Edit: and my Nintendo:))

Hi guys, thanks for this and welcome to the AE subforum. I hope you like the decor.

 

Answer me these questions three:

 

Travel back in time with me for a second, you're the younger versions of yourselves, the year is 1994. A strange, vaguely familiar looking man approaches you (see pictured below)

 

Spoiler

 

He speaks in a northern accent and says "hey m8, heres a tape check these tunes out". After the initial horror subsides you put the tape in your Sony Walkman (with Smash Hits magazine stickers on it) and play the tape, it plays a collection of tracks assembled from Confield, Draft, Untilted and Exai. How do the younger versions of yourselves react to this music do you think? Do you enjoy it or think it's a little too out there?

 

 

Also you played Hearn St car park in London on the Quari tour in 2008. This was really coincidental for me as I got a job around the corner there a week before you played. Do you remember this gig? The sound was incredible, it's the best I've heard you guys live (Bloc 2010 was a bit shit due to sound). This isn't really a question I guess, I just found it novel that you played in a car park with your own setup.

 

 

What do you think of my ae subforum moderating? I like to think I'm firm, but fair. I do my best to keep vagrants out and am thinking of introducing uniforms here soon, thoughts?

 

 

(In all seriousness, nice to have your presence here guys, keep up the great music <3<3<3)

reckon we would have been bang into em tbh, we were pretty open

i dunno if i've ever seen your handiwork round here but i'm prob just not on enough to notice

What's your favorite western movie? (i need it for school)

once upon a time in the west

What's your favorite western movie? (i need it for school)

Do you guys have any background in music theory at all? I always joke with my friend, who knows music theory, to tell me the time signature of some of your songs. 

not really

we knew none at all when we started

Not a question, but here is something you guys might find interesting:Back in 2007 I went to Venice and visited the Biennale, the big art festival. I went into a pavilion, can't remember which country, Norway, Sweden, Finland... something Scandinavian (I might be wrong). I see this art film thats playing. Pretty weird, had lots of snowy landscapes, white and blue colors, and sometimes people, don't know what they were doing, it looked like it was made from still photos with subtle differences that mutated into eachother. It was edited to various musics. It was weird and I liked it, so I decided to watch the whole thing. And lo' and behold, I suddenly hear Melve. I've heard it play three times or more in the movie. It didn't play long, it was used as an intermission between scenes or something. At the end I looked at the credits, and every song that was used in the movie was credited... except Melve.So hey, your song was used in an art film at the biggest art festival in the world. Without you being credited.Were you guys aware of this?

i think you might have missed my earlier question about headphones preference - what headphones would you recommend for listening to your music? does it matter a lot to you or do you prefer listening to your finished pieces on a pair of decent speakers?

i'm not very good at this kind of thing but i have a mate who works at richer sounds who i could put you in touch with

 

What's your favorite western movie? (i need it for school)

A Fist Full of Travellers Cheques

 

bastardos

What's your favorite western movie? (i need it for school)

A Fist Full of Travellers Cheques

 
bastardos

Actualy I got a decent question,

 

What do you think about Streetsounds Electro Compilations? Were they really important to you? I'm pretty sure these compilations were key to your early days and getting you into music? I remember an older friend of mine playing me Knights of the Turntables, off....Electro 5....I think, just checked, and yes it was number 5 (Techno Scratch). That moment changed my life (I was about 11 years old). I'd never heard music like that before, though elementry it seemed beamed in from another planet. Like your music seems beamed in from another planet.

yeah the whole series was totally key, made it loads easier to actually afford music

knights of the turntables were amazing, and chris the glove taylor's stuff, they had a similar weird future acid vibe. wish there was more stuff like that out there tbh

i used to love that ray gun omics track as well

do you think using real instruments would work on an autechre track?

 

Does it bother you that for the most part creating electronic music and putting on shows is not environmentally friendly? I guess in your case it is more so, because you have tendency to turn off the lights.  Did this factor play a role in your decision to experiment with a low light atmosphere?  

 

I appreciate this aspect of your performance. It seems so often that people decide to throw a random video on screen to entertain their audience. More specifically solo electronic artists tend to do this. I believe this is what Squarepusher was attempting to overcome with his Ufabulum project/tour. (as he sort of stated in an interview)

 

What do you think is the next step in the evolution of electronic music performances? Do you think Squarepusher did a good job of challenging this boundary between artist and presentation? 

i didn't know that was what he was trying to do

i dunno i haven't thought about it in any depth tbh, i just thought he was wearing a helmet with lights on

bit of a daring question:

 

ISS Sean  Alone ?

do people actually think it means that?

eew

Not a question, but here is something you guys might find interesting:Back in 2007 I went to Venice and visited the Biennale, the big art festival. I went into a pavilion, can't remember which country, Norway, Sweden, Finland... something Scandinavian (I might be wrong). I see this art film thats playing. Pretty weird, had lots of snowy landscapes, white and blue colors, and sometimes people, don't know what they were doing, it looked like it was made from still photos with subtle differences that mutated into eachother. It was edited to various musics. It was weird and I liked it, so I decided to watch the whole thing. And lo' and behold, I suddenly hear Melve. I've heard it play three times or more in the movie. It didn't play long, it was used as an intermission between scenes or something. At the end I looked at the credits, and every song that was used in the movie was credited... except Melve.So hey, your song was used in an art film at the biggest art festival in the world. Without you being credited.Were you guys aware of this?

Had no idea.

Can they just do that?

Whisky: Maker's Mark is a classic American whisky, Jameson is a good Irish go-to.

 

What was the resonant structure referenced in Extended Ambience Sample from a Resonant Structure?

you really don't wanna know

What's your favorite western movie? (i need it for school)

A Fist Full of Travellers Cheques

 
bastardos

They can play, they just need a new manager

 
hah thanks guys! i actually need 3 westerns each one from a different decade, but the decades need to follow-up..? (eg 60s-70s-80s)
so if you could give me one from the 70s or something that'd be awesome lol 

What would you put on a pizza?

Much love and respect and love :cheers:

What would you think about coming to Memphis and/or other southern delta states?....loads of nature and moonshine :)

mushrooms

yeah i like playing in the south tons

Edited by Sean Ae, 03 November 2013 - 03:52 PM.

can you guys persuade Clavia to release a nord modular g3? it would be much appreciated.

yeah somehow i don't think we are their target market

they should tho their algo's fucking own

Are the vocals in IO a heavily cut up recording of one of you two rapping?

nah

What do you guys think of Anthony Fantano's review of Exai? Do you guys watch him?

he seems fair and subjective, and he doesn't front that he knows everything

i mean he's pretty real, i wouldn't say he was a melon or anything

As a fellow Manc, I find a really distinct synaesthetic connection between the structures and architectures in your work and the atmosphere of Manchester and the Pennines. Would you say your work is connected to the local landscape in that way?

What is the fattest beat you've ever heard?  Could anything have made it even fatter?
 
What should I name the track I'm going to start tonight/tomorrow?  It's got to fit on an album comprised largely of intense ambient pieces.
 
What is your favorite Coil track or release?
 
(Also, I'm still hoping for that music-to-listen-to-while-walking-to-the-studio-on-Tuesday recommendation, but otherwise that Residents album mentioned earlier shall serve me nicely... just heard the track Shorty's Lament and fell in love.)

 

 

i got no idea, i never owned one

but i take it as a compliment cos it means you're hearing some of our dsp progging as analogue (which was the intention)

 

interesting, because Exai has a distinctly more 'analog' sound, if it's mostly digital you guys did a great job of making it sound the opposite, at least all the synth work.  Are there soft-synths you guys have an affinity for? I've noticed you mention FM7 a few times, how about some of the newer ones like Madrona Labs Aalto? 

Also thanks for the confirmation on the Autechre patch, there are an army of cycling74 employees trying to claim it's not a real patch or as some would say a 'hoax'.  The patch made me realize just the lengths you guys go to get that perfect timbre. No matter how many times or different ways I've tried drum stuttering/rapid fire sounds, they never have that pleasurable timbre quality you guys mastered so well during the Draft/Confield era. 

Do you guys enjoy any of the other artists on Isolate Records besides Vsnares and OST/Dalglish, specifically Nommo Ogo or Tomoroh Hidari?  

And what's your favorite album or work by Mick Harris aka Scorn? 

 

never seen alto, i'll check it when i get back to using DAWs

a lot of the stuff around draft time was done in dp, just triggering a sampler from the sequencer (akai z8 over midi) - the motu midi interface we were using was really fast so you could mad rolls with it. we'd do tuned rolls and then copy them and multiply the length of the roll by 1.05946 incrementally to make it play melodies.

not checked anyone on isolate apart from aaron and chris

zander probably cos it was the first one where he nailed the kind of hip hop i like

Oh, just remembered a question, Dual Purpose is you two, right?

 

And which one of you wrote the lyrics to Augmatic Disport? Or was it a joint effort? I find them very emotional, especially the bit about the bowl of crisps.

nah dual purpose is another gescom related person

the lyrics came to us both in a dream

What's the name of the last track on your Radio mix (WARPCD51)?

you know what i can't remember

i know the track tho, and it does have a title

 

 

Oh, just remembered a question, Dual Purpose is you two, right?

 

And which one of you wrote the lyrics to Augmatic Disport? Or was it a joint effort? I find them very emotional, especially the bit about the bowl of crisps.

 

nah dual purpose is another gescom related person

 

the lyrics came to us both in a dream

 

 

I want to say Rob Hall, I feel like I can hear similarities between that stuff and Viral... but you wouldn't tell me.. would you?

 

nah

from this thread & recent interviews it seems like you work primarily with software now, but you have used a lot of gear over the years. 

 

do you spend much time these days checking out other hard/software to see how it might inspire you or meet a need?

