Fennesz’s latest offering, “Bécs,” manages to find a way to balance electronic and acoustic compositional techniques where neither approach seems to take precedence over the other. From start to finish each track explores atmospheres that range from pure, amorphous clouds of sound that ebb and swell turning over and fold into themselves to allow various shadings of their harmonic palette become exposed and explored; to more traditionally beat oriented tracks that bring bright acoustic guitar sounds into the mix.
While “Pallas Athene” explores the former–the more amorphous sound-world–a track like “Bécs” places a more standard harmonic rhythm and progression into a structural role. The opening of that track investigates the overtones of a single attacked string, but before long the sound is granulated, it begins to feed back on itself, and a hazy cloud forms all around it until the very sound that opened the work sinks to the background. Though that string attack remains audible, one must work a little harder at times to really hear it and it becomes more a backbone than anything, the exact source of every sound that surrounds it. So, is it really that much in the background after all?
And these timbral, structural considerations aren’t the only way to look at this album. The emotive quality of something like the titular track should not be overlooked. The suspended melody and delicate harmonic underpinning, though shrouded in swirling granulation, is no less effective. When that cloud of overdriven haziness dissipates suddenly, though gently, at the end of the piece, one begins to truly feel the full weight of the track. That ending, the stripping away of everything, brings about a pretty satisfying resolution.
I would have to say that the standout track to me is “Liminality.” The 10 minute track moves from ambience to solo guitar, and back to electronics that sound similar to one of Tim Hecker’s works on “Ravedeath 1979.” The guitar line’s suspended dissonances ring out, and their resolutions are held back as far in the beat as possible, wringing as much tension out of each pitch as they can bear.
Overall, the album is successful at taking a fairly unique approach to electronic music, eschewing pure laptop sounds for a mix of synthesis and acoustics. Fennesz’s style of electro-acoustic music is at once engaging and exciting, intriguing and emotive, and simply put needs to be heard.
“Bécs” is out now through Editions Mego and can be picked up here on vinyl, CD, or as your choice of download. Samples of the album can be heard by following this link.
First of all Bleep’s website makes it ridiculously difficult to listen to anything at all. You can listen to each track in pieces because after the 30 second sample is up you have to slide the player over to the next 30 seconds etc. etc. I mean, I can understand why they do it, but I would be happier being able to hear one entire song than having to mess with the player to hear detached pieces of a track.
Thankfully Ninja Tune, the label that released “Ghosts of Then and Now,” was kind enough to upload some of the tracks to Youtube.
Anyway, the reason that I head over to Bleep regularly is, well they send me their newsletter, and I’ve been listening to a lot of Autechre lately and it has given way to a new fascination with electronic music and it’s where you can get Autechre’s albums. So, I’ve been looking for similar artists to broaden my horizons.
Listening to Illum Sphere (as much as I can anyway), with the ultra thick bass and synth that buzzes through most of the tracks, it reminded me in some ways to Baths’ “Cerulean” album from a few years back. But there’s also hints at proto-IDM like Kraftwere, which I hear heaps of in “Sleeprunner.” The kraut-rock, motorik sound has an undeniable influence throughout the track with its heavily cyclical and repetitive synth line, though it takes a gradual turn toward the end.
The album has been out for a few weeks now, and it’s a really interesting listen, worth checking out. From the motorik synths of “Sleeprunner” to the Wurlitzer sound of the titular track, there is a lot to grab onto. I wouldn’t quite say that it’s similar to Boards of Canada, but it’s definitely closer to their output than it is to anything Autechre has done. Check out “Sleeprunner” (above) and “Ghosts of Then and Now.” (below) The album can be ordered from Bleep on CD, 2xLP, or various downloads, as well as on iTunes. And if you head to Bleep, you too can have fun trying to use the audio player. Hours of enjoyment. Test your skill.
I had this thought pop into my head for no reason at all this afternoon. I was imagining myself as teaching a one-on-one music composition lesson, just like the ones that I used to have on a weekly basis when I was an undergrad. I was thinking about what the first thing that I would say to a first-time student would be, as I still remember my first lesson, and there are some things that I know now that I wish I had known then, that I wish someone would have told me long ago.
