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Aborted Autechre Amazon Review

Last week I was browsing around Amazon.com and stumbled upon what may be the greatest treasure trove of customer reviews on the entire site. Autechre album reviews. Autechre (there are a variety of ways to pronounce it, and the duo, Sean Booth and Rob Brown, have said the name can be pronounced any way one sees fit) is an experimental electronic music act whose compositions tend to defy description. There’s is the sound of machines lumbering towards expression. It is music that has been called unique, difficult, complex, repetitive, alien, abstract, robotic, inhuman, minimalist, dark, strange, mathematical, architectural, atmospheric, frightening, structured noise, austere, intellectual, emotional, cold, beautiful, harsh, etc. Lots of words trying to express some kind of analog to an experience that is completely lacking in words.

As one reviewer so well summed up, just go with beauty, stop trying to describe it and just experience it for yourself. Which is probably the best course of action with Autechre, but that doesn’t mean many have put forth some incredible attempts at the art of describing Autechre. Some particularly inspired samples:

“Here, we’re no longer looking at landscapes/listening to soundscapes. Instead, Ae bring us inside the mind of the machine. It is a claustrophobic, disorienting, but totally fascinating experience. The machines we inhabit are definitely mortal, perhaps mortally wounded. They spit out strange pattering rhythms, and quirky, touching melodies. They suffer from Tourettes and Obsessive-Compulsive disorder. They undergo life-cycles from birth to death before our eyes/ears.

When I listen to a great soul singer like Marvin Gaye or Sam Cooke, I feel a surge of emotion that comes from a sense that they are singing about my life and my experiences, more eloquently than I ever could. I feel like I share a special human bond with them. Ae have managed a more daunting task; they’ve brought me as close as is humanly possible to feeling a special bond with machines. Amazing.” link

“Through digitally construed mediums, we’ve been allowed to taste something that our parents and their parents never imaged, actually allowing us to ride on the shaped experimental surf of some unnamed audio sea for the very first time. Its uttering amazing in that respect alone, with foreign worlds never before experienced finding themselves sonically cultivated in man’s existence.” link

“Autechre sounds like the the noises of the inner cortex of a robot, while Aphex Twin sounds like a kid playing in a robot factory.” link

“Someone once compared the music on Tri Repetae as the sound of machines chattering away to each other in the dark. If so, then this record is the sound of those machines trying to drag themselves out of a dark tarpit under the glare of acetylene lights on some forgotten evil robot construction site. link

“It depicts an alien, mechanical, vaguely threatening but overall unclear form that seems to be wriggling into existence spontaneously (i.e., constructing itself rather than being birthed). link

“It’s weird. It’s repetitive. It’s difficult. And yet, there’s something there. Something fascinating. Something alive. I have to learn it’s secrets. I have to listen again. Marge! Prepare my headphones! Open the listening room doors! Hold all my calls! I’m going back!!” link

“picture crystalline structures of great complexity slowly growing, but incorporating organic fragments in a way that seems random and orchestrated at once. Now translate that to sound.” link

“damn brahmin… this is inaa fine style. jagged beats spin and contort, go out of focus, come back together. sounds like milford grave ripping apart acid house and early hip hop and putting it all back together as cubist dub drug cult funk.” link

After being inspired by the multitude of astounding reviews, I attempted my own review of the Untilted album. However, I found myself drifting towards trying to describe Autechre in general, instead of the album in question. It got me thinking about the music though, and ever since, I haven’t been able to stop listening. Maybe once I can decide on a favorite album I’ll be able to craft a proper review. My aborted attempt, after the break.

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Robo-Personalities For Your Inbox?

So the human personality construct is a pretty multi-plicitous beasts, no doubt about that. Especially in this newly fractured world of social media and friends networks and avatars, the net-connected human has many opportunities to present different faces to the world as different situations and contexts present themselves. Despite this, the fact remains that contending with the many traits and habits that people bring to a situation requires a certain level of predictability and stability, or else we are left without the all important middle ground where conversation may reliably take seed and blossom.

Consider email and the habits of interaction in that well-trod, though still very new communication space. Some people rely on the caps lock key to indicate excitement or exasperation. Others rely on the aptly-named emoticon, an attempt to parse the emotion of facial expressions with the tools of text. Some emailers have a repeating set of anecdotes they employ to illuminate a variety of situations and events. If you run with the truly geeky side of the net, you may even encounter the world of 1337sp34k (leetspeak), gamely replacing normal letters with number and symbol stand-ins.

We all learn to identify and predict these styles of email communication and respond at the very least coherently, and at our best, even reflect these styles back to the sender in our responses. So while the human’s opportunities to mix up one’s personality to the nth degree has increased, i believe our personalities in context, the personalities we present in specific situations and modes of communication, are actually becoming easier to codify and predict. Email is again a good example of why. First of all, unlike many other mediums of communication, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that one’s entire history of email communication could be stored and accessed in one archive. As the medium matures and services like gmail and hotmail have the opportunity to become a kind of “life-partner tool” establishing relationships with customers that last a lifetime, the opportunity to process the whole of one’s communication styles and habits within a certain frame becomes possible. User A starts off a conversation about Subject A with communication construct style G 95% of the time on weekdays. User B responds to Question B with Communication Construct Style G6 86% of the time after a workout.

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