 

i expect the answer to this next one depends a lot on situationally specific factors, but fwiw: what has been your general approach to trying a new piece of kit? put another way, what goes into deciding whether you'll find use for it? does it for example need to make immediately inspiring sounds that you can hear yourselves using, have a great interface that leads you to dig into it even if it doesn't instantly speak to you, etc.? 

could be anything really; the sound, ease of use, apparent workflow, a feature

sometimes we would buy things not even knowing if we wanted them and later find something cool about it

i think cos we grew up using anything we could get our hands on we don't really care about what's supposed to be the 'right thing' to use.  you can get good stuff out of anything really

pls can you give a name to my cheap mfb2 synth? thank you!! this AAA is awesome!

your mfb2 is now called julianian

Earlier I was asking about the drums in a live track, the track is this one:

Do either of you remember what drum machine/routing set up/manipulation you were using to create and modify those drum sounds? They're amazing, every damned time I hear them.
 

that's the nord rack

Let's say you could have just 2-4 pieces of hardware (excluding your laptop) to record your guys next album, what gear would you choose?

mic

soldering iron

mpc1000

rs integrator

 

- When programming, do often spend a long time trying to make more general purpose tools with a ride range of uses, or is it usually more ad-hoc? What are some of the more interesting/unexpected design challenges for you when making these tools? I'm particularly curious about how you decided to handle recording/storage and playback of continuous parameter changes, i.e. stuff you control with knobs/faders. 

- Do you ever find it uncomfortable to use a mouse as much as Max requires? If so, how do you mitigate the effects on your wrist/arm?

- Could you talk a little bit about how your custom communication protocol differs from OSC?

- Could you pretty please name my Nord Micro Modular and my Octatrack.

 

i might start out making a specific thing but then i get distracted by an idea for something else do it becomes the new thing

i don't really care if i get to finish the thing i started

everything is continuous basically, there is no recording as such, just a stream of data being generated strictly

it's no worse for wrist burn than anything else, i use a massive trackpad, ymmv

how it differs from osc?  hugely, it's not packet-based for a start

your micro modular is now called miranda

your octatrack is now called waterwaterwaterwater

Guys, are you able after all those years imagine a sound you would like to create and then really create it? Or are you at least able to predict what your patches will do? Or is it re-discovering over and over again and just trying new things all the time?

more into finding things than making ersatz versions of imagined things

If y'all were doing something else today, what would it be?

just a funny story 
i saw you at i think se1 for the untitled tour and was very drunk.
there were some posters up around the gig and everyone was taking them, but when i tried the security would stop me.
because of my cheeky drunken state i would keep on trying to take it.
when i did get the poster as the security was not looking he then walked up to me and got on his radio and called for back up.
i was then walked in to the corner of the room so he could then screw up the poster and put it in the bin. i thought i was going to be kicked out of the gig.
he then made me take it out of the bin so he could laugh at me.
the poster is now on my wall and it puts a smile on my face when i look at it.
 
you also talk of playing in the dark and reading the post i agree with you on why you do it.
Are you aware of all the camera flashes that go on? they totally screw with your eyes when they go off its very funny.
its kind of like a strobe and how they mess with your head.
its a good thing when they go off some people get very confused when one goes of next to them.
i also wonder why people take them as all i have managed to get a good picture at your gigs.

 
o i do have a question.
what was your last gig you went to and what gigs have you been to that stick out in your mind.
 
thanks (-;

Were the Peel Sessions done in the BBC studios in a short period of time, or were they older tracks dusted off? It amazes me how so much pure emotion is funneled through Drane.

there is a metaphysical approach in ae's music? something related to speculative realism, or object-oriented ontology that rejects the privileging of human existence over the existence of nonhuman objects, or just hyperrealism? whats the final goal of your music if it lasted for thousand years?

What is your favorite flavour of icecream (currently in existence or yet to be created)?
 
It can be either real icecream of icecream consumed only in lucid dreams and/or seen during a psychedelic experience boiling up from between floor tiles.
 
Also, thank you for creating vletrmx21.

Hi there,
 
Was wondering if you could confirm whether the track in this youtube video really is by you, or whether it was mislabelled - doesn't sound like your other stuff, but i guess you guys aren't known for keeping to one style. It is at the second half of this video, starts at around 4 min. (also its not the track labelled in to comment section)
 

 
cheers!

I also remember something (maybe untrue) about Sean being really mean to Moby at some point during one of the ATP festivals. Did you guys fuck with Moby?

I heard it was Aphex that was pestering Moby on some tour, hiding his shoes stuff like that. Moby got pissed and left.I don't know, something I vaguely recall reading here.

Biggie and/or Tupac?

Biggie and/or Tupac?

Biggie , not by much, only really like one track.

 
Is it "Playa Hater"?
 
I bet it is.

the synths in Eutow are super phat, how many layered saws did you use?

there is a metaphysical approach in ae's music? something related to speculative realism, or object-oriented ontology that rejects the privileging of human existence over the existence of nonhuman objects, or just hyperrealism? whats the final goal of your music if it lasted for thousand years?

By nonhuman objects do u mean man made objects? Or other lifeforms?

 
all things made by men, whether physical or fictional: a panpsychic reality where humans and objects have the same dignity.[/size]

Do you still write graff? What names did you used to write? Any old pictures?

Rob this question for you was probably skipped:
 
What is your opinion on In Sides by Orbital and later evolution of the band to the more simplified, mainstream tunes (after Middle of Nowhere)?
 
Did guys just burnout but still wanted to make music no matter what?

Do either of you keep up with the Manchester or your local graffiti scenes? Seeing as it's how you fellas met. Do you have favourite writers and do you still paint yourselves?

I asked something to this effect earlier but I think it got buried
Can one of you elaborate on some tracks that you think are particularly complex with a high level of attention to detail, or some tracks you found were a particular pain in the ass to finally finish? I could make some guesses but I'd like to hear your thoughts.

thanks for all the great music over the years. you changed my perception of music and the endless possibilites 
 
i wish i had a useful question but i don't
is fermium a club / pop track in the world of untilted which is totally different from today in the far future or some other unidentified place? thats what i hear and i also see blue and gray on untilted.
 
and maybe
 
on exai did you recreate sounds from older albums but yet didnt source from actual old sounds? i feel like i hear kick drums from draft, vocals from untilted and so forth?

I was surprised to see that the lushest pads vote went to anything else other than Goz Quarter.   Anyways...
 

I imagine most famous people would like to still think of themselves as "regular guys"... but I can't imagine not having some sort of complex if I was in the spotlight for two decades and becoming more well known then most people ever be.  Do you feel this has gone to either of your heads or manifested itself in ways that contributed to a loss of touch with the rest of society?  I tried not to load the question too much.

do either of you guys have kids, and if so, do you create music for them?

Also, on the gear naming bandwagon.
Can you (sean pls) (or rob, pls) name my sh101 and Yamaha tx81z. The 101 is modded with extra inputs and output so you can get it to modulate itself and create FM acid, if that helps:)

Do either of you keep up with the Manchester or your local graffiti scenes? Seeing as it's how you fellas met. Do you have favourite writers and do you still paint yourselves?

Yeah locally there are some really talented writers. 3dom does alright round here.

Do either of you keep up with the Manchester or your local graffiti scenes? Seeing as it's how you fellas met. Do you have favourite writers and do you still paint yourselves?

Yeah locally there are some really talented writers. 3dom does alright round here.

Ask & Soker have done some good colour schemes not unlike syd meads' lusher acrylic pallettes, but i dont get out much, grafs a saturated scene in a way.

any of you  ever get tinnitus? (esp.after too much fm)
how do you get around it, when it stays for a while?(days,  weeks)

Do you guys like Turkish delight? If so what flavor?

Rob another taste-checking question. What about Laughing Stock by Talk Talk or Mark Hollis' solo album? I find it really fascinating how they developed from a new wave/synth-pop band to an experimental post-rock legend.

 

im not sure 3 more days of this will be enough. I mean, i have a hundred questions about what foods you guys like that still need to be answered.

 

marmite?

 

huge fan

 

Marmite is in

48 seconds into bladelores there's a glitch just before the track 'fades' into reverb. Was this you hitting stop on your sequencer after noticing the glitch and decided to keep it in the track, or deliberately programmed ?

A few years ago I accidentally discovered a way to make my megadrive glitch crazy FM sounds -
Sonic hangon.mp3
Ecco Jr.mp3

Are there any other happy accidents (like your 'Ensoniq RAM' discovery) that your were delighted to discover ?

our Casio SK1 had similar issues, after a Vimto situation

neatly bringing us to Vimto AND Marmite.  Dope!

48 seconds into bladelores there's a glitch just before the track 'fades' into reverb. Was this you hitting stop on your sequencer after noticing the glitch and decided to keep it in the track, or deliberately programmed ?

A few years ago I accidentally discovered a way to make my megadrive glitch crazy FM sounds -
Sonic hangon.mp3
Ecco Jr.mp3

Are there any other happy accidents (like your 'Ensoniq RAM' discovery) that your were delighted to discover ?

It was deliberate. 

sorry I have multiple questions
1.Is autechre for headphones - yes or no?
2.do you see the use of vocals as a instrument or just as something to adorn the track with?

3.is there a studio version of that MCR Quarter track?
4.If I pm you a link to files of a track of mine...would you remix it for me?
5.If I pm you my adress would you send me something signed for my birthday

1 yes absolutely, since the start.

Having bedroom studios forced us to do it all on cans a great majority of the time early on.

Late night manchester radio shows - listening had to be done covertly.

We also had quite a few Walkmans (yeah 80s er), journeys to school/college would be essential headphones time.

Later on we would 'idiot check' tracks' final mixes on cans during each DAT pass..

And still a lot of cans throughout the entire process - where necessary.

2 yes - an instrument.

3 iirc theres only one MCR QTR.

4 we're very busy at the mo, so its unlikely in the near future, shit put me on the spot dude why don't u. <3

5 agh, as much as i'd love to say yeah but looking at the namegeargate explosion, i'd be fucked if i could actually keep it a one off. But hypothetically speaking, sure.

Edited by Rob Ae, 04 November 2013 - 05:16 AM.

Is your remix of Jello's Neph you just telling Daz that they track is great as it is, just lose all the fluff and keep it simple

not really, we've been into the way he uses the keyboard since we met, and he does fluff very well. I think we just got mesmerised by the keys, and ended up focusing more there.

When you listen back to your tracks, are you able to distance your mind from the creation process? In other words, can you just kick back and enjoy the fruits of your labour, or are you always thinking about the building blocks that went into it?

 

Favourite 2 Live Crew track?

yeah i can distance myself from the processes, assuming theres been enough time to fill my short term buffer with other things.

early 2 live crew was best ;

ghetto bass, trow the d, what i like, get it girl. 

however yakety yak etc was bad.

Can a recommend a certain generative music patch / vst / software you like a lot (besides the ones you created yourself)?