What I came up with was, “Ok, the first thing that you have to realize is this: everything has been done already.” I do believe this is true, and I think that for someone that is just starting out writing music that is an important thing to hear. Just practice and get better, develop your voice and everything will fall into place, don’t spend all your time (or any time for that matter) trying to convince people of how brilliant you are.
Then I happened upon an email from Warp Records touting the forthcoming Squarepusher EP. Of course I was excited. I love Squarepusher, even being lucky enough to have seen him perform live this past Summer. The man is a genius, and a virtuoso instrumentalist. His sound is recognizable from only a few pitches.
According to the man himself:
“In this project the main question I’ve tried to answer is ‘can these robots play music that is emotionally engaging?’
I have long admired the player piano works of Conlon Nancarrow and Gyorgy Ligeti. Part of the appeal of that music has to do with hearing a familiar instrument being ‘played’ in an unfamiliar fashion. For me there has always been something fascinating about the encounter of the unfamiliar with the familiar. I have long been an advocate of taking fresh approaches to existing instrumentation as much as I am an advocate of trying to develop new instruments, and being able to rethink the way in which, for example, an electric guitar can be used is very exciting.
Each of the robotic devices involved in the performance of this music has its own specification which permits certain possibilities and excludes others – the robot guitar player for example can play much faster than a human ever could, but there is no amplitude control. In the same way that you do when you write music for a human performer, these attributes have to be borne in mind – and a particular range of musical possibilities corresponds to those attributes. Consequently, in this project familiar instruments are used in ways which till now have been impossible.”
Sure, that’s all well and good, but while I was listening to the track my question of “why?” just never went away. The composition is undoubtedly Squarepusher. Everything about it has his voice all over it. But, it’s just off. It just doesn’t sound quite right. Sure his character is in those notes, but the personality is gone. The personality and delicate shading of timbres that, yes, are still possible (and noticeable!) in electronic music, are replaced with rigidity and coldness. Sure, robots can play anything, absolutely anything. I would argue the “emotionally engaging” part though. How can music engage someone emotionally if all of those subtle shadings, the things that are impossible to notate, and impossible to mimic verbatim, and utterly, unmistakably human have been extracted?
Sure, they are playing live instruments. The human, emotional element doesn’t lie in the instruments. Even someone that composes pure, fixed media electronic music, needs to finesse that music so that there is a human connection. They take the machines, and the computers and they sand down (so to speak) what makes them sound like machines. The human element is inserted, it’s not something that just comes out through notes and rhythms.
Yes, it is fun to hear (and watch) music be performed by robots. It’s not an original idea though. The simple answer to the question is, I don’t think that the music created by these robots is emotionally engaging at all. Intellectually engaging, sure, but after about 30 seconds of the stolid, precise rhythms and the wind-up music box timbres, I was done.
Why bother with the robots if you can pull the stuff off yourself?
“Music for Robots” will be released April 8th digitally, on CD and vinyl. Pre-orders from Bleep and iTunes will come with a download of “Sad Robot Goes Funny.”
I’ve been listening to this album a lot lately, and though I don’t typically like to do reviews this long after an album has come out (“Exai” was released back in February), some things came to mind when I was listening to it last week (not necessarily related only to this album, but to their other work as well) and I thought that they were worth sharing. I also feel that a duo such as Autechre that creates music that is unique, thoughtful, challenging and intricate is always worth talking about.
On “Exai,” more so than on past releases, Autechre finds a balance between repetition and eccentricity. Unlike the tracks on “Confield” (my personal favorite of theirs, though this album is working its way up the ranks, for sure) where the object of each song, or most of them anyway, seems to be to explore temporality and shifting time-streams. Though these explorations are not done in the same way as phase music, rather they do so in way that is akin to the work of Elliott Carter or Conlon Nancarrow where melodic lines of different lengths are performed at different tempi only to line up at a specific, calculated point.
These intricate, premeditated rhythms became the basis of “Confield.” Songs like “VI scose poise” bring out these temporal shifts to a degree, opening with a delicate timbre that resembles a spinning top, or a ceaselessly spinning quarter on a table. This track in particular, its opening, makes use of metric borrowings, switching to tuplets, and sometimes tuplets inside other tuplets, which gives the the listener the impression of varying tempi despite the constant pulse (remember what I said about Pink Mountain?). In this way our sense of time, our temporal footing, is disturbed. Not too many artists take full advantage of realizing the potential of this kind of effect, or manipulating this dimension in music.
