Pink Freud - Pink Freud Plays Autechre (2015)

Live album by Polish yass group from Gdansk - and yep, as per the album title and cover, every track is a rendering of an Autechre piece, performed by a jazz quartet with additional electronics.  This followed on from an earlier cover of Goz Quarter on Pink Freud's 2010 album Monster Of Jazz - bassist and bandleader Wojtek Mazolewski is a huge fan of Autechre, and described this project as the realisation of a dream.  Eight tracks written by the IDM duo whizz by with not much in the way of improvisation, but tons of energy making for an exhilarating set.  Can't fault this for being a unique idea that just kind of works in its own weird way.

 

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pw: sgtg

 

The actual Autechre at SGTG:

Confield

Oversteps

Autechre - Oversteps (2010)

As much as I love Autechre for most of their albums being such a challenge just to sit through, this one is a personal favourite because it's probably their most accessible post-2000 album.  And it'll likely remain so, unless they decide to pull back on the whole four-hour albums of impenetrable circuit-frying niche that they're now so fully ensconced in.  But who would want that?  Anyway, from eight years ago this week (IIRC), here's Oversteps.

Opener Ress fades in gradually, to a looming, 22nd-century cityscape that eventually picks up a beat that seems at odds with the dark ambient overlay.  After that, we're into full-on Autechre with Ilanders - everything twisted out of shape, but if you listen closely there's a definite melodic progression just under the surface, and occasionally shining through.  Known (1) is more accessible again, like a cyborg JS Bach playing to post-human courtesans.

Thereafter, the track titles (with a couple of exceptions) descend into full-on fist on the keyboard gibberish, and the tracks continue to ping back and forth between dark, metallic constructions and bright, sparkling melodies - the gorgeous See On See being my personal favourite of the latter.  For all their early work now sometimes sounding a bit dated, and their latter-day epics sometimes getting too far out there even for me, Oversteps is probably the perfectly-balanced Autechre album.

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Previously posted at SGTG: Confield

Autechre - Confield (2001)

A massive watershed moment for one of my favourite British electronic artists.  We've touched on Richard D James' catalogue early on in this blog, and no doubt will again; but today, from the same stable of early 90s Warp-ed electronica comes an album from Sean Booth and Rob Brown at the time when they reached far beyond those roots to definitively stake out their cold, clinical universe of alien machine music.

Ever since Confield's 2001 release, Autechre have become notorious in some critical quarters for pursuing circuit-bending inaccesability for its own sake.  If Cluster's Qua was described as a sketchbook, your average latter-day Autechre album can be more like an afternoon-long slog round an art gallery full of giant, multi-faceted metal sculptures that take about 7 or 8 minutes on average just to walk round each one once, let alone take in a meaningful impression.  Whether this is actually a bad thing, or, if you're like me, something to be relished, is purely a matter of taste.

What actually strikes me about re-listening to Confield now for this writeup is that it's actually not nearly as difficult and unapproachable as a lot of critical reviews would have you believe.  There's a gentle start of sorts, with what sounds like lots of little metal balls rolling around, over which we do get an actual melody, albeit a minor-key one that floats around in aloof isolation.  For such a supposedly anti-melodic record, the second track, Cfern, has even more recognisable reference points, with a winding melody set over a loping groove.  From Pen Expers onwards, we're into the album's solid core, as the synths gradually become increasingly buried and twisted into the unearthly sculptures.  If you make it all the way to the end of Lentic Catachresis to exit the gallery through the gift shop, I highly recommend just starting all over again. And again.

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