Did you replace midi in favor of a modified version of osc or did you create something new from scratch?

Do you like any sepecific ios / android music app you would suggest?

What do you think about software like noatikl, synfire, melodyne and liquid notes?

when sean pointed me to SunVox on IOS i was pretty chuffed.

What's is(was) your favourite effect/fx chain on a Quadraverb? The thing is so damn flexible, am I right in thinking it had a big influence on your early sound, in terms of what it made possible? Any tips?

yeah love the quadraverb, tended towards the reverb phaser delay ring mod - can't rem if there was the spectrum shifter on the plus or not now (its at seans) , not so much chorus or distortion back then - its quite apparent in the early trax…. and its noisiness was not a problem.

caffeine?

not  for me generally, hard to breathe :)

could you name my juno-6?

johnnotrixpointrevver

=)

Will you pop in after this thread is over or will you retire these handles and return to the ones you were using before?

Ever considered restricting yourself to just a couple of pieces of gear and see what would come out without using any computers to mangle and manipulate sound? Just as a fun exercise.

1 should we?

2 thats our daily tea break exercise.

What are the weird high-pitched noises at the end of The Trees made from? I've heard something similar in a few electronic tracks (not just ae tracks, even though I seem to remember it being at the end of reniform puls too). It reminds me of FM radio noise when a station is slightly not tuned correctly.

those noises are made from The Trees.

 

hello ae, thanks for yr time.

 

I have some brief questions:

 

what is your favourite cartoon? 

 

do you really dig any drummers in particular?

 

have you ever sampled rubberbands?

 

zen/mindfulness/meditation: is there the odd buried reference in yr material?

 

did you know valis is basically a true story? there are online doco's and the exegesis is a real thing - you can buy a pretty large chunk of it in paperback. It's pretty wild. RAW also got hit by a pink beam of information, he and PKD wrote letters to each other about it. 

 

Big thank you both for the amazing music over the years! and the lols in this thread to a lesser, but also important extent. 

 

ps: pls digital release livesets as is it's totally not milking it pls

 

1 yeah good q, we love cartoons, rem, hard to say from which is most fave so mbe i'll think first for a while.

2 same answer but will return fewer options i expect

3 easy

4 easy

thanks back

"in a world ruled by immediacy and ease , contemporary artists try to deconstruct reality, and reconstruct it in a much complex way, which offers all kinds of prospective and aspects" : do you relate to this statement?
another two smaller questions:

have you ever used modular synthesizers? what do you think of this kind of instruments?

is there any chance to see you live in Italy?

not really too attached to statements about contemporary artists, i mean not to miss the point of the q much, but if people have more options, i expect more outcomes, dunno.

yeah we have a handful of modulars, real and unreal, bought and made.

yeah we visit Italy almost every time. we've had lots of support from italian people thanks!

Have you seen Jeskola Buzz - It's very much what SunVox is but with an insane amount of user created generators and effects -



and has one of the most gorgeous software reverbs I've ever heard

is it on more platforms?

I read somewhere there's an interview where you guys said you consider Incunabula and Amber as the 'cheesiest' albums you made. Can you elaborate on that? What do you mean with cheesiest? Most accesible? Least challenging? It does sound a bit harsh to say something like that about your work. Did you imply that you feel a sense of shame about those releases because you were still trying to find your feet? Does it bother you that those are the most popular amongst listeners?

yeah that was me, i said it in a way that was easily misinterpreted. a classic case of assuming someone knows what your on about and them not at all.

it was in relation to incunabula i guess. lol no shame at all, i still rate these releases, i mean they're the first stuff to fully come out.

it meant a lot to us to actually have an album on a brilliant label. i think what i meant was (in the context of the original interview, as the journo was commenting on the striking differences between old and ((then)) newer work) i think i was trying to say how they were perhaps more simple, but not in a shit way. 

We're you aware of Basic Channel etc in the mid 90's? do you rate their work?

 

(Thanks for putting up with all this btw.)

dude these releases were absolutely seminal

this might have gotten asked already but heck..

how important is a "hands-on" interface for you when you work on music?, obv. you guys like play all sorts of gear, but when you're using your Max programs for instance, param editing, composing, jamming, is your mode of working more prevalently computer-y with a screen, QWERTY keyboard & mouse?
or do you consciously spend time to think about & augment your HI's with dedicated controllers (monome, ipad etc.) to get a more instrument-like feel from your applications?
seems like last couple of years controllers have evolved quite a bit due cheaper/better parts from mobile phone tech etc.. use any of these like, dunno, q-nexus? data-gloves? vr-helmets?

hands on is important to a greater/lesser extent depending on what were up to, like configuring one that adapts as fast as the system (in the case of max) initially the cons outweigh the pros. so mouse/trackpad is cool enough for blazing through patching. something super simple but mega flexible that mirrors what were doing works well on end results, (as seen on oversteps tour).

but i rate most of my hardware for its controls interface, i.e. old nord modular V1 kbd. my bitstream BS3x's. 

 

something super simple but mega flexible that mirrors what were doing works well on end results, (as seen on oversteps tour).

tbh I couldn't see anything other than laptops :)
(lol @ google image search for autechre oversteps tour)

may I ask what you had in front of you back then?

 

Hi Æ. I can't believe I'm talking to my favorite artists ever. This is insane. Anyways, here are two questions (and sorry in advance if they were already posted): 

 

1) Do people often recognize you in the streets of your city, or wherever you go ?

 

2) Do you have special memories, or exclusive infos about "Garbage EP", and specially the track "VLetrmx", (which is for me the beautifulest track that a human being ever made) ? 

 

Thank you so much guys for all you've made. You changed my life. For real. 

1 not really on the whole, it has happened, mostly when were in a town with a show that day and theres some likely attendees floating around.

2 yeah i remember being particularly excited by the nature of the kick drum transient with the bass tuning that we got on garbagemx, and yeah the result of vletrmx

Was the software used in the Oversteps tour the same as the one used for the album?

What were the roles that your Macs/ PCs played in live shows, over the time?

I remember you (Rob) talking about that you could do entire tracks on old computers and that now we need lots of processing power to do that same. What software did you run on those old computers?

I remember seeing Sean in a video with some IBM laptop, making stuff with granular synthesis. What software was that?

I am a computer guy.

Sorry for all this batch.

Thanks.

its been changed quite a lot since oversteps, on that tour it was expressly designed to drive the sequencing for outboard nord synths.

the load i would get on a thinkpad w/48mb ram, was higher at one time that i could on later macs (PPC 7200), but not a true or fair comparison, cos i reckon the reliance on plugin inserts had shot right up in mac os compared to windows.

once when we used an early mac laptop for live work, we also opted to get an IBM thinkpad so we had both at the same time. the thinkpad ran windows version of NM editor amongst other things exclusive to PCs in a live set.

i think that granular synth was Granulab, what video, i wouldn't mind taking a look.

 

I spend most of my time driving the snake pass and can see why it's been important/referenced by you (and rdj). It really pulls you in but is massively frustrating as well (mottram bypass pls). It's also pretty magic in the dead of night and a great time to listen to tunes. Do you still get up to Sheffield much? Fancy DJing the new Computer Club night at the uni that Hanal is sorting?

sorry but I think my crappy question got skipped. Was drunk. Thanks!

 

didn't miss it, can't say, not been to sheff for a while, Hanal is a close friend so anything he does is good by me.

two questions:

1) during your periods when you were working with raw audio files, how did you manage collaborating with each other? did you have a system of tagging? any sort of timecodes or marker systems for syncronisation? categorise them as percussionhits/soundevents/beds/beats or did you just go freestyle? (also, any related anecdotes about co-operative workflow could be extremely illuminating)

2) do you have any methods for organising/planning the overall 'form' of a track, (as in, labelling and co-ordinating all the 'sections') and have you built up your own vocabulary to explain these things?

2 when we first met, we got on well because of a similar lack of musical training but a similar descriptive understanding of what we liked in the forms of actual sounds (more than full tracks). kind of a bottom up language which works well to this day.

1 i guess just staying up to date with contents of folders is easy enough, say in older work, DP's 'edge edit copy' creates new files each time theres a change, so only latest files needed sharing.

no real anecdotes recently - its quite easy to remove whole channels by accident - i ruined seans' latest version of the skeng remix by losing a track. it was a while before we realised, while i was commenting on the mix so far, that what i had was completely wrong.

actually, I have one more:

PD vs Max: I use PD and find it hard to manage the cpu usage by hiding all the gui elements in subpatches, (and it seems that not many people really do huge compositions within it like you do) is max any easier to manage this specific problem?

yeah it has presentation mode.

 

 

"in a world ruled by immediacy and ease , contemporary artists try to deconstruct reality, and reconstruct it in a much complex way, which offers all kinds of prospective and aspects" : do you relate to this statement?
another two smaller questions:

have you ever used modular synthesizers? what do you think of this kind of instruments?

is there any chance to see you live in Italy?

not really too attached to statements about contemporary artists, i mean not to miss the point of the q much, but if people have more options, i expect more outcomes, dunno.

 

yeah we have a handful of modulars, real and unreal, bought and made.

 

yeah we visit Italy almost every time. we've had lots of support from italian people thanks!

 

thank you for replying.

 

concerning modulars, how much do you use them in the studio? because it happens to hear some sounds in your record that make me think: "that awesome sound... must be a modular!"

 

good, that suggests its deep - which is nice because i have a tendency to feel that modulars give deeper results - and the studio right now is all maxmsp.

for other older tracks - that depends on which tracks your thinking of

 

 

 

 

"in a world ruled by immediacy and ease , contemporary artists try to deconstruct reality, and reconstruct it in a much complex way, which offers all kinds of prospective and aspects" : do you relate to this statement?
another two smaller questions:

have you ever used modular synthesizers? what do you think of this kind of instruments?

is there any chance to see you live in Italy?

not really too attached to statements about contemporary artists, i mean not to miss the point of the q much, but if people have more options, i expect more outcomes, dunno.

 

yeah we have a handful of modulars, real and unreal, bought and made.

 

yeah we visit Italy almost every time. we've had lots of support from italian people thanks!

 

thank you for replying.

 

concerning modulars, how much do you use them in the studio? because it happens to hear some sounds in your record that make me think: "that awesome sound... must be a modular!"

