0 = 0 • On Autechre’s ‘Oversteps’

Autechre
Oversteps
released on Warp, March 2010

Bret Schneider

Samuel Beckett once said of the English language that he wanted “to drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through.” The same could be said of Autechre’s impulse to meticulously interrogate given conventions of electronic music machines, resulting in a plastic exorcism of sound reminiscent of Beckett’s methodical wordplay.  Oversteps, Autechre’s 10th album is unsurprisingly a continuation of this project.  Over the 20+ years of the duo’s (Rob Brown and Sean Booth) existence, Autechre has unflinchingly clung to a consistent program of investigating the potentials of varied electronic music equipment, ranging from vintage analog hardware to cutting-edge algorithmic software.  If one thread has connected all their projects, it is a process-based attempt to analyze the materiality of new technological material and allow the hidden potentials within them to surface.  Curiously and problematically, Autechre’s project is singular today.

0 = 0

Though much of experimental music’s mid-century avant-garde electronic futurism is contained in their technique, the current experimental music community, which boasts of its historical significance, implicitly excludes Autechre.  Autechre arose in a new cultural field of production in the 1990’s when experimentations of mid-century electronic musicians like Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, Tod Dockstader, and countless more seemed both obsolete and ripe for revisiting.  If slaving objectively over new technologies in order to cultivate an abstract assemblage of sound had expired sometime post-1960’s due to the traditional compositional techniques that catalyzed it, then revisiting and fusing the same methodologies in a more populist entertainment industry reinvigorated it.  Autechre, Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, and many more ‘idm’ electronic artists in the 1990’s, marked a confused persistence of a difficult avant-gardist electronic music which came from Stockhausen’s hopes to renew the tired conventions of western music.  However, this was not explicitly the case. Autechre et al., though well-versed in electronic music history, didn’t peg this mid-century golden age as a fixed reference point for their music.  Rather, there was something altogether new and changed about these musicians because of the amnesia between moments, and this newness had everything to do with the pop music culture which had eradicated the experimental avant-garde of the mid-century.  Autechre’s music, despite its reputation as abstract and unconventional, is considerably more listenable than the mid-century electronic music which preceded it.  This ease of listening has made all the difference in creating something new – only when the avant-garde’s countercultural tendencies fully liquidate into the culture industry, can music like Autechre’s be permitted to acutely present the intricacies of such a broader societal turn.  By absorbing into the culture industry, and not railing against it, Autechre more robustly and freely expresses the constricting forms of dominating culture.  Instead of an art of denial, Autechre presents an art of clarity, even if the object of clarification is unfortunately abstract or alienated.

Like all good art, Autechre allows itself to be symptomatic, instead of futilely trying to be socially relevant.  In opposition to the current melodramatic countercultural trends of noise music, which expresses the surface qualities of its instruments, and denies imbrication with its material qualities so as to make a comment on society, Autechre digs into their materiality objectively.  Likewise, Autechre is not pop music, which also instrumentalizes material to ‘say something’ and convey a message.  Nor does it fetishize the determinist futurism of technology as do the art-and-technology crowd.  Each of these models of capitalist appearance are likewise symptomatic of culture industry.  The idea of conveying a socially relevant message always plays into the adaptable hands of capitalism.  As Siegfried Kracauer and Theodore Adorno observe, in modernity the subject is no longer free to say something, because the subject is an instrument of a mass ornament.  Autechre occupies a unique place where, instead of futilely trying to say something, they allow the instruments to do the talking.  And if the instruments change, so does the outcome, which clings to its material.  If the ‘idm’ of the 90’s was a conflict with anything it was against the tyranny of free expression, which was targeted as illusory.  The determinist administration of culture which manages expression for production’s sake was already expounded upon by Adorno and Horkheimer in The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception as early as 1944. Offering a plethora of music examples they illustrate that what is commonly understood as freedom in art is, at least in part, a deception.  Richard D. James constantly defended against charges that his music wasn’t ‘performed’, arguing that other fake  electronic musicians danced on stage merely to sensationalize something that was essentially un-performable.  After all, electronic music happens in the domain of recorded medium and if the 90’s electronic music resurgence was a radicalization of anything it was recording and home listening.  When advances are made in recording medium – which they unceasingly are – crises emerge in the validity of live music.  This electronic music was an extension of these crises, whhich had already been addressed in Merzbow’s de-spectacularized laptop performances.  That Aphex Twin, for example, reiterated the banality and abstraction of music production by likewise  de-sensationalizing live performance, which by that time had become a ruse in some instances, only popularized the problem and placed it in the domain of where it was most resonant – pop culture (at least compared to the esoteric nature of Merzbow’s performances).  Autechre was, and continues to be, an attempt to bring the sensationalist dreams of expression down to the material reality which such dreams are founded upon.

