'Exai': Autechre

Some Context:

Autechre is the Rochdale-based duo Rob Brown and Sean Booth who, for an astonishing 26 years now, have gained a highly respected name as purveyors of uncompromising, left-field electronica.  Their extensive back-catalogue comprises ten previous albums and numerous E.P.s.  This eleventh album, 'Exai', is a double package, clocking in around the two-hour mark.  It suggests they don't plan to stem that prolific tide just yet.

Autechre.  Rob Brown (L.), Sean Booth (R.).

The Ae sound is famously obscure, complex and, at it's furthest edges, highly challenging.  As far as it can be divined, their M.O. leans heavily on current software but may also involve the sabotaging of both digital and analogue synthesizers, and the application of homegrown digital algorithms to pervert generated sounds into baffling mis-shapes.  There have been occasional geeky rumours of military hardware.  By the time of 2001's 'Confield', or 'Draft 7.30' in 2003, their music had become so abstruse that it seemed to mostly represent the effects of complex programming on beat patterns.  It's possible to imagine that some of this stuff was devised by writing code to specifically modify each bar or individual beat in a different way.  'Unquantized' doesn't get close; rhythms appeared programmed to metastize uncontrollably and progressively randomise themselves.  The music wasn't so much produced as subjected to invasive experimental procedures under lab conditions.

Despite all their difficult number crunching, Autechre themselves have always claimed to be old-school Hip-Hop and Electro enthusiasts at heart.  There has often been a sense that their pieces derive from a recognisable rhythm or even a tune, even if only Brown & Booth actually know where they buried it.  More recent recordings have seen a slight rounding out of their sound once more, with 2008's 'Quaristice' and 2010's 'Oversteps' leaning towards the atmospherics of their earliest work and the length 'Move of Ten', E.P. also from 2010, featuring beats you might actually dance to, (you still wouldn't pull, mind).  So where does that leave 'Exai', with its punning title, customarily opaque track labels and intimidating scale?  More to the point, do Autechre actually make me feel anything or did all those ones and zeros die in vain?

Rigourously Formal; Very Focussed; Tonally Varied; With Pure Sound
 At The Very Centre.  Says It All Really

Response:

Autechre hardly create 'Soul' music but I do find immense sensory stimulation within their work and it's from this that vivid imaginative connections and yes, - emotional responses, gradually emerge over repeated listens.  Here, instead of trying to encompass 'Exai' in its entirety, I'll respond to four specific tracks that have made a particular impression on me.

'Irlite’ (Get 0)' (1/2):  The album's second track is one of it's longest, at a smidge over ten minutes, and one that breaks in half around a distinct central lacuna.  After an opening moment of apparent chaos, the first passage establishes a bouncy forward momentum and a dialogue between an insistent, ticking rhythm and an ominous, rubbery sub-bass.  Throughout this opening movement the top end prevails.  The beats clack on through numerous patches of interference, becoming heavily embroidered by distorted Electro flourishes but retaining their regular metric identity.  I'm reminded of urban transit carriages traversing the dense, complex environment of a modern metropolis on clearly delineated tracks.  The music speaks of an earlier moment of optimistic techno-futurism, albeit one becoming somewhat confused by multiple distractions.  The metronomic rhythm counts time reassuringly and there's even a slight hint of Jazz-Funk about the shards of synthetic melody.

After pausing with a deep ambient sigh, the track proceeds, apparently in similar fashion, but a more forbidding mood emerges now.  The big, grumbling Dubstep bottom grows progressively dominant and washes of miasmic ambience create an increasing air of suspense.  Although the bright synths briefly coalesce into something almost resembling a tune, the beats degenerate into irregularity, fading from rhythmic foundation to mere embellishment.  I'm left reflecting on the relationship between the well-regulated machine ethic of older electronica and more organic dread-laden forms of recent years.  It parallels the ways that uncertainty and potential threat so often haunt the shadows of what remains of the Modernist 'future' and how reality and entropy must abrade any Utopia.

Ae Demonstrate Their Understanding Of The Importance of Beautifully
Packaged Artefacts...

  

'Bladelores' (1/9):  'Bladelores' is an even longer piece that gives the lie to the idea that Autechre only deal in cold, grey, hard-edged sounds.  It features laid-back Hip-hop style beats and a singularly squelchy bass line but the track's most notable characteristic is its vapourousness.  It's announced from the off by the clouds of fuzzy reverb applied to the percussion and prevails via washes of synthesizer and processed organ sound that evoke an ethereality far greater than Ae connoisseurs might normally expect.  The track's extended coda is just a gorgeous sheet of very subtly textured ambiance.

Mentally, I see a city skyline, - its architectural forms softened through a filter of dawn mist or polluted heat haze.  It gives me the feeling of delicious detachment one might get on observing the scene from a high vantage point and also the sense of immense possibilities experienced on a mid-summer morning with no duties to perform.