 

good, that suggests its deep - which is nice because i have a tendency to feel that modulars give deeper results - and the studio right now is all maxmsp.

 

for other older tracks - that depends on which tracks your thinking of

 

 

is there much modular on pre-untilted stuff?

 

yeah some

Edited by Rob Ae, 04 November 2013 - 07:51 AM.

i've been kind of at a wall with putting together releases lately (burnt out on the whole dub techno scene), any advice for experimentation? i always get stuck doing the same things on most tracks.

try really hard to do a very shit track

I saw you mentioned footwork in your recent Fact interview, has it been inspiring you at all? Been getting more and more into it recently... people have been making some interesting fusions with it as well. The drums in Runrepik sound a bit footworky...

 

 

not inspired by the current incarnation per se, but as a form of what i like to think of as general hip hop styles, we've always been in into the kind stride some heavy percussion at the right tempo has. Runrepik beats are oversteps tour sound system test patches.

Was the software used in the Oversteps tour the same as the one used for the album?
What were the roles that your Macs/ PCs played in live shows, over the time?
I remember you (Rob) talking about that you could do entire tracks on old computers and that now we need lots of processing power to do that same. What software did you run on those old computers?
I remember seeing Sean in a video with some IBM laptop, making stuff with granular synthesis. What software was that?
I am a computer guy.
Sorry for all this batch.
Thanks.

its been changed quite a lot since oversteps, on that tour it was expressly designed to drive the sequencing for outboard nord synths.
 
the load i would get on a thinkpad w/48mb ram, was higher at one time that i could on later macs (PPC 7200), but not a true or fair comparison, cos i reckon the reliance on plugin inserts had shot right up in mac os compared to windows.
 
once when we used an early mac laptop for live work, we also opted to get an IBM thinkpad so we had both at the same time. the thinkpad ran windows version of NM editor amongst other things exclusive to PCs in a live set.
 
i think that granular synth was Granulab, what video, i wouldn't mind taking a look.

Sorry, I couldn t find it on Youtube but you two watched at the back when something sounded like broken or something similar. You were using a cellphone at the time of that sound happening, maybe.

 
from ~4:30 mark

View on Vimeo.

Hah, still using Granulab to this day myself (after about 10 years of near daily use I thought it'd only be fair for me to pay for a registered copy ). Is there any other granular synthesis programmes you enjoy using (or do you mainly make your own granular stuff) - It's by far my favourite tool in my kit, making a simple 16 bar loop getting evolve into a 10 minute ambient thing is my usual trick :

ok if u can squint hard enough to verify, cos i can only make out horizontal controls there, and our granulab is all vertical, memory is patchy here so might be another app. also i can sort of make out a waveform across the top. ah yeah course. doh

edit

yeah they filmed us playing back files in wavelab. but the tracks were granulab jams iirc

1) How did you do that great repeating delay feedback sound in Drane where is sounds like the delay time is being changed a lot?

 

2) LP5 sounds really clean and crisp (for want of a better word) compared to anything that came before it, was this your first major move to Max/MSP and away from outboard synths / effects? 

 

3) Who is Jacobean? 

1 not telling

2 no

3 sorry?

Has being a full-time musician ever put a strain on the enjoyment of making music?

no, it makes it more enjoyable.

there was another one realtime granular app at this time (and still is), called CrusherX. did you used it?

no sorry didn't have that one

 

 

1) How did you do that great repeating delay feedback sound in Drane where is sounds like the delay time is being changed a lot?

 

2) LP5 sounds really clean and crisp (for want of a better word) compared to anything that came before it, was this your first major move to Max/MSP and away from outboard synths / effects? 

 

3) Who is Jacobean? 

1 not telling

 

2 no

 

3 sorry?

 

 

Jacobean from Mask 500: http://www.discogs.c...0/release/19800

 

now u have me playing the Dranes back to back really loud. 

Can you say anything about the melody in irlite (get 0)? It's a really insane melody, like nothing I've ever heard before. How'd you guys come up with it?

this was partly covered in an earlier post, its quite a long track, hard to know which bits you mean really. 

Would either of you like to name my synth?

chuckshene

btw none of our gear has ever been named afaik, this isn't something we do to ourselves.

Whats your favorite track on L-event?

currently Osla for n

There is a quite interesting book by Jan St. Werner (of Mouse On Mars) & Klaus Sander from 2006 called "Vorgemischte Welten" (Pre-mixed / Prepared Worlds) where they discuss about music composition / innovation etc in the age of Ableton & Co where you can basically build an entire discography on preset sounds and beats only - like cooking with deep-frozen food. Their argument is that this sort of preset-based production has killed innovation in music and simply interesting music.

Would you agree with that? And have you ever tried to work with presets of plugins / softwares only (and achieved anything satisfying)?

i think its been the same situation since presets were put there.

we have

though there are plenty of arguments to the contrary - like we grew up listening to music with hundreds of tracks illustrating variations on say how a DMX or an 808 through a studio desk can turn out, i think custom is better overall, cos its more you. but only if thats the point. 

Can you name my desktop computer? It's old and dusty, if that makes any difference. 

Heater

Edited by Rob Ae, 04 November 2013 - 09:22 AM.

i feel like untilted > untilted tour > quaristice > quaristice tour was like 1 big creative chunk of exploration. has working out live stuff from 1 record always contributed to the next album as much as it did with that stuff?

yeah this throughput was useful defo, but hard to answer definitively cos live sets were very often a separate setup cos we ether a) not like to 'do' studio tracks in live context. like whip out bass cadet on request. b) couldn't do it with the gear we wanted to jam onstage with. c) or other.

but after each tour we'd come back to reset, untitled/elektrons et al - like sean said earlier were easy to get out the box after moving house/studio…. so it was a starting point to mess with what was in there.

then moving on from hardware live setup, had the effect like in reverse.

theres been a strong sense of contribution from previous live set to the following album, but not always in literal use of gear terms. sometimes just a reaction to it. not sure if that is clear tho'

Edited by Rob Ae, 04 November 2013 - 09:38 AM.

Is there anything more hilariously distressing than the sound of a broken merry go round:

shit i need to insure my ribs, this is the sonic equivalent to the bull wallet versions

Edited by Rob Ae, 04 November 2013 - 09:49 AM.

 

 

 

 

"in a world ruled by immediacy and ease , contemporary artists try to deconstruct reality, and reconstruct it in a much complex way, which offers all kinds of prospective and aspects" : do you relate to this statement?
another two smaller questions:

have you ever used modular synthesizers? what do you think of this kind of instruments?

is there any chance to see you live in Italy?

not really too attached to statements about contemporary artists, i mean not to miss the point of the q much, but if people have more options, i expect more outcomes, dunno.

 

yeah we have a handful of modulars, real and unreal, bought and made.

 

yeah we visit Italy almost every time. we've had lots of support from italian people thanks!

 

thank you for replying.

 

concerning modulars, how much do you use them in the studio? because it happens to hear some sounds in your record that make me think: "that awesome sound... must be a modular!"

 

good, that suggests its deep - which is nice because i have a tendency to feel that modulars give deeper results - and the studio right now is all maxmsp.

 

for other older tracks - that depends on which tracks your thinking of

 

 

like tapr in Draft 7.30, the texture in the background sounds a lot like a modular patch. could it be?

 

to me most of the texture here appears in the foreground.

do you you have specific visuals / spaces / ideas for your tracks that persist, or do they change over time so you see the music in a new light?

yeah nothing specific visually, its usually too wild or turbulent to be literal. yeah things change mostly down to adding more experiences on top of experiences.

disembarking off a cliff edge but horizontally is a recurring good one.

Edited by Rob Ae, 04 November 2013 - 10:34 AM.

If the yellow power ranger is a girl then how the hell do you explain this?

 

the director was obviously implying that gender is a social construct

Oh, here's a question someone should have asked:

 

Are you aware of the gap in the middle of Teartear on the American release of Amber? Do you know how that happened, and is it fixed now? 

 

(I actually bought the album twice but both had the gap, so I assumed it was intentional, only to find out years later it wasn't...seemingly all the US versions, at least from that time period, had this problem). 

nah u know what, i only read about that on here like a week or two ago

i haven't even heard it

obv. it's a huge fuckup as i'm guessing they shifted a few of them by now

whose idea was the looped vocal sample near the end of zeiss contarex? its one of my fav parts on ep7

 

and why did blyz castl get such a limited release?? do u not like it or something? its bangin m8

i dunno i guess we were reacting a bit to everyone asking why the japan only tracks were always a bit rubbish

 

 

Guys, are you able after all those years imagine a sound you would like to create and then really create it? Or are you at least able to predict what your patches will do? Or is it re-discovering over and over again and just trying new things all the time?

 

more into finding things than making ersatz versions of imagined things

 

 

So if you have a work in progress track where you can totally hear in your head a sound design idea for that track that would make it a killer track you would not try to make it real?

 

i might but if i got sidetracked and ended up making something different then i would see that as a good thing

What do you think might be the effect of extreme cerebral stimulation of listening to for example especially long tracks on Exai? Especially when that stimulation is hard to vocalise or simply emote to or physically express?

For example, sometimes when I really love something and find it intangibly stimulating, I find that I have no way to express it to people (a description can't really express 'that thing') - do you ever get this kind of frustration? Do you think it might effect how someone thinks, behaves, feels?

