A Year of Music

I want to say something about the music Autechre’s been making for the last five years, but it’s hard to find the words. Autechre defined, more or less by themselves, a pure, electronic sound that, after their first three or four records, was indebted only theoretically to the electro and hip-hop that originally inspired them. It is now something entirely other, although they have a legion of followers who together constitute a dotted line connecting Autechre back to the techno continuum. Their music is rooted at least as much in the process and tools used to make it as any residual notions of traditional songcraft, and this can give their music, even at its most turgid, a glossy, intellectual sheen. It can also make it feel fathomlessly recursive and inhuman.

I sometimes end up feeling about Autechre the same way I do about the more abstruse electronic works of Iannis Xenakis (RIP) and Karlheinz Stockhausen (RIP). A piece of music (or, really, sound art) can be an aesthetically unimpeachable artifact of an intellectual process, and it can intimidate you with its recondite structure and alien sounds, but sometimes that’s insufficient if the work doesn’t lend itself to interpretation. I believe that Autechre spend a long time working out the structures they use, and are conscientious about shaping their aggressively experimental music into songs, but sometimes I feel like I have to take that too much on faith.

I will say that I feel that they’ve pulled themselves out of the creative dead end they were in when they made Confield; that album is one of the most frustrating CDs I own. Excerpted, it sounds brilliant, but despite concerted, repeated efforts to wrap my head around it, I’ve never been able to get it to stick. 30 seconds after hearing it, I’ve completely forgotten what it sounds like. It contains an hour of sound that mimics music without ever coalescing into songs – with the exception of the obsessive quasi-Japanese melodic figuration and monotone rhythm of “Eidetic Casein”, which is the one part of the album I love without reservation.

Each album since then is another step back from the inaccessibility of Confield, but their last 4 albums are all easy to admire and hard to love. Draft 7.30 returns to the ghostly melodies of Garbage while keeping Confield’s arrhythmia. Untilted brings back some much-needed low-end heft and some discernible attempts to engage with Autechre’s electro legacy. And finally, their newest album, Quaristice, sees the return of the diversity and ambition of tri repetae (as well as its length).

But I miss the promise of Autechre’s middle period, when they were probably my favorite electronic musicians of all time, and when they knew a secret: they had figured out how to invert the figure and ground of music, and use their keen ear for ruthlessly pared-down melodies to create melodic lines that were sturdy enough to act as the backbone for their wandering, erratic rhythms. Just listen to “Laughing Quarter” from Envane, “Tewe” from Chiastic Slide, or “Under BOAC” from LP5 to hear songs that balance spastic rhythms with simple 4-bar melodies that somehow never get old. Sometimes, as in my favorite song by Autechre, “Arch Carrier” (also from LP5, what I consider their last fully successful album), both the beats and the melodies are kept on a tight rein, and they produce songs that are both rigorously constrained and classically beautiful.

I have to be careful when I talk about Autechre, though. I was completely disgusted with Envane and Chiastic Slide when they were released, taking them as yet more evidence that the whole IDM community had finally and irredeemably disappeared up their own asses. In fact, I was mostly reacting to the fact that tri repetae++ consisted of two brilliant EPs shackled to a wildly uneven album. Perhaps in reaction to the eventual near-total reversal of that opinion (at least when it came to Envane, Chiastic Slide and Cichlisuite), I tried to convince myself (and a few other people) that Confield was a difficult but ultimately brilliant record that would release its secrets in time. This lasted a few short weeks until I went to see them play in Oakland. Practically everyone in the Bay Area’s electronic music scene was at that show and were in the mood for something weird, challenging and transcendental; I can’t speak for anyone else, but I got the distinct impression that I was far from the only one who was severely disappointed. It was amelodic, rhythmically flat, and while technically live (and perhaps even improvised or generatively produced) sounded completely lifeless.