...And Of Standing Around In Bleak Industrial Locations

  

'Nodezsh' (2/2):  This track is a great combination of Autechre's typically frigid atmospherics and a rhythm pattern that threatens random breakdown but proves, perversely, to be more regular than expected.  It opens with stark synth stabs before settling into a stumbling pattern of punchy rhythms built from sputtering snares and dull metallic beats.  Threaded through this rickety structure are broad washes of echoing tone and repetitious, incomplete phrases of a higher, static-fuzzed timbre.  Many of the album's tracks have perfunctory, or even arbitrary endings but 'Nodezsh' dies away rather thoughtfully, receding into the distance under thickening blankets of reverb and muffled distortion.

This track first captured my imagination during a hurried drive through swirling snow between Leicester and Nottingham, establishing the sense-memory I now associate with it.  Peering through an increasingly dense interference pattern of wind-churned particles, my perceptions of both driving and music synchronized into an overall sensation of vulnerability and frustrated purpose in an entropic environment.  The unbalanced yet propulsive percussion clearly echoed the irregular buffeting being dealt my car but also suggested the mis-firing of failing machinery as Britain's infrastructure began to buckle and its landscapes became clogged by drifts of late-season snow.

‘Yjy Ux’ (2/8):  ‘Yjy Ux’ concludes the album and is another atmospheric mood piece.  Its general esthetic is pleasingly sparse and distinctly liquid as it proceeds with stately melancholy over a slow, irregular beat.  It seems to tap into Ae’s origins in a rain-soaked Lancastrian landscape of industrial architecture decaying into grimy dereliction.  The most dynamic elements are the percussive splashes that pepper the track like heavy water droplets shed from rusted girders into murky puddles.  In the sparsest passages, certain note clusters resemble the rattle of corrugated sheeting stirring in the wind.

The track’s position on the album can be no accident.  Throughout it’s duration it threatens to run out of momentum and its whole function seems to be to mark the passing of activity.  Eventually, it sputters to rest as if the incessant rain has penetrated the last circuit, shorting everything out once and for all.

Certain reviewers have pigeonholed ‘Exai’ as an over-long grab bag of random sound files lacking any unifying theme or overall identity.  Others claim that it plays to Ae’s comfortable strengths without breaking any new ground.  Perhaps it’s just a function of my middle-aged attention span and comfort with the album format generally, but I have happily listened to the whole thing right through on numerous occasions now, and find these criticisms to be rather short sighted.

In doing so I’ve detected various recurring motifs, most noticeably the playing-out of struggles between conflicting elements within individual tracks, and the sense of structures progressively succumbing to the forces of entropy and decay.  As already mentioned, many pieces here also create a palpable sense of atmosphere and environment.  It would also be wrong to ignore how adeptly Brown & Booth incorporate newer sonic elements, such as wobbly sub-bass), into their existing toolbox.  Even if ‘Exai’ is primarily a monument to their established strengths, it’s still a fascinating edifice to wander around inside.

Further Listening:

‘Oversteps’, Autechre

‘Noisette’, Soft Machine

‘Amazing Grace’, Spiritualized

‘Technicolour’, Disco Inferno

‘Ufabulum’, Squarepusher

‘Somer’, Deepchord

‘Stand Down Margaret’, The Beat

‘St. Dominic’s Preview’, Van Morrison

‘Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!’, Godspeed You! Black Emperor

‘All This Useless Beauty’, Elvis Costello & The Attractions

Winter's Stale

Mapperley, Nottingham, March 2013

It’s always tempting to employ selective memory to make a point but, in 50 years, I genuinely can’t remember a winter lingering as long as the last one. (Older readers will quote 1962 but I was a few months old so have no memory of it).  Only now, with rather milder weather finally in evidence, does it feel like spring might actually make itself known.  The back–story of climate change and disrupted weather patterns this all may highlight is unsettling enough but I think the recent weather actually affected many people on a rather more immediate, emotional level too.  It’s no secret that light levels and the tensions engendered by perpetual chill have a massive effect on people’s moods and temperament.

Mapperley, Nottingham, March 2013

I appreciate that anyone reading this in Scandinavia, Central Europe, Russia, North America, Canada, etc. will wonder why the British would make so much fuss about cold winds and a bit of snow in March.  However, its more a case of what you’re used to and also, on an animal level, the disquiet of feeling one’s environment becoming noticeably less hospitable.  Certainly, I’ve lost count of how often, in the last few weeks, I heard people exclaim ‘I’m sick of feeling cold ALL the time!”  As a nation we’re renowned for our obsession with weather and routine unpreparedness for climatic events.  This year, for hill farmers, isolated communities and stranded motorists it all became just a little more existential.

Mapperley, Nottingham, March 2013

Either way, there’s little we can do about it other than to monitor events.  In fact, I guess I’ve always considered it part of an artist’s role to bear witness and respond to events, without always chafing about an inability to rectify them.  In my experience, any kind of creative response to a particular situation can be a great sanity saver and all art therapists understand the value of externalising our frustrations and dissatisfactions to prevent them consuming one’s chances of future happiness.

Mapperley, Nottingham, March 2013

Keith

Just before Easter, I spent a weekend in Nottingham, looking after my surviving cat, Keith and watching in bemusement as the spectacularly hilly suburb of Mapperley, and indeed the rest of the city, gradually disappeared under a thick blanket of snow.  The photos posted here were taken over those two days.