To try to clarify a bit more - I'm talking about extreme stimulation with no real world counterpart - that thing where something just 'does something' you can't explain it.

tbh it's only frustrating in a  third party kind of way

like, if i'm seeing someone trying to explain to someone else what's good about a track and they end up resorting to ill-fitting metaphor or cliche-speak

but in terms of us, and process, or playing rob stuff, nah, u can just tell if someone is getting it, there are a ton of unconscious signals i think. or i feel, i mean

Were the Peel Sessions done in the BBC studios in a short period of time, or were they older tracks dusted off? It amazes me how so much pure emotion is funneled through Drane.

they were done in our studio as a chunk of tracks, i.e. we got the request and then did the tracks one after another

Hello Rob.

some questions

What is your fav acid house 12"

What is your fav album or 12" cover art

Can you remember the label of that acid 12" with the hip hop acapellas ove the top (ice t shante ) etc.. as im trying to find a copy.

are your decks original or did you ever have to replace them

it changes, prob my most awesome fave is very often : Jaquarius - Love Is Happiness(Acid Rain) 1988 - YouTube

what!? one cover? right now as yr asking : Unsane. the one with the track : Bath on it

Hi there,

 

Was wondering if you could confirm whether the track in this youtube video really is by you, or whether it was mislabelled - doesn't sound like your other stuff, but i guess you guys aren't known for keeping to one style. It is at the second half of this video, starts at around 4 min. (also its not the track labelled in to comment section)

 

 

cheers!

yeah it's our remix of various artists

http://www.discogs.c...s/release/13017

Do you like the matrix sequels?

god no they were absolutely shit

What item under $100 would you suggest to someone who wanted to start making music?

renoise

 

Hello Rob.

some questions

What is your fav acid house 12"

What is your fav album or 12" cover art

Can you remember the label of that acid 12" with the hip hop acapellas ove the top (ice t shante ) etc.. as im trying to find a copy.

are your decks original or did you ever have to replace them

 

it changes, prob my most awesome fave is very often : Jaquarius - Love Is Happiness(Acid Rain) 1988 - YouTube

 

what!? one cover? right now as yr asking : Unsane. the one with the track : Bath on it

 

What are the best/your favourite records to listen while on train?

super linear stuff works well

i like basic channel, chain reaction, acid tracks (actual acid tracks not people making techno songs on a 303)

 

 

 

 

i got no idea, i never owned one

but i take it as a compliment cos it means you're hearing some of our dsp progging as analogue (which was the intention)

 

interesting, because Exai has a distinctly more 'analog' sound, if it's mostly digital you guys did a great job of making it sound the opposite, at least all the synth work.  Are there soft-synths you guys have an affinity for? I've noticed you mention FM7 a few times, how about some of the newer ones like Madrona Labs Aalto? 

Also thanks for the confirmation on the Autechre patch, there are an army of cycling74 employees trying to claim it's not a real patch or as some would say a 'hoax'.  The patch made me realize just the lengths you guys go to get that perfect timbre. No matter how many times or different ways I've tried drum stuttering/rapid fire sounds, they never have that pleasurable timbre quality you guys mastered so well during the Draft/Confield era. 

Do you guys enjoy any of the other artists on Isolate Records besides Vsnares and OST/Dalglish, specifically Nommo Ogo or Tomoroh Hidari?  

And what's your favorite album or work by Mick Harris aka Scorn? 

 

 

 

a lot of the stuff around draft time was done in dp, just triggering a sampler from the sequencer (akai z8 over midi) - the motu midi interface we were using was really fast so you could mad rolls with it. we'd do tuned rolls and then copy them and multiply the length of the roll by 1.05946 incrementally to make it play melodies.

 

interesting, so that max/msp patch which appears to be 'stuttering' a real-time synthesized bass drum sound and turning it into a melody was not a technique used in Confield or draft? Was it used in anything specific you can remember? I feel like i hear some aspect of it in the Confield tour recordings. 

Your response about recordlabelrecords appears to have been edited out and/or blank, any followup on that?   
i'd be happy to endure the mysterious mind fuck though too if you don't want to answer

was Recks On in Exai an intentional Mick Harris/Scorn homage?  Or if it wasn't planned I guess my other question would be, just how much Scorn are the two of you listening to these days? I'd like to think a lot. 

 

nah that patch was just an exercise in using phasor in a kind of slightly fractal way

i haven't heard much stuff on rlr soz, feel free to link me to some tho

nah recks on is an 80s hip hop homage, that emu snare is on loads of hip hop records, and the booming 808 etc.   more of a shout to meat beat manifesto, renegade soundwave, keith leblanc, duke bootee etc

but i can see why someone who doesn't really listen to 80s hip hop but listens to scorn might think that

So, you write your music; and a lot of the rhythms and melodies vary widely from bar to bar.

 

When I listen to it, I have memorized some of them, but there are always parts that sound new to me because I don't remember that particular variation, and there are so many different ones (fills, riffs and such) -- does that happen to you too? Are you still surprised by what happens in the songs, or do you know them backwards and forwards since you made them and listened to them so many times during the final mix process? (I know generative vs. non-generative writing makes a difference here, feel free to comment on either case.)

 

Btw, that's one of my favorite parts about your music, that (cliché as it sounds) I am always hearing new things and being surprised and entertained. :)

yeah we tend to know them inside out, if we've both had a hand in the tracks - it sinks right in, but we get to hear each others tracks as more end user sometimes….but with a highly unusual degree of  exposure

What is the first track you play for people that have never heard you before?

i had a guy round fixing my boiler a couple of years ago when i was doing tac lacora so i played him that cos he was asking

he just said 'who listens to this then? loads of guys sitting in their houses smoking weed?'

and i went 'yeah, pretty much'

Is there some other artists' song that you wished you had written? Do you guys even listen to mainstream music?

i reckon the stuff martin gore and alan wilder did together is basically some of the best songwriting ever

not that i do stuff like that, or want to really, but i love it

hello to you both 

 

are we likely to see a live set this year?

i wonder how the process works after you finish an album to prepare for a live set?

do you take time off after after the album goes to press? 

 

also what are your feelings of repressing vinyl? i would love to get amber on 12" 

 

thanks again to you both hope to see you soon 

don't really do time off after a records' finished, cos of mastering and product design and so on, but certainly a switch from doing the compiling type procedures to something more omni directional mbe

i suppose if it was manageable for warp to repress old LPs without going under, they'd be the guys to do it at some point. 

question for sean or rob: 

you guys have been recognized as being primary figures in bringing back or re-popularizing FM synthesis as well as pushing it in entirely new directions, do either of you have interest in physical modeling synthesis? I know you say you're mostly outside the DAW right now, and given that there arent very many pieces of physical gear that do physical modeling (besides the korg wavedrum, yamaha vls and a few others) have you explored much in the past or present new advancements in this technology such as Pianoteq or Applied Acoustics Chromaphone (probably the first really solid phys mod percussion engine since the Machinedrum) ? Just curious if you could speak on how you feel about this type of synthesis or if any specific tracks utilized it.

edit: Sonderemawe sounds like it had some virtual metal plate/membrane action happening in it. A 

lot of loaded questions here tbh but i'll say this

we've been blagging sounds for years, way way before we heard anyone using the term physical modelling

even just using a 202 you can make really mad 'bonk' sounds by tuning the resonance and using the res env a certain way (think of voodoo ray by gerald)

not implying we were the first at all obviously, wendy carlos and tomita were running rings round anything we did before we even knew what music was

but like, there are literally tons of ways you can make fake things out of other things. this idea that physmod is only a few techniques is a bit of a new thing really.  but i guess describing those things an non-linear processes is a bit much for some people

you can make a wide array of vowel sounds using a combination of pwm and fm, but it's only considered formant synthesis is you're using a collection of bpf's

the actual list of techniques that you're supposed to learn is weirdly limited and doesn't really cover what's possible.  in a lot of ways things were more interesting before it all got formalised

that's why wendy carlos and tomita are so good, cos they didn't have that list of techniques getting in the way, they found most of it thru trial and error

Edited by Sean Ae, 04 November 2013 - 11:42 AM.

 

What are the best/your favourite records to listen while on train?

 

super linear stuff works well

i like basic channel, chain reaction, acid tracks (actual acid tracks not people making techno songs on a 303)

 

yeah roland kayn - tarego II - is a good one for rotating perspectives

Edited by Rob Ae, 04 November 2013 - 11:48 AM.

This is not a question but I thought I'd share this recently un-earthed album by Wai Cheng who ran Isolate Records.
It's very reminiscent of some of your older material but perhaps a little darker and more depressing

https://optic-isolat...illed-rebellion

Wai recounted to me a fun story of meeting you guys once and getting to hang out on the tour bus for a little bit, I think Chris had introduced you guys. He said you had many bikini clad lady posters hanging up. &nbsp;I also remember something (maybe untrue) about Sean being really mean to Moby at some point during one of the ATP festivals. Did you guys fuck with Moby?

i would never fuck with moby

we did meet him in nyc once at one of our gigs but it was a bit weird, i think the other guys we were hanging with didn't like him

i reckon he gets more shit than he deserves tbh

not that i listen to his music

go was good tho

Word up, Ae. I recently found a few of your old radio mixes on my old Compaq desktop PC (XFM, Breezeblock and Solid Steel), it was great to hear them again (big chunks of Wendy Carlos and Hafler Trio on that Breezeblock Mix :-D). I know you guys do the massive webcast marathons but does it work differently for the radio output? does the station come to you and you post them a CD of a half hour mix? And are you inundated with requests for this type of stuff in the lead up to an album release? 

yeah sometimes its like that for outside radio programmers, we get quite busy with requests when we announce a new record.

are you happy with record labels like Modern Love that try to obscure the fact that they also own Boomkat ? Does this come off as slightly deceptive to you or do you have no opinion? 

Also what are your feelings on bands that channel old school industrial vibes but don't seem to actually be making interesting music like Vatican Shadow who seems like he's molded his image entirely on Muslingauze

were you just as embarrassed as I was when Zomby donned the cover of The Wire magazine? 

lel

i dunno if they obscure it at all tbh, everyone knows

jeez yeah i mean i get what you're saying but the new guys have their own slant on stuff, and i bet if u asked them they'd jump at the chance to show respect to muslimgauze or zf or nurse with wound etc

the wire, i mean

i dunno man they need to shift magazines i'm not gonna slag them off for that

i quite like some of zomby's stuff

Hey guys.

 

a) what did you guys do in Australia in between gigs? Did you get to do anything or just hang out in the hotel?

 

b) you did a remix for Earth a while back. Do you listen to much of their music? Do you listen to much music with distorted guitars? I seem to remember a mix with necrophagist on it.

we just went record shopping and hung out with mark a lot (we'd not seen him in years so was really nice to catch up)

 

I was surprised to see that the lushest pads vote went to anything else other than Goz Quarter.   Anyways...

 

I imagine most famous people would like to still think of themselves as "regular guys"... but I can't imagine not having some sort of complex if I was in the spotlight for two decades and becoming more well known then most people ever be.  Do you feel this has gone to either of your heads or manifested itself in ways that contributed to a loss of touch with the rest of society?  I tried not to load the question too much.

 

not really, most people don't have a clue. it's not like we get recognised in the street

Hey Sean & Rob,

 

When you guys played the Detroit Electronic Music Festival several years back, how did you feel about playing the underground stage with completely horrible acoustics? Or, did the shite acoustics add to the fun?