known(1)

The idea of allowing material to speak through the artist’s craft in order to avoid instrumentalization is an old, perhaps outmoded idea; a modernist fusion of subject and object that has dissolved since the 1960’s abandonment of medium specificity.  Theodore Adorno theorized as much when he backed up Schoenberg’s art of technique, as opposed to the romanticized isolated genius, where expression occurred exclusively through the material’s latent potential.  The art of technique allowed the historically given material to emerge from under the oppression of subjective will, which had degraded to a pastiche of the intellectual radicalism it was founded upon.  If art had a purpose, it was that by denying the role of ‘genius’ and surrendering to a perfectable craft,  the artist could also be manipulated by the musical material in a free-flowing interplay of subject and object which could lead to new forms (e.g. Schoenberg discovering the 12-tone row).  Autechre curiously extends this project in a ‘living on’, or spectral continuation of an aesthetic theory – now ubiquitously championed as outdated – by advancing the role of the artist to that of an engineer.  It is by no mere whim that Autechre is often called ‘modernist’, for they tacitly inherit those incomplete ideals.  Autechre interrogate and overcome synths and hardware in ways that Schoenberg did the piano’s ‘given’ conventions.

Historically speaking, there were moments when electronic music movements brushed against one another and defined their differences.  Specifically, the correspondences between Stockhausen and Richard D. James (Aphex Twin).  James noticed similarities (somewhat after the fact of his aesthetic discoveries) between he and Stockhausen, and looked towards the mid-century era as a reference for the new abstract electronic music of the 90’s.  In Stockhausen’s brutal denial of any connection whatsoever, and his deriding the new music as being primitively repetitive and idiotic, we see the transpiring differences  between decades and the lack of ability to ‘return’ to some golden age of an electronic avant-garde.  The accidental isomorphism, or parallels between mid-century avant-garde and the 1990’s use of electronics to argue against the status quo on their own grounds, imply that there is something intrinsically progressive in an idea of ‘electronics’; ie that something within the form caters to a certain consciousness, or expectation.  On the one hand the stumbling upon electronics by Autechre could be simply an amnesia about the past which carries over to a nostalgia.  After all, futurism is always equally nostalgia.  If the moment of the mid-century avant-garde was inhering in anything, it wasn’t an outright consciousness, but rather one mediated by the continued production of electronic music production equipment targeted at younger generations.  By the time Autechre arrives at the end of the 20^th century, the idea of electronic music being avant-garde had been so abstracted as to be contained in the equipment.  In this sense, no electronic musician today can create without doing so on the administered grounds of an abstracted avant-garde moment which pioneered both electronic products and likewise the principals that they are somehow liberating which comes along with them.  In short, the avant-garde slipped into the culture industry and the administration of younger generations through products.  No artist today can use a synth or music software without being tacitly forced to subscribe to the obscured cultural zeitgeist of generations earlier.   Music artists and their industries today, as a result, are the projected utopias of yesterday.  Ironically, the denial of obviously connected moments came from the older generation and not the younger, much like Adorno’s skepticism of Stockhausen’s sonorous electronics which Stockhausen perceived as traditional.  But whereas Adorno participated actively in the Darmstadt and investigated his skepticism thoroughly in For an Informal Music, Stockhausen became purely dismissive, and this dismissiveness is nothing short of the suppression of failure.  In each scenario, there is the idea that anytime something is gained aesthetically, something is likewise lost.

