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this one's gonna be a freeform page

So there's two men from Manchester, graffiti artists with backgrounds in architecture and sound engineering, who have been making electronic music since, like, the 90s. They call their band Autechre, and they have been one of the more influential (and certainly most experimental) electronic groups in the industry.

Midway through the 2010s, I got their album Untilted on CD for some reason, I honestly don't remember why (other than that I personally wanted it), and I hardly even listened to it, I remember very little of an impression. But for some reason I did keep wanting to go back to it, to this band, to learn about this band, because I knew it was experimental electronic music, and I wanted to expand my awareness of music. It wasn't until 2020 that I managed to successfully do this. I remember, I found their third album, Tri Repetae, and I just started listening to it, and the first two songs were so immediately perfect, were exactly the kind of electronic music I had been yearning for, that it sold me, it convinced me, I went and bought Autechre's entire discography on the spot. I spent the rest of the year working my way through their albums chronologically, and I took some kinda silly notes along the way to help me identify and refer back to specific songs. I'll be putting those notes on this page.

But it's been another several years since then, and my relationship with Autechre's music has solidified some more. Truthfully I want to make a page on my Website just to, like.. have a space where I can try to work my thoughts out. I don't really care if anyone else reads this page, though I'd be happy if someone got curious and tried listening to this music too, as it's. It's so. ...inarticulable. I want others to see, to see what I mean. And in the meantime, if I am just talking to myself, then the hope is, if I keep trying, I can articulate something, because I do believe Autechre brings profound value to my life, but even that value is difficult to identify.

Now, like. Some of their music is easier to articulate. The duck test applies: If it sounds like a bop, it's probably trying to be a bop. If it sounds like a vibe, it's 100% trying to be a vibe. And their first few albums fit into an early 90s music scene; they are recognizably electronic albums, dance music, vibe music, using samples and sick beats and moods that are easy to contextualize as, say, peers to the likes of Aphex Twin, and a great influence on 2000s electronica, such as the music of Boards of Canada. Their early music isn't that alien, it was bold for its time and very thoughtful, but, if you listened to it today, you could contextualize it. (And, like, dude, if you're in the mood for 90s electronic music you can vibe to, I'm telling you, the albums Amber, Tri Repetae, and Chiastic Slide will satisfy you. They're super easy to listen to.)

But starting... at some point (depends how you look at it, could be Chiastic Slide, could be the untitled LP5, or could be Confield), Autechre got sufficiently good enough at their hardware to start really fucking diving into the gaping frontier that is Noise Music. Maybe not explicitly. I'm 95% sure that the band themselves never explicitly saw themselves as making noise music. They just saw themselves as evolving, taking what they've learned and expanding with each new album, tweaking their hardware and exploring the sounds that can be produced. (In fact, by this point in my life, I'd actually say even Autechre's most noisy stuff fits very comfortably, at a compositional and artistic level, in the range of jazz music produced by Miles Davis in the 1970s. Autechre are just using machines instead of a quintet of analog instruments. Autechre's music is machine jazz. IBM Bitches Brew.) Their music got really smart. They got big into avant-garde music theory. They got interested in algorithms, computer language, programming. And their albums became deeper investments for the listener. These are albums you have to revisit, several times in several different contexts. You have to find a way in, sometimes for each individual song. (Sometimes, a song comes by and you immediately "get it," as you were already in the right mood and didn't know it. Most songs, though, hide their fruit until you're in the right mood.)

There's so many albums, though. And so many EPs besides the albums. And now there's even a collection of live albums (that have no audience noise, just the direct feed from the band) that are entirely new original material. There's at least 60 hours of music to choose from. Autechre is a whole digital art world. In a real sense, when I get into an Autechre mood, it's heaven.




The Big First-Time-Listen Song Impressions Section

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Autechre, and all their albums, are owned by Autechre and Warp Records. I claim no affiliation with.. any of this. All views are my own.
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