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.

Clark’s Turning Dragon is a vast, immediate, atonal monster of a techno record. The first half, in particular, is probably the finest half-hour of hard techno released since Surgeon’s Klonk. The album starts out with a short field-recorded ambient intro, and then warps (ha!) itself through a series of thudding hard techno rhythm loops, oversaturated noise-ambient interludes, diced R&B and disco samples splattered all over the mix, and Clark’s instantly recognizable downcast melodies, all fused into a seamless whole. Things calm down in the second half, but it’s still heavily beat-driven. The net effect is like moving between rooms at a very large, very loud and very postmodern warehouse rave, and it seems to me that this was the effect that Clark was looking for.

Chris Clark spent a bunch of time on tour after he put out his last full-length album, Body Riddle – his first under the shortened name of Clark – and it shows. Turning Dragon, for all its excess and outsized energy, is a concise and taut record that has obviously been refined by exposure to the dancefloor. There are parts of Central and Eastern Europe where the kids still want dance music to make the obvious dancefloor gestures – prominent kick drums, reverb, stabbing synths, meandering acid lines, everything compressed to hell and gone – so it’s not so surprising that Clark came back from a European tour sounding more like Chris Liebing or Umek than his beardy labelmates at Warp.

Something similar happened to fellow Warp alumnus Speedy J a few years ago (to which I alluded in my previous hyping of “Volcan Veins”, which is still my favorite track on the album), but Speedy J got so wrapped up in making an album that perfectly mimicked the “schranz” style Liebing made popular that he ditched most of the elements that made Speedy J sound like Speedy J. Clark doesn’t repeat that mistake – there is no point on this album that is not obviously Clark music. The combination of his sharp ear for atmosphere and the telling detail with straight-up techno and electro rhythms makes for a stunning, deep album. And techno albums that work as coherent wholes, rather than collections of tracks, are precious because they are rare. Only time will tell if this stands up to my personal choice of high-water marks, Surgeon’s Force+Form, but it’s off to a good start.

In the alternate world where thudding European techno is (still) being dropped on heaving, roiling dancefloors in American Legion halls in small towns across the Midwest and every major city has a Technodrome right next to the basketball coliseum expelling crowds of sweat-soaked, euphoric clubbers every Sunday morning, Clark’s “Volcan Veins” (released today on his new album, Turning Dragon, on Warp) is entering the charts at #1, where it will tenaciously hang for the next six weeks. Good gravy, I didn’t think anyone was still making music like this. Sounding like nothing so much as an exceedingly messy yet propulsive blend of Jackson at his nastiest and Speedy J’s from-out-of-nowhere heavy techno flawed-masterpiece Loudboxer, “Veins” also reminds me of Neil Landstrumm’s “Gigolos Trapped in Retro Hell”, Kiki’s “Gas126” and some of User’s more alarming Moroder-on-bathtub-speed disco loops. Which is to say that it’s a grainy, oversaturated chunk of High NRG disco-loop fury, and is exactly the sort of thing that makes me regret having hung up my slipmats. This is some seriously whacked-out dancefloor business and it ends the only way it could – by collapsing into a murky black hole of distortion and echoes.

Don’t believe me? Listen to the second track in this album sampler. I already tried to buy the whole album through Bleep (the samples make it sound fucking fantastic, but I sort of expect that from Clark at this point – his last album, Body Riddle, was a nearly flawless slab of loud bedroom techno), but they sent me a ZIP file containing only the liner notes. Thanks, guys.

It doesn’t matter how many times I hear it, every time I hear “Polygon Window”, it gives me chills. Richard James made some genius music before he turned into techno’s very own Rumpelstiltskin.

Even though Surgeon got his start ripping off Jeff Mills, both in his production and DJ styles, his DJing sounds much better these days the further he strays from his hard techno roots. Listen to one of his DJ sets where he plays edgy dubstep like Vex’d’s “Fire” and straight-up industrial noise like Whitehouse (or even the bizarre punk-funk glitch edit of “Iron Man” he busts out in his live set from Emergency a year or so ago), and compare it to the sets where he stays within the confines of the techno ghetto, and it’s striking how much more fun and loose the former are.

One of the many pleasures of the digital download revolution is that it means that people who like raw, tracky electronic music can get high-quality techno in a portable form without having to jump through hoops to get it. I haven’t ripped my vinyl yet, and may never get around to it, because doing it right is a lot of work. And a huge chunk of that stuff was originally available solely on 12” and 10” records which never made it to the west coast of the US. But who cares, when I can hit Beatport or Bleep and download acres of high-quality MP3s at more or less reasonable prices?

Especially when it’s stuff like Surgeon’s, or a release like East Light? East Light came out in the middle of Surgeon’s most fertile period of the end of the 90s, when he was running two labels (Dynamic Tension and Counterbalance) and putting out material on two others (Soma and the legendary Tresor). Upon first listen, it is a clinically dry collection of tracky dancefloor techno, unrelenting and very mechanically composed. All four tracks are pure percussion workouts, and this is precisely where their most appealing qualities lie: while they sound unremittingly electronic, almost all these tracks are made from carefully chosen samples of real percussion instruments, orchestrated into a smoothly ticking orrery.

Because these tracks were, after all, intended to be worked into a dancefloor set by a DJ, they don’t have the sophisticated progression and complexity of Surgeon’s dense, sui generis Force+Form, or the easy appeal of records by Model 500 or Underground Resistance, but first listens can be deceptive. I’ve had East Light kicking around my iPod for years, and it continues to grow more interesting and immersive each time I hear it.