It’s possible that someday a key will turn in my head, and suddenly the most recent third of Autechre’s output will suddenly open up to me. I want to like it: I love difficult, esoteric sounds (see: rest of this blog), and it feels like a confession of failure when I ultimately just can’t get into work as clearly uncompromising and innovative as Confield and their subsequent albums. It’s never fun to see my limitations so clearly laid out. But I also have to be honest, with myself if nobody else: I don’t think my feelings are going to change. Somewhere along the way, Autechre lost me, and while I’ll keep my ears open, I don’t think they’re going to find me again.

I know some music nerds who seem to live to amass a hoard. They, like me, have stacks of CDs covering every flat surface, and connive to find ways to fit more CDs into more places in their houses. Most of them share a problem in common, and that problem is one I try very hard to avoid: they’ve lost track of what they’ve acquired, and it’s entirely likely they have a big pile of music scattered around that they’ve never heard.

That sort of thing makes me itch. Music is a thing to hear and to experience, not to collect and sit on like Smaug, the greedy dragon from The Hobbit, was with his stolen gold. Since I’m not a professional critic, I pay for my music myself, and music claims the biggest share of my disposable income. If I buy music, I want to get my money’s worth out of it.

One of the most useful side effects of ripping my entire CD collection was that it gave me tools for tracking information about what, when and where I buy music, and helps me make sure that I actually hear everything I buy. I make heavy use of iTunes’ smart playlists to help me give equal time to my collection, and one of the main things that drove me to upgrade to a new MacBook Pro was that iTunes was getting so bogged down in dealing with the hundreds of playlists I’ve created that it was taking minutes (literally) to do trivial tasks, and syncing my iPod was taking half an hour each time.

These tools come with their own problems, though, which is that periodically I get overwhelmed by buying too much new music at once. It happens. I don’t really have a list of new releases I want, because for at least the last ten years I can walk into and out of a record store in under a half hour having spent an uncomfortable amount of money and not having to look too hard to find a big pile of stuff I absolutely must have right now. As I gradually make the transition to buying music online, resisting the temptation of immediate gratification only gets harder.

So last year I came up with a solution to the problem, which was yet another set of smart playlists that I used to create a music budget. Capping my spending on music isn’t really a concern to me, at least right now: I’ve got a good job, no car and few vices aside from music shopping. No, really it was about trying to make sure that I wasn’t buying more music than I could get to know. After looking at my listening habits over time (something for which last.fm is extremely helpful), I decided about 24 hours a month was a good cap.

The idea is a good one, and it’s definitely helped, but I’ve also blown the budget more often than not (I’ve also come in way under budget a few months, in part to balance out the months where I get out of hand).

It is my sad duty to report to the world at large that January 2008 was not a good one for my music budget, as I added, um, 3.5 days’ worth of new music to my iPod. Oops. Even after last night’s Amazon & Interpunk orgy, I ended up downloading these releases from Bleep and Boomkat after Bleep suddenly fixed my Clark order:

• Clark: Throttle Promoter (Warp)
• Amon Tobin: Kitchen Sink: Remixes (Ninja Tune)
• Autechre: Untilted (Warp)
• Autechre: Draft 7.30 (Warp)
• Autechre: Quaristice (Warp)
• KTL: KTL 3 (Mego)
• Æthenor: Deep in Ocean Sunk the Lamp of Light (vhf)

For somebody who used to claim he didn’t like Sunn(((O))))) very much, I sure do have a lot of their side projects. And now my Autechre collection is complete again. But either way, I’m sort of hoping I can ease up for a month or two, both so I can assimilate all the new stuff I’ve gotten, and so I can make some progress in listening through my collection, which is what I’m supposed to be doing for this blog.

Stuck in my head this morning: Second verse, same as the first. “I’m So Gay With the Boner” for Dan Deacon!

