Story Archive February 2, 2003 (Page 1 of 1)

This is an album I got almost a year ago and never listened to up till today. It even inspired me to start a thread at I Love Music: CDs you bought but never listened to. Quoting myself:

I bought Autechre's Confield about a year ago and never listened to it. There must be more CDs but this one kind of haunts me. Somehow I am afraid to listen to it and somehow I am intrigued. I never felt like wanting to listen to it. Too abrasive, not enough melody was what I thought. I don't go to the dentist on my free will neither...

Autechre are nothing for people with short attention spans. It is hard to get into them. Their "music" is challenging. As I am a curious person concerning music I could not resist listening to the CD finally. At the end of the CD I felt like having experienced a hangover without having been drunk the night before. The most rewarding was that the hangover didn't last long. It was over after exactly 62 minutes and five seconds. The kind of hangover I have always been dreaming of.

I like the idea of this stuff. In theory I am a fan. In practice I am not there yet. The music itself is naked. No melody, few harmonies, hardly a constant beat, no voices. The listener has to clothe the music himself. He has to make it up in his head. It is his work. It is not shoved in his ears. But there are endless possibilities. The music gives the listener almost total freedom. But he has to be imaginative. He needs to have his own ideas, otherwise it won't mean anything to him. Everyone will hear different things in this record. The music is like an empty house. You have to furnish it yourself. First you paint the ceiling, then you paste the wallpaper on to the walls, then you lay the floor coverings, finally you put up the furniture. I haven't made Confield my home yet. I hear lots of different noises but altogether it doesn't make sense yet. I am still connecting the sounds to create pictures and stories. Some impressions of the first four tracks:

In a way Confield is to conventional music what the internet is to television. The user is not only a consumer anymore. He is participating. It is not enough to just open the ears and eyes. There is an interaction which goes beyond passive perception.

1. Zen Buddhist monks are engaged in a spiritual performance. Together, they turn the impossibly tight-sealed lids of various jars and metal containers. The monks slowly begin taking heavy breaths, the slightest low-pitched hum of their voices can be heard. Songful spirits of trees and rivers are drawn to them and begin surrounding them. The spirits gradually trail into the priests and are released upon the exhalings. The breaths grow deeper, the inhalations become extended, yet everything remains utterly calm.

In another galaxy, this would be a traditional rural farm song. Percussionists keep the swaying rhythm alive to boost morale for the humble workers. Under a purple-yellow haze and the heat of 2 suns, baskets are filled with some sort of glowing alien coal. Everybody mines, gleans, and gathers in the same back-and-forth motions set by the drums. Later, you can hear the shearing of crops and dust evaporating in the humid atmosphere.
A relentless meteor shower upon a cactus-infested plain where scorpion-like things surface every now and then to warble about. Everything is dangerously spiny, acute and in abrasive conflict its surroundings. The sky is shrouded in clouds and brutal sandstorms flurry upon the twilight ranges. Eventually, a few distant stars are able to shimmer through the havoc quite brilliantly. However, this vague sign of consolation is ultimately lost in the pelting assault.
A 2-legged machine rhythmically pounds the floor in a cave of bats. It sends out horrifying growling frequencies to instigate hysteria throughout them. Wings flap and the bats all begin grinding their teeth in tension. The machine strikes the ground more forcefully, shaking the more distant creatures off of their stalactite bound areas of slumber. The rumbling mechanical howl grows more intense, the collective grinding of teeth forms a claustrophobic chatter, the pounding grows more and more erratic. The bats begin to drop to the ground, a couple can be faintly heard screeching in pain. As the last fall, the machine sends out one final moan before shutting off.
A large beetle chomping and snorting away at a pool of tinier insects. Every bite it takes is performed with a systematic double-slurp followed by a sharp snapping of the jaw. A mysterious shaman plays a strange and foreign metallic instrument to keep the beetle hypnotized through this ritualistic devouring practice. The beetle's consumption becomes more frantic, more violent. The hooded apprentices of the shaman silently pray beside the beetle's arena. The beetle's eyes redden as a dark omen begins to take shape.
You awaken to find yourself upon the tongue of a gargantuan beast. The beast roars as you are forcefully tossed around in bubbling gurgling saliva. Skeletons of past meals and other barely alive unidentifiable animals are trapped with you. Undigested bones crumble and crunch rapidly as the beast writhes around in attempts to swallow you. Suddenly, the mouth closes and it all fades out in an instant.
Uh oh, somebody left the drum machine on and today the kids are going to be at the shop for a music-education field trip. As they arrive, the steady beat compels the rambunctious rascals to slam around on a bunch of keyboards all set to "Harpsichord 2". A couple children try to sing a nonsense little melody around the cacophony (let's say the kids have all gotten their hands on broken vocoder-filter-masks as well). One even discovers how to switch her keyboard to "Acid Pad". But enough is enough... the chaos of the noise causes one young boy to cry and soon enough... everybody is crying.. the drum machine obliviously runs on. Where'd the teacher go?
3 frogs. Like the Budweiser frogs, they alternate noises... the first 2 emit little croaks while the third puffs out with a deep boom. The moon shines peacefully, a cluster of fireflies encircles the pond. However, this tranquility is all about to change. Little did the first 2 frogs know, they were seated upon powerful fountain streams. The water-cannons begin their spray, sending the 2 frogs high in the sky. The frogs are startled and let off distressed cries, at times with water in their mouths so that a gargle is all that can be heard. They consistently land with a splash precisely where they once sat, only to be thrown up in the air over and over again. The whole time the 3rd frog persists indifferently with its burping bass.
An argument between a metronome and a dysfunctional ill-tempered computer. The animosity steadily increases and the mood swings so that mild tension boils into rage. As a result, the agitation culminates into a full-blown melee. The metronome really loses its cool and aggressively lunges at the computer, sending both of them down a long, rocky, arduous incline. Down, down, down they tumble, no longer engaged in battle, but lost and confused in the tangle of thorns and steep terrain. Major injuries to both.

This is what always ends up happening when I listen to Autechre's Confield. It's just how I react. Is this enjoyable? Good music?

Lou Reed in a longish interview with LA Weekly's John Payne on his new album The Raven.

The new album features some interesting guest musicians like Ornette Coleman, David Bowie, Willem Dafoe as narrator and Lou's wife Laurie Anderson of course.

In the interview Lou complains already about all the people who are going to listen to the album on mp3 and will miss the subtleties of the sound. Personally I suspect that there are only very few people capable of distinguishing a compressed mp3 from a normal CD. I am very interested in the new Massive Attack CD as I find the mp3s of a pretty high quality and would like to test if I can hear the difference.

JP: I was excited to hear you doing several electronic pieces on this new album; "Fire Music" is especially thrilling.

LR: That was done after September 11, so that's very much a reflection of that. I had been working on that piece, and in the interim the thing went down, and then one day I went and did it.

It's complicated how that was done. There's no guitar. I wanted to get a certain Metal Machine Music guitar sound, and I waited a long time for the technology to get to the point where you could do that. I've been talking with computer guys for a long time, talking about a certain thing I wanted to have happen, and they said to me, "Listen, that's impossible, what you're talking about." And then I found a way of doing it. The minute I could hear it I could play it, 'cause I heard the tone — bingo, I was home free.

I could play it if I could hear it; if I can't hear it I can't play it. But put it this way: I couldn't do it again. That was of the moment, like a lot of things I do, which is a drag in some ways. "Fire Music," for example, two and a half minutes or whatever it was — that was it. I shot my load. I couldn't do it again, because I don't know how I did it.