 

Any fond memories from the bankruptcy that is Detroit?

 

Are the Secret Chiefs 3 ever going to release Book of Souls?

 

Holla.

yeah it was fun tempered with a carnage kind of angle.

just being there is enough, detroit's reach has been deep for us… like going to the centre of the universe in a way.

are you working on tunes while you watmm?

nah i'm listening to stuff

other people's

I would like to have VLetrmx21 played at my Funeral. Which music (if any) would you want played at yours?

 

And while on the subject of death, If 1 of you died would the other carry on releasing music? and would you still call it Autechre?

 

Sorry for the morbid questions and respect for keeping this thing going!!

dunno if it would be fair to call it autechre, sometimes we have impersonated each others' styles in a track in any absence, but i doubt it would be fun to do it post lossage.

any idea how long it took bladelores to come together? was it something you kept returning to over a long period of time?
the wash at the end is beautiful.

a while, some of the back end was built before the track became what it was in the end. also timeline in this context isn't accurate because we had a few tracks on the go simultaneously, so divided by them, dunno. hahah

 

 

Word up, Ae. I recently found a few of your old radio mixes on my old Compaq desktop PC (XFM, Breezeblock and Solid Steel), it was great to hear them again (big chunks of Wendy Carlos and Hafler Trio on that Breezeblock Mix :-D). I know you guys do the massive webcast marathons but does it work differently for the radio output? does the station come to you and you post them a CD of a half hour mix? And are you inundated with requests for this type of stuff in the lead up to an album release? 

yeah sometimes its like that for outside radio programmers, we get quite busy with requests when we announce a new record.

 

In the lead up to Draft being released you did a mix for Radio 3: Mixing it and a mix for Mary Anne Hobbs. The Radio 3 mix was full of bombastic dance beats which almost left the presenters speechless, while the Radio 1 mix was more cultured/refined. It was almost as if the two CD's had got mixed up in the mail and went to different areas in the BBC. I thought that was a nice touch :-D

 

yeah the mixing it mix was super condensed to like 15min

 

 

Hey Sean & Rob,

 

When you guys played the Detroit Electronic Music Festival several years back, how did you feel about playing the underground stage with completely horrible acoustics? Or, did the shite acoustics add to the fun?

 

Any fond memories from the bankruptcy that is Detroit?

 

Are the Secret Chiefs 3 ever going to release Book of Souls?

 

Holla.

yeah it was fun tempered with a carnage kind of angle.

 

just being there is enough, detroit's reach has been deep for us… like going to the centre of the universe in a way.

 

 

Thanks Rob,

 

Going back to your time in Detroit.

 

Did you rub elbows with any of the Belleville Three? 

Was Derrick May like, Awww my GOD! it's the Autechre! You guys comb my hair back with AwEsomEnEss!!!?

or were you guys like Derrick May, OMG! Noooo Waaayyyyy!!!? knuckle bumps.

 

Thanks in advance

 

no we didn't meet any of them, but we got Juan to play with us in japan some time after that. which was stupidly hard - cos even though we hung out a fair bit, i remembered all the things i wanted to pester him with, as i landed at heathrow.

What do you guys think about this? 

 

some nice harmonies

and the bit where she sings low is well trippy 

 

 

 

What is the first track you play for people that have never heard you before?

 
i had a guy round fixing my boiler a couple of years ago when i was doing tac lacora so i played him that cos he was asking
he just said 'who listens to this then? loads of guys sitting in their houses smoking weed?'
and i went 'yeah, pretty much'

 

 
So you worked on tac lacora for several years? Impressive.

 

Do you always take time to get a distant view on tracks before you know what you did there and release them or do you just work on them very long?

 

nah it was done in a week or so, i was playing him the edit

the original live jam was done in a few hours tho, a few months before that

 

 

 

What is the first track you play for people that have never heard you before?

 
i had a guy round fixing my boiler a couple of years ago when i was doing tac lacora so i played him that cos he was asking
he just said 'who listens to this then? loads of guys sitting in their houses smoking weed?'
and i went 'yeah, pretty much'

 

 
So you worked on tac lacora for several years? Impressive.

 

Do you always take time to get a distant view on tracks before you know what you did there and release them or do you just work on them very long?

 

that really varies from track to track. some get turned over in an afternoon, others are built on ideas that took years to facilitate

 

 

 

 

What is the first track you play for people that have never heard you before?

 
i had a guy round fixing my boiler a couple of years ago when i was doing tac lacora so i played him that cos he was asking
he just said 'who listens to this then? loads of guys sitting in their houses smoking weed?'
and i went 'yeah, pretty much'

 

 
So you worked on tac lacora for several years? Impressive.

 

Do you always take time to get a distant view on tracks before you know what you did there and release them or do you just work on them very long?

 

that really varies from track to track. some get turned over in an afternoon, others are built on ideas that took years to facilitate

 

hahah we're about to phase each other out!

any of you  ever get tinnitus? (esp.after too much fm)

how do you get around it, when it stays for a while?(days,  weeks)

yeah i have pretty constant hf tinnitus and occasionally i will get either a kind of rippling bass sound or like a 70% reduction, both of which can last for anything from a few seconds to a few hours, and then seem to clear up by themselves. i found that listening to computerworld by kraftwerk seems to make them go away faster.

not joking there, it works for some reason.  prob cos it's a neural feedback thing, i think i'm shoving something in the feedback path and kind of washing it out.

Rob another taste-checking question. What about Laughing Stock by Talk Talk or Mark Hollis' solo album? I find it really fascinating how they developed from a new wave/synth-pop band to an experimental post-rock legend.

i always liked them tho even when they were doing more normal stuff, there was always a kind of sophistication to it, or elegance or something

Okay guys, few more questions, you don't have to answer them if they feel to personal, especially number one and two.

 

1. Does your family like your music? By family I don't necessarily mean your wife/gf or possible offspring. Maybe your parents? Or your aunts or something like that. 

 

2. Did your family play a role in the making of Autechre back in the beginning? Like, supporting you and stuff like that.

 

3. At what point (release) were you both able to make a living off your music?

 

Oh, and Sean, you kind of skipped a question, would love an answer to that.

Also, thanks for doing this, it's great to get an authentic picture of the minds behind Autechre. Thank you, you guys are great.

some of the music they had on around us had some bearing on things.

after touring the US in the first tour, pretty much lost my job on returning cos i used up all my allowed holidays, then got offered a week in moscow, so from that point on i had little choice but to try to keep it up.

following up on Sean's comment about the ISAM visual show here

 

 

 

oh not to mention the cheesiness of using projection mapping, it's like a corporate presentation or something 

is it strange to either of you guys to see the corporate world appropriating the style of imagery presented in Gantz Graf? 
I'd imagine it would be somewhat off-putting to create something as amazing as the Gantz Graf audio/visual presentation and have hundreds of knockoffs being used in anything from a car commercial to a scene in a bad hollywood film.  this takes me to another question though, what does it feel like to have a ton of people imitating your styles? Was there a conscious decision to just go so ahead of the curve that no one could possibly predict or emulate the future of AE? Or did this just happen on its own (because that's where you are now). 

nah not strange at all in fact i think alex's graphics work suits that environment, in a good way cos that he's pushed it so far it makes it something else

if alex was actually designing corporate presentations they would be fucking excellently done

but yeah i mean sometimes people think they hired someone to appropriate something and they get the result and they can't tell it's like a totally shit version of the thing they asked for

like the robots in I, Robot, imo they are like a really shit ripoff of the bjork robot, but the director/producers prob couldn't see how badly done it was so it got used

i don't mind if people want to adapt what we've done (in principle) at all.  whether i like the music is a different question tho

we never thought we were being ahead of other people, we've always felt like we are making music for here and now

The first half of d-sho qub is one of the most floor-friendly moments of your later years, with a sublime melodic hook. Are there more 'accessible' versions of this track? You could have made a few bob off that! Have either of you found yourselves treading a particularly commercial-sounding path and felt the need to dial it back? Or do you just release what ever, paying no mind to something sounding commercial or not?

it doesn't seem particularly weird because they're more normal = commercial, making stuff purely for commercial supremacy would be a rod to beat ourselves with, so not something to dabble with lightly. i think the first parts of D-sho qub aren't a million miles from say bike or tracks on our first releases. so its been a thread we can't help its something we do naturally, commercial or not.

how does one mix such complex tracks, so that various sounds don't nullify each other? simple eq?

i don't have a snappy sounding answer to this

i know a lot of producers would say something lame like 'turn everything down' or 'mix with your ears' but i can't go there

i read so many stupid posts on gear forums like that, it never actually works like that.  every case is different

Do you guys do a lot of field recordings? Like, recording street sounds, or clicks, water, metal, voices, wood, etc...

Do you do that often? Or only once in a while/when you have a specific idea?


And Sean: I have send you a PM with a link to the 2007 Dour Festival concert recording, it says here you still haven't read it. (just a heads up)

Also, can you name my acoustic guitar? I haven't played it in years, needs a new life.

recent field recordings have often come about by chance - and the opportunity to capture something good we've noticed, not say as a result of a pursuit for something.

im not sure 3 more days of this will be enough. I mean, i have a hundred questions about what foods you guys like that still need to be answered.

 

marmite?

yeah

Do you guys do a lot of field recordings? Like, recording street sounds, or clicks, water, metal, voices, wood, etc...

Do you do that often? Or only once in a while/when you have a specific idea?


And Sean: I have send you a PM with a link to the 2007 Dour Festival concert recording, it says here you still haven't read it. (just a heads up)

Also, can you name my acoustic guitar? I haven't played it in years, needs a new life.

Rifdent Stroakes

Any tracks you've done that you thought went unappreciated maybe? Calbruc and Iera spring to mind..