This year is shaping up to be a major trip, music-wise. Either it’s been a great year for new music, or writing this blog has made me hyperaware of what’s being released, but whichever it is, a bunch of my favorite bands either have new things out, or are about to:

• Season of Mist just released Anaal Nathrakh’s brutal, unrelenting and majestic latest, Hell is Empty, and All the Devils are Here in America, finally. The UK’s had it for four whole months already!
• The unpredictably brilliant grindcore / IDM hipster assault unit Genghis Tron have a new album out next month. Their first full-length was one of my favorite records of whatever year in which it originally was released. (H/T to Tomas.)
• Autechre have emerged from their laser cocoons, sound swords smoking, to unleash Quaristice, their latest bit of tortured Max/MSP mangling. Maybe it’ll be better than Confield and Untilted. Maybe. I think I’m gonna get that one on digital (which is available now – the physical edition’s out in a weekmonth or so, although if you wanted the laser-etched steel cased limited edition, too bad! You snoozed! You lost!).
• I was able to download my copy of Clark’s newest, Turning Dragon, finally. One of Bleep’s servers slipped a disk. I am very excited to finally have it. I was so excited about “Volcan Veins”, I bought it off iTunes to tide me over until I was able to get the album. It has not gotten old yet.

You know what would be awesome? If Autechre and Radiohead co-headlined a tour, with Dan Deacon opening. Dan could get the party started, and then Autechre and Radiohead could take turns confusing the shit out of everyone. I think that would be a lot of fun.

Severed Head’s last album with significant distribution in North America was 1991’s Cuisine (with Piscatorial), and their last album to be released at all in the United States was Gigapus, which was released by tiny indie Decibel all the way back in 1995. Severed Heads didn’t disappear, though, “they” – Severed Heads has been Tom Ellard alone for quite a while now – just moved on, without looking back to see if we were keeping up.

Back around the turn of the millennium, you could download low-bitrate MP3s for their entire catalog from sevcom.com. You could buy their albums as shareware, although the purchase interface was clunky. Then, once the rights to their recordings had reverted to them, Sevcom started selling CD-Rs of their albums, but still offered streaming audio for the curious or chintzy. Now, digital distribution has finally caught up with Tom Ellard, and you can buy a large chunk of their catalog through iTunes, most of it as “iTunes Plus” DRM-free AAC files. Or you can buy them as MP3s straight off sevcom.com and get, as a free bonus, Tom Ellard’s demented liner notes included as PDFs.

I highly recommend you do so, because there are few experimental pop musicians at the level of Severed Heads, and even their oldest, most primitive material still sounds pretty fresh. Also, I’m sure Tom Ellard could use the money. I’ve always thought of Severed Heads as being like Wire: both are artists who outgrew their original style (in Severed Heads’ case, tape-loop based experimental industrial), developed an ear for sickly-sweet melodies that play on in your head for days, write stream-of-consciousness lyrics that have no relationship with reality, and are driven by irascible eccentrics.

Severed Heads have released 9 albums since they last had a distribution deal in North America. Well, actually, that’s not quite right: they’ve put out 4 standalone albums, a couple remix collections, a side project (Coklacoma, a purposefully awkward electro-pop project which doesn’t do much for me), and one continually mutating, versioned release, Op.

The Op releases are intended to be sketchier and looser than the “full” albums. In reality, they’re also punchier and contain more of the loopiness and elusive melodies that have kept me a dedicated fan of Tom Ellard all this time. My favorite is Op 2.0, both for “Symptom Symphony 2.0”, with its Autechre Lite breakbeat (turnabout is fair play, and anyone who thinks Autechre doesn’t owe a huge debt to Severed Heads needs to hear more Severed Heads) and nonsensical lyrics, and the “Hank” half of “Pinagoal / Hank”, which is a disorienting, almost melodic looping blurt. It also features “Kern That Bembo Tighter 2.0”, which is about the nerdiest type-related title I’ve ever seen. They all have their moments, though, and Op 3 is free.

While you’re over there, grab Gashing the Old Mae West / Kato Gets the Girl (which is also free), and then buy some stuff. I recommend Come Visit the Big Bigot or Viva Heads!, but all of it is worth hearing.