Moving to “Exai” the foundation of the tracks relies mostly upon shifts in complexity, from the fairly straightforward “bladelores” to the densely layered and highly complex “jatevee C.” The trick with listening to Autechre, and this album in particular, is to listen for things one may not usually listen for in music. For example, changes in density, subtle color shifts over melodic lines akin to klangfarbenmelodie. Speaking of those color shifts, the overall timbres used throughout “Exai” are, for the most part, decidedly darker. I mean darker in the most specific way possible, referring to the characteristics of the soundwaves and where the harmonics are amassed.
Although there are brittle, piercing resonances. For example throughout “YJY UX” there are sounds in the extremes of the high register that are balanced by other melodic lines in the mid-range. This, to me, is an interesting component of Autechre’s music and the way that they construct songs. When there are extremely high sounds, the complex percussion often creates the low foundation which leaves a nice bit of space in the mid-range for any motion, or melodic activity.
Listening to “YJY UX” one can hear certain bands of frequencies dropping out to make room for other melodic lines that are of more interest to fill in those spaces. The highest pitched material does serve as simply a ceiling of repeated high gestures that soar over top of everything, yet they are not rawn to the ear as a melody. The line is the highest, and in some ways periodically the loudest as a result) and yet it manages to steer clear of becoming the primary focus. By and large this is not the case in most other songs – not just most other songs on the album, I mean in general.
The music of Autechre is a music that resists all passivity. One can not listen to anything by Autechre passively. The activity and complexity of the music demands our attention. Listening passively is nearly impossible, and certainly pointless. The duo has even made it difficult to recognize songs by track name, often times appearing to be random letters, numbers and other ASCII characters. A lot of the track names apparently come from file names of samples that are used in a song, while others may be from inside jokes between Brown and Booth.
Album opener “Fleur” begins with a wildly energetic rhythm that eventually fizzles to near silence. “T ess xi” features some nice chord voicings at the beginning that make use of different resolutions of a suspended pitch to create motion through a standard 8 bar phrase. The first 4 bars end with a dissonant resolution, and that is finally resolved the next time around in the final measure of the next phrase, connecting it to the beginning again. After each cycle of this chord progression another layer is added. From skittering drums to bright syncopated stabs in cyclical rhythmic patterns that are lined up such that they accentuate the aforementioned suspensions. The melodic material shifts and swirls around these elements, building to its highest density before taking a step back by stripping away material. The final section of the song distills the essence of the opening chords to only two alternating harmonies that work to accomplish the same forward motion as the beginning, this time re-appropriating it as closing material.
“nodezsh” resists all attempts at finding a steady pulse, but the more that the song comes into focus the less it can hide. The track features similar metric borrowing as “VI scose poise” but the hi-hat sound keeps the rhythm a bit more honest, giving the listener something to hold onto at points. There is also another element at work in this song and that is the manipulation of distance. Some of the timbres in this song are notably more echoed, providing the listener with a sense of distance, we feel that the sound is coming from further away than some of the other elements that may be up front. This is not just a result of levels in the mix, but about changing the profile of the sounds. Think about the doppler effect, or how distant sounds in the real world are effected by the space between you and the sound. Certain frequencies travel further than others, so the more distant a sound the fewer frequencies will make it to our ear, subtly altering the overall sonic profile of the sound. It’s about overall volume, but it is more about the ratio of certain frequencies to one another.
Though some may disagree, I think that “Exai” is one of the group’s most enjoyable albums. Clocking in at just over 2 hours it’s safe to say that the scope of the album is epic. Three tracks break the 10-minute mark, while there are several over 6 minutes. I don’t see this as putting the album at a disadvantage though. There is so much to listen to and so many interesting ideas flowing through each of the tracks, though not necessarily one overarching m.o. If you’ve been scared to get into Autechre, or haven’t really heard much by them that grabs you, start with “Exai.”
There is also a new EP coming out on October 28th, “L-event,” which can be ordered by clicking the link below. “Exai” is out now as 2xCD, 4xLP or iTunes download.
