#Autechre bleep store update#
I hope to update it on occasion, as I find my way. To that end, what follows are listening notes, references and thoughts as I make my travel through the collection and back again. It’s one thing to review a book, another thing entirely to review a library. Now, elseq 1″”5 may be modest in comparison to the live collection, and a record that’s four hours long and is subdivided twice - into sets and tracks - doesn’t necessarily evade reviewing, but its capacious nature invites alternate approaches. Autechre’s music may sound like willfully broken music machines, but it is the harbinger of an aspiringly efficient cultural machine. In the context of their releases, names of actual cities and dates of concerts - “AE_LIVE_KREMS_020515,” “AE_LIVE_DOUR_180715, “AE_LIVE_KATOWICE_210815” - on the live collection read less like places and timestamps and more like the fragmented, coded syllables and numerals that have long served as placeholders for their ecstatically broken beats ( Envane and Cichlisuite, “Characi” and “Pen Expers,” “PIOBmx19” and “777”).ĪE_LIVE used its oversized scale to announce the arrival of a dedicated Autechre store,, which is really front end for Warp’s venture, and a window into Bleep Dispatch, a physical distribution organization.
It often lacks reference points other than the duo’s own fervidly brittle catalog. Only in contrast to AE_LIVE can elseq 1″”5 be seen to deserve its lowercase title treatment. This massive set, released back in May, follows on something larger still: last fall’s AE_LIVE, which consisted of nine hour-long performances. Its most recent release is five releases in one, elseq 1″”5: 21 tracks, roughly four hours of music, the individual parts ranging in length from about five minutes to just under thirty. However the deck seemed to have been stacked in the mid-1990s, it’s Warp Records - the label where Autechre has long maintained a home with Squarepusher and Aphex Twin, among others - that’s still kicking.Īnd as the record industry strains to find a path forward, Autechre strains the definition of a recording. The behemoth music retailers are gone, major record labels are struggling, and smaller labels face their own hurdles. This reaction had, perhaps, more to do with the venue, Tower Records, than with the music, but decades later the point is moot.
Told their Chiastic Slide was due to be listed as the number one electronic album of the year in the magazine where I’d recently stopped being an editor, Tower Records’ Pulse!, the duo’s Sean Booth replied “What? That’s fucking ridiculous.” Their music was then no less self-assured than it is now, but they were. It’s coming up on 20 years since I interviewed Autechre, back in 1997 ( “More Songs About Buildings”).
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