Or do you not care? Do you have a general interest to find out what tracks people seem to prefer?

nah, things vary  so much, people change minds, tracks age well others don't then get cool again, theres no short term stability to it.

do you like ween? it's 2 crazy musicians making a bunch of awesome tracks

 

yeah i fucking love ween

pure guava is in my all time top 10 most days

describe the machine that is autechre in a haiku

I'm curious as to how soon in the creative process one of your tracks will be given a track title or a working variation on a track title?

 most likely as soon as we save some of it. and the process then can continue

-Any involvement with NMB? NWH20 seems like shoutout to Lego Feet track

 

-Also, about the Gescom track "G1" Darrel Fitton shared with the public a few years back (I imagine you guys had to be made aware he was doing that), is there any chance for a similar gesture of goodwill on your end during this ask you anything event or anytime in the near future? *wipes foam away from mouth*

 

Sean, regarding your answer to the question about the resonant structure in question...  I remember reading somewhere a long time ago (interview maybe) that the sounds were infact from your rectum - the piece made as a joke or "statement" referencing the sort of rabid fan who would purchase their favorite artist's new album even if it was straight farting for 45 minutes.  I won't ask to confirm or deny ...but I think it is hilarious if true.

nah that's not it

 

 

how does one mix such complex tracks, so that various sounds don't nullify each other? simple eq?

 

i don't have a snappy sounding answer to this

i know a lot of producers would say something lame like 'turn everything down' or 'mix with your ears' but i can't go there

i read so many stupid posts on gear forums like that, it never actually works like that.  every case is different

 

 

So do you mix while composing or you tend to separate it on composition and mixing stages? (Of course I don't mean mixing that is naturally involved in composing while making gradations/climax etc). Sometimes I mix a track even for a few weeks before it is really right - which make me often wonder if it's not a problem somewhere else in the track than in the mix (like bad composition or sound design not really working for the vibe or simply sobering from the enthusiasm for the track etc).

 

for me - something can just click into place after running it for days, then just changing one thing, and suddenly theres a moment of awareness like was just totally meant to be that way and it couldn't tell us. 

 

 

do you like ween? it's 2 crazy musicians making a bunch of awesome tracks

 

 

yeah i fucking love ween

pure guava is in my all time top 10 most days

 

 

Ween is pure class. Went to a show in Pontiac (99'-00'?) where they played for at least 4 hours. Might have been longer. Knocked out some tunes that night.

 

sweet. found setlist.

 

 

 

• 1. Buckingham Green
      
  2. Spinal Meningitis (Got Me Down)
      
  3.  
      
  4.  
      
  5. Dr. Rock
      
  6.  
      
  7.  
      
  8. The Golden Eel
      
  9. Mutilated Lips
      
  10. Roses Are Free
       
  11. Sketches of Winkle
       
  12. Fat Lenny
       
  13. Mister, Would You Please Help My Pony?
       
  14. Voodoo Lady
       
  15. Back To Basom
       
  16. Frank
       
  17. Bananas and Blow
       
  18. The HIV Song
       
  19. Piss Up a Rope
       
  20. Booze Me Up and Get Me High
       
  21. Baby Bitch
       
  22. Mister Richard Smoker
       
  23.  
       
  24. Ocean Man
       
  25. Puerto Rican Power
       
  26. You Fucked Up
       
  27. Reggaejunkiejew
       
  28. Buenos Tardes Amigo
       
  29. Encore:
  30. Ice Castles
       
  31. Stroker Ace
       
  32. Tick
       
  33. The Blarney Stone
       
  34. LMLYP
      (Prince cover)
  35. Encore 2:
  36. Hot for Teacher
      (Van Halen cover)
  37. Encore 3:
  38. Purple Rain
      (Prince cover)
  39. 1999
      (Prince cover)
  40. Fluffy
       
  41.  
       
  42. Demon Sweat
       
  43.  
      (Paul McCartney cover)
  44. Band on the Run
      (Wings cover)
  45. Captain Fantasy
       
  46. Poopship Destroyer
       

 

 

CHRIST!

now thats a show

Could you tell me anything about what you like to do in Jitter? Have you used jit.repos much? Lately I've been trying to do these weird polar coordinate morphs in repos, I like to just set up the math, then get high staring into the webcam playing with settings. 

 

Also do you ever draw/manipulate spectral data for visuals? I'm kind of obsessed with spectrograms. Actually the first thing I did when I got the Exai digital release was make a max patch to play the wavs through a spectrogram with some symmetries and stuff. Still one of my favorite ways to listen to the album!

i've never used jitter for spectrograms, might give it a go sometime. i've not used it for a bit, i don't have java se6 on here so i'm locked out for now

i was doing stuff with gl mostly, no video stuff just graphics

 

 

-Any involvement with NMB? NWH20 seems like shoutout to Lego Feet track

 

-Also, about the Gescom track "G1" Darrel Fitton shared with the public a few years back (I imagine you guys had to be made aware he was doing that), is there any chance for a similar gesture of goodwill on your end during this ask you anything event or anytime in the near future? *wipes foam away from mouth*

 

Sean, regarding your answer to the question about the resonant structure in question...  I remember reading somewhere a long time ago (interview maybe) that the sounds were infact from your rectum - the piece made as a joke or "statement" referencing the sort of rabid fan who would purchase their favorite artist's new album even if it was straight farting for 45 minutes.  I won't ask to confirm or deny ...but I think it is hilarious if true.

 

nah that's not it

 

 

 

I have to do full disclosure on this one, and I apologize in advance because I mean no offense, but back when I worked in construction and it'd be a brutally long job without a porta-john or other socially-sanctioned urine receptacle around, there would always be some corrugated sheet metal shack set up as a temporary structure, and man, to pee on those things was fucking bliss because the sound was really beautiful and capable of all sorts of textural nuance.  I mean, I know I'm pretty weird, but even your typical tough guy construction bloke loved to piss all over those things and serenade the vacant-lot skunks and pigeons with lovely resonant pee sounds.  

 

So uh, were you peeing on something metallic?  Or can I if nothing else get validation from someone respectable that peeing on metallic things is ok and normal?

 

/worst aaa question

 

nah we weren't 

but i mean, sure m8, it's totally normal

 

hello ae, thanks for yr time.

 

I have some brief questions:

 

what is your favourite cartoon? 

 

do you really dig any drummers in particular?

 

have you ever sampled rubberbands?

 

zen/mindfulness/meditation: is there the odd buried reference in yr material?

 

did you know valis is basically a true story? there are online doco's and the exegesis is a real thing - you can buy a pretty large chunk of it in paperback. It's pretty wild. RAW also got hit by a pink beam of information, he and PKD wrote letters to each other about it. 

 

Big thank you both for the amazing music over the years! and the lols in this thread to a lesser, but also important extent. 

 

ps: pls digital release livesets as is it's totally not milking it pls

 

time masters, akira, my neighbour totoro

the first cartoon i liked as a kid was battle of the planets. i liked it a lot

keith leblanc, sly dunbar, john french

yeah

it wouldn't be buried

actually that makes a lot of sense 

i really liked ubik as well, i get chills when i think about it

Hi, Rob, Sean, Do you still use eurorack modules? I remember you said you use some doepfer modular in an early interview. Do you have any recommendation/favorite modules?

 

Thanks!

Hi, Rob, Sean, Do you still use eurorack modules? I remember you said you use some doepfer modular in an early interview. Do you have any recommendation/favorite modules?

 

Thanks!

don't think we said we had any doepfer, we have a british modular.

Do you use microphones to record one-shots of some sort? 

have done

one of the most notable things about your records for a long time now, but especially with exai and lel event, is how unique the textures are. on watmm lots have noticed that the latest ep has a very "frothy" and "wet" sound. I don't mean this in a gay way. anyway, are there any records that you guys like that have such a distinct textural quality.

for instance, phoenicia's "brown out" or gas "pop" come to mind as examples of records that have a really unique feel and detailed textural aspect. don't say computer world.

always liked redundance 3 - porter ricks, for this

additional note re: much earlier post about driving music, i mentioned Erik Satie on entering a new town or city, this also rocks for that, but its the flip of that coin really. good scoping-place-out tune.

was tempted to post the youtube but its shitty quality sorry

Sean, do you get pissed when you see Autechre albums in sharethreads?

 

And what's your general stance on music piracy?

i grew up taping stuff off my mates

i prob wouldn't be making tracks if we hadn't been able to do that. well, not very good ones anyway

tbh i don't care at all as long as we get enough to live on

Hah, still using Granulab to this day myself (after about 10 years of near daily use I thought it'd only be fair for me to pay for a registered copy ). Is there any other granular synthesis programmes you enjoy using (or do you mainly make your own granular stuff) - It's by far my favourite tool in my kit, making a simple 16 bar loop getting evolve into a 10 minute ambient thing is my usual trick :

yeah we do our own usually these days

we used to do similar stuff with an eps but you'd get clicks

what is yr opinion on the new bladerunner project?

can u describe a strange, noteworthy sound u have heard? 

with no restrictions, logistical issues or politics, no problems of any kind; where would u most like to play live musics? it could be anywhere (under the ocean, the bottom of the mariana trench, the core of the sun wherever)

memorable, unusual sounds or things u have sampled, field recordings in hopes of using in musics, regardless of whether u did use it or not?

which artists / abstract paint do u enjoy? cy twombly, francis bacon, jean-michel basquiat? 

name the last sound u sampled?

i try not to read about it

i mean maybe it will be amazing, i dunno

i wanna give them the benefit of the doubt

yeah the sound of ice sheets being hit by small stones

and the sound of claps echoing off a large corrugated wall which is set at an angle

a gig deep inside the untersberg would be interesting i'm sure

a metal master of a record (which is attached to a wall by a nail, thru the centre hole) being spun so that the rough unfinished edges of the disc rub against the woodchip wallpaper, recorded with a mic positioned underneath, quite close to the edge.  yeah we used it

i like bridget riley a lot

Hey Rob! Hey Sean!

 

What is your stance on illegal file sharing?

A collab with VHS Head possible in the future?

What are your thoughts on Vatican Shadow output?

That last track on Radio mix - one of your own unreleased tracks or a remix?

Sean, that Casio Databank is still working?

 

Thanks!

voice in my head saying 'do not answer' every time i see your name

answered about filesharing already, don't mind as long as i can live off music

dunno, it never came up, but i like his stuff loads.  not sure how good a collab would be he has his thing i dunno how we would make it any better

i've not heard enough to comment

unreleased track

nah it snapped where the strap goes , got a replacement

Hello Gents.