Mapperley, Nottingham, March 2013

On the Saturday, the snow fell unceasingly all day, three-dimensional forms became unified and then obliterated by whiteness and the wider visual scene seemed intent on erasing itself altogether.  By Sunday the snow had stopped falling and we even enjoyed a few minutes of pale sunshine.  Despite biting wind and sub-zero temperatures, families emerged with sledges and the whole mood felt slightly less apocalyptic.  On treacherous pavements, I struggled as far as a local park and began exploring the juxtaposition between the overwhelming white field and the darker shapes isolated within it.  Of particular interest were the relationships between gleaming snow and the bright, industrial colours of abandoned play equipment.

Mapperley, Nottingham, March 2013

Amongst the images are also a couple of new examples of Hazard Warning stripes to feed my current preoccupation with Health & Safety graphics.  It feels like weather forecasting and Risk Assessment may become increasingly entwined disciplines in coming years.

Mapperley, Nottingham, March 2013

Postscript:

Since beginning this post I've been able to turn down my central heating and even opened a window or two.  Here's hoping we've finally turned a corner.

Completed 'Risk Assessment 3 & 4' / Granthanathema

'Asylum 1', Acrylics & Paper Collage on Panel, 100 cm X 100 cm, 2011

Amongst the paintings I produced in 2011 was ‘Asylum 1’.  It’s probably not my most successful piece as I suspect I tried to squeeze too much into a single image.  One of its themes was an attempted response to the political situation as we got used to the new reality of coalition government.  Despite claims of togetherness in adversity and shared political responsibility, there was the distinct suspicion that the ideological maniacs would soon show their true (blue) colours and we’d see who was really running the asylum.  Some months on, the painting justifies its undercurrents of paranoia increasingly.

Grantham, Lincolnshire, January 2013

If the opportunist exploitation of the global crisis in Capitalism to pursue their divisive, inequitable social project weren’t enough, now we must endure days of sickening, posthumous adulation at the shrine of Thatcher.  The prospect of spending large sums of public money on an overblown funeral for the Queen of Privatisation, whilst slashing the meagre benefits on which so many of the system’s surplus ‘human resources’ rely for their very survival, seems the ultimate insult.  It threatens to drive me beyond anger into simple bafflement and despair.  That way madness lies so I’ll attempt to make vaguely constructive, if tangential, creative connections instead.

Grantham, Lincolnshire, January 2013

  

Thatcher’s origins in the Lincolnshire town of Grantham are well documented.  I drive though there regularly and have come to regard it as exactly the kind of place likely to spawn such a personality, (smug, mono-cultural, complacently conservative and essentially lacking in anything like imagination or broadened horizons).  It makes my own hometown and county capital of Lincoln, a few miles further up the road, appear positively sophisticated, - some achievement!

Grantham, Lincolnshire, January 2013

At the turn of the year I parked the car and took my camera in search of something inspiring in Grantham.  The results provided some useful material for my on-going H&S-themed ‘Risk Assessment’ project, in the form of the astounding fluorescent hazard warning graphics that now adorn the town’s Victorian railway bridges.  The lady in question was fond of evoking ‘Victorian values’ and the kind of private enterprise that built these edifices but had less to say about the rank hypocrisy and widespread social deprivation that also characterised the period.  She also instigated the devaluing of Britain’s tradition of industry and manufacturing that they represent.

Grantham, Lincolnshire, January 2013

My ‘R.A’ project exists in the background of my current activities but it’s still live and may be subject to further development in the future.  Appropriately enough, it’s another attempt to respond, somewhat obliquely, to my recent feelings of impotent anger and political/societal frustrations.  As already mentioned, the basic idea is to apply an ironic Risk Assessment approach to the bigger existential threats that society and authority pose to our wellbeing or sanity.  For now, here’s the most recent of my ‘Risk Assessment’ pieces and some more of the photographs I took on that bright, chilly January day.

'Risk Assessment 3: Tell You Lies', Acrylics &
Paper Collage on Paper,  60 cm X 45 cm, 2013 

'Risk Assessment 4: Make You Sick', Acrylics &
Paper Collage on Paper,  60 cm X 45 cm, 2013

My photographing of the bridges was accompanied by the regular passage of express trains on the East Coast Main Line that they bear.  This relates, in turn, to another potential theme that may emerge in future work.  It has to do with various forms of transport and communications infrastructure and is nominally labeled ‘Control Systems’.  It only exists on the pages of a notebook as yet so I’ll wait for another day to discuss it further, if and when something tangible emerges from it.

Grantham, Lincolnshire, January 2013

I won’t pretend that 2013 has started well.  The radio brings nothing but bad news, we struggle to emerge from an interminable winter, my arthritis has ramped up to increasingly concerning levels and I’m engaged in a frustrating battle with my current painting.  In the light of all that, it feels encouraging to be still making creative connections and planning future activity.

Grantham, Lincolnshire, January 2013