 

Was wondering about the soundtrack work. I know you can't talk about current things in development (or not) but I did want to know if there were any films you wish you could have scored, or how you would have approached the scoring of certain genre films (say Blade Runner, or Alien for example)

 

Thanks!

kind of hard for me to separate the existing soundtracks from the films, to me blade runner would be shit without vangelis

and i know he doesn't rate it but i reckon the alien music is some of the best stuff goldsmith did

so i dunno, 'what they did' basically

Word up, Ae. I recently found a few of your old radio mixes on my old Compaq desktop PC (XFM, Breezeblock and Solid Steel), it was great to hear them again (big chunks of Wendy Carlos and Hafler Trio on that Breezeblock Mix :-D). I know you guys do the massive webcast marathons but does it work differently for the radio output? does the station come to you and you post them a CD of a half hour mix? And are you inundated with requests for this type of stuff in the lead up to an album release? 

yeah back then we would just mail them a cd, nowadays it's file transfers

not usually inundated, but if i told warp we want to do as many as possible then we are, just depends on how available we make ourselves

what do you think of nine inch nails and trent reznor's recent output? i recall trent mentioning that you have been an influence on his music making from the late 90s onwards....

really?  i can't hear it

related to your reply to i believe it was awe's question about the NSA to which you said it (spying) was a necessary phase-

 

so in the nearish future when brain implants, chips that allow you to connect your brain directly to your computer are available, will either/both of you say 'damn the torpedoes' (in this case the torpedoes being the american gov and possibly other govs recording every thought you have in a secret facility somewhere, and organizing all the data into various cross-referenced, instantly searchable databases, to be used in who knows what ways), and go ahead and get one so you can control your max patches directly with your brain waves? assuming you don't already. is that what you meant by saying the NSA stuff is part of a necessary phase? that all of this is inevitable, that all of our brains are going to be under direct monitoring by gov/commercial entities but that we have to accept that if we want the cool shit like robot servants that bring us our tea when we think about tea, or being able to compose tracks with our thoughts like raymond scott wanted to do?

nah

i don't know why everyone is focusing so much on the nsa

everyone's at it, all spying on each other

it's not like some nice neat pyramid, it's like a web

in the future we're gonna be so much more networked than this, even the concept of monitoring will be totally antiquated 

What do you think of Yoko Ono's latest stroke of genius?
 

you said you like Lynch's films, but do you like his music?
 

 

 

but i can see why someone who doesn't really listen to 80s hip hop but listens to scorn might think that

 

which is exactly me, thanks for answering. I think what made me think of Scorn wasn't so much the drums but that really nasty filtered pad sound kind of reminiscent of a Virus synth combined with the 80s hiphop vibes like Mick used a lot back on Plan B and his records in the early 00s

 

oh, that's a piano, funny

I'm curious if y'all feel like masters

Or more jack of all trades, master of none.

Friends here in M10 are freaking out y'all are here so lots of loving and weird vibes coming your way B)
also Exai is 'talking' a lot more now~

nah we're not masters of anything, and def not jack of all trades, we got like the least transferrable skill set ever 

I never realised you lovex dm so much. Id heard you mention them in interviews before but didnt realise the high regard you held them.

Considering the collaborated with mark bell its not a million miles away, the thought of you two working with them is it? I know martin gore was well into bitstream.

What do you think of exciter? And whats your favourite dm album? Sorry for another favourites q.

i dunno it's hard to pick a favourite, either a broken frame, some great reward or black celebration, depending on mood

exciter was ok but tbh i liked them more when alan was with them

 

 

Word up, Ae. I recently found a few of your old radio mixes on my old Compaq desktop PC (XFM, Breezeblock and Solid Steel), it was great to hear them again (big chunks of Wendy Carlos and Hafler Trio on that Breezeblock Mix :-D). I know you guys do the massive webcast marathons but does it work differently for the radio output? does the station come to you and you post them a CD of a half hour mix? And are you inundated with requests for this type of stuff in the lead up to an album release? 

yeah sometimes its like that for outside radio programmers, we get quite busy with requests when we announce a new record.

 

In the lead up to Draft being released you did a mix for Radio 3: Mixing it and a mix for Mary Anne Hobbs. The Radio 3 mix was full of bombastic dance beats which almost left the presenters speechless, while the Radio 1 mix was more cultured/refined. It was almost as if the two CD's had got mixed up in the mail and went to different areas in the BBC. I thought that was a nice touch :-D

 

cheers

yeah we thought a show called mixing it should get a mix where we're really 'mixing it'

and MAH i mean, yeah playing dockstader and wendy carlos on a usually trendy show just made sense somehow

Oooh, I know what I've been meaning to ask for ages. The code inside the tape inlay of Draft7.30:



My theory on here a while ago was this -
 

It kind of looks like Rube-Goldberg code (i.e. a convoluted way of doing nothing) in what looks like Pascal - A whole bunch of 'for'/wait loops with no actually functional part of the code, so it's either a timing section from a larger piece of code or (more likely) a bit of geeky humour by the boys about the process of the audience listening to the album (eg. Repeat Listendraft; until time = 1894 for tracknum = 1 to 12 )

So what actually is it ?

 

that description is pretty spot on

are you already now starting to hear material you would release on a new album? and like, since your albums sound so different from one album to the next, do the tracks typically come from the same sessions or do you pick and choose from tracks before like, the previous album and so forth. and do you find that you have many aesthetics and ideas that are not released that you could have done a new album out of? 
also i sent you a pm sean if you wanna check;

Boards of Canada said they jam a lot and then sample the best parts to create songs. Do you also work that way?

sometimes, but loads of other ways as well

I'm curious as to how soon in the creative process one of your tracks will be given a track title or a working variation on a track title?

soon as we have to save it usually

sometimes it gets changed way later tho, when we compile a release

when i listen to cloudline it's like i'm stuck on an autobahn in da future did you guys plan it to be like this

Hello again, you guys seem to be quite consistent  in release an album + following EP/mini album every two years, is this a contractual thing or a deadline you set yourselves for motivational purposes? Do you take time out from music making after a release or are you constantly working on something on a regular basis? 
 
ta :)

 

do you like ween? it's 2 crazy musicians making a bunch of awesome tracks

I remember hearing an alternate version of Buckingham Green in one of the webcasts, so I'm guessing that one's a yes!

 

Have you guys done any coding in ChucK?

 

nah but i saw it years ago and it looked interesting iirc it was made for live coding, is that right? would prob appeal to me if so

What do you think might be the effect of extreme cerebral stimulation of listening to for example especially long tracks on Exai? Especially when that stimulation is hard to vocalise or simply emote to or physically express?
For example, sometimes when I really love something and find it intangibly stimulating, I find that I have no way to express it to people (a description can't really express 'that thing') - do you ever get this kind of frustration? Do you think it might effect how someone thinks, behaves, feels?
To try to clarify a bit more - I'm talking about extreme stimulation with no real world counterpart - that thing where something just 'does something' you can't explain it.

 
tbh it's only frustrating in a  third party kind of way
like, if i'm seeing someone trying to explain to someone else what's good about a track and they end up resorting to ill-fitting metaphor or cliche-speak
but in terms of us, and process, or playing rob stuff, nah, u can just tell if someone is getting it, there are a ton of unconscious signals i think. or i feel, i mean

That makes sense, but I meant that I sometimes get an impulse to act (don't you?), driven by something inspiring, but because of the strange nature of the inspiration, there's no way to act on it, there's nothing that correlates in the real world - it's like watching a film containing the secrets of life but made by aliens, and totally connecting with it it, but then having no way to apply it
 
It's the impulse to act on it more than the desire to explain it verbally I was talking about more
 
It's like that thing Francis Bacon said:
 
“Supposing I was satisfied with what I did? How can you be satisfied, because everything escapes you. You know that perfectly well. You know that even if you’re in love with somebody, everything escapes you. You want to be nearer that person, but how can you cut your flesh open and join with the other person? It’s an impossibility to do."

How large are your personal music libraries? Records or CDs or Tapes or digital? Which format do you consume the most?

never measured it

i don't even know how many records or cds i own

23881 tracks in my iTunes lib

er digitals mostly, depends on what room i'm in, i only have one deck atm

related to your reply to i believe it was awe's question about the NSA to which you said it (spying) was a necessary phase-
 
so in the nearish future when brain implants, chips that allow you to connect your brain directly to your computer are available, will either/both of you say 'damn the torpedoes' (in this case the torpedoes being the american gov and possibly other govs recording every thought you have in a secret facility somewhere, and organizing all the data into various cross-referenced, instantly searchable databases, to be used in who knows what ways), and go ahead and get one so you can control your max patches directly with your brain waves? assuming you don't already. is that what you meant by saying the NSA stuff is part of a necessary phase? that all of this is inevitable, that all of our brains are going to be under direct monitoring by gov/commercial entities but that we have to accept that if we want the cool shit like robot servants that bring us our tea when we think about tea, or being able to compose tracks with our thoughts like raymond scott wanted to do?

 
nah
i don't know why everyone is focusing so much on the nsa
everyone's at it, all spying on each other
it's not like some nice neat pyramid, it's like a web
 
in the future we're gonna be so much more networked than this, even the concept of monitoring will be totally antiquated

what do you think of this quote by raymond scott
 

 
 

• "Perhaps within the next hundred years, science will perfect a process of thought transference from composer to listener. The composer will sit alone on the concert stage and merely 'think' his idealized conception of his music. Instead of recordings of actual music sound, recordings will carry the brainwaves of the composer directly to the mind of the listener." —Raymond Scott, 1949

Any experience with anxiety disorders? Some AE is so disassociating that it induces a state similar to the total dissociating feeling I get during severe panic attacks, such as Cfern.

were you guys inspired by the production methods of older dub music for Exai? One of the distinct differences between that album and the other before it is the overwhelming use of various delays/flangers/reverbs. A good example is how at one point in Irlite the snare sounds almost like it's entirely made up of some kind of flanger noise from being automated at a quick rate. Also tons of cavernous reverb bursts, which you guys have been doing since Confield arguably, but on Exai there seems to be a distinct focus on some of these classic effects (but not being used in classic contexts always). Things being fed into the effects, especially the delays and then having the delay line suddenly stop (like in the ending of newbound) are techniques i've not heard in earlier autechre. 

not directly, our ref points are a bit different, we grew up on stuff like duke bootee, d-train, egyptian lover. they were doing weird things with drums, processing them in tasty ways, but the music wasn't like totally about that the way that dub is.  i don't even know if it came from dub directly for them either i think my life in the bush of ghosts was really the record that made a lot of that stuff happen, at least in nyc anyway.