Today, Autechre’s persistence seems out of place for a few reasons.  First of all, much of their experimentation was a reaction to the dance music conventions of their time.  Techno had become an industry in itself by the 90’s, and Autechre worked within a lot of these formal conventions to develop their aesthetic.  Many reviewers are smart to notice the subtle experimentations of techno that follow its certain logical rules, such as restructuring the 4/4 beat convention.  Autechre music expresses how techno could point beyond itself and into broader domains of production.  Today, techno and the electronic music which carried so much social hope in its time has volatilized.  So why do Autechre continue to make music when its moment has passed?  The passing of its moment is perhaps one reason why Autechre seems so abstract.  At least in the 90’s there was a locality to the music which counterpoised the immanent conventions of the era.  Certainly their music was always an ‘abstraction’ of techno and hip-hop, but it seems that this abstraction has been hyperbolized by its current lack of social significance.  Techno and hip hop have dissipated, so even these most marginal reference points for Autechre are lacking when listening to them today.  When these local reference points shift into different cultural domains (eg noise, synth-pop etc.) Autechre becomes free-floating.  In this freedom is contained an abstract kernel of what once was hoped for, which still isn’t understood today.

If Autechre’s music is ‘abstract’, as is often the charge, it is only accidental.  This is not merely because of the dissipating social situation that surrounds it, but also because of formal issues in the music.  It is poignantly ironic that a music that so specifically and objectively works with generally accessible material (e.g. generic synths, drum machines, software) is considered ‘abstract’.  Wouldn’t a music that grapples with its materiality so thoroughly be considered grounded, more so than any other music?  Perhaps Autechre’s music is not abstract at all, but rather the most practical.  Autechre’s music isn’t ‘abstract’, ‘futuristic’, or ‘artificial’ at all.  It is all too real, material, and present.  Autechre’s abstraction is not inherent within their music, but is projected onto it by a popular music society that expects the given instruments (synths, drum machines, software etc.) to be used in a certain way which says a certain thing.  The charge of ‘abstract’ or ‘alienating’ music is a projection from a culture whose cultural ethos is expressed most acutely in dreamy pop music (the real abstraction), and refuses to address the brutalities of everyday banality.

treale

Subversion of technology on the grounds of its hidden potential is an old dictum ingrained in electronic musicians of the 90’s which has more or less dissipated today and given way to pastiche of the same idea.  The hardware hacking fetish of today carries this same dictum but with considerably more constraints in its reactionary quality.  Hardware hacking is an iconic subversion that keeps itself from actually doing what it professes to do.  Likewise the growing noise music fields and analog hardware fetish which also simply react to reified conventions and harden them.   If the kitsch producer has more clout today in pop culture, then such a situation is permitted by the mobilization of artists into reactionary stances against it, which fail to build a more cohesive program in their pure reaction.  They are in sum antithetical extremes of the same “apparatus”, as Adorno called it.  The music of artists like Autechre, Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, et al., which now seems outdated, was part of a moment where avant garde-kitsch distinctions had seemingly collapsed and funneled into the laboring producer and seemed to imply something other than this historically determined relationship.  Regarding Adorno’s music philosophy, this (passed) event is significant for two reasons; first of all, these ideals happened in the ‘sonorous’ schema of electronic music, of which he was skeptical to say the least, and secondly that these artists were slaving over the material in isolation in ways Adorno felt were passé even in his era.

Oversteps, Autechre’s most recent album, exercises their machines in the same ways their previous albums have., only problematically less so.  Autechre’s previous albums, perhaps especially their immediately preceding Quaristice (2008), with its intricately nuanced manipulations of timbre and a-rhythms, rely on a methodical entanglement with their audio apparatuses in order to master them and be mastered – a sort of canceling of each other, or a scenario where ‘0=0’, which is incidentally a witty track title on Oversteps.  Quaristice is an album which (maybe problematically) approaches pure timbre and sonority.  If Adorno had one criticism of electronic music, it was that it approached a ‘sonorous’ aesthetic which didn’t permit an immanent methodology.  Likewise, recent musicians and critics, Olivia Block for one, have been skeptical of the meandering presentation of uncomposed sounds in recent experimental music.  It is through this argument that Autechre acutely presents this confusion, because their music is singularly methodical and composed but inevitably ends up (most acutely on Quaristice) at a music of sonorities.  Autechre’s music is an index of how easily a meticulous process subordinates to the heterogeneity of sonorities within a society that categorizes sounds.  This makes Autechre all the more important, as they demonstrate how sounds are born and actively ambiguate that process, or rather address the issue generally through the particular.  If mere sonority is the end goal, it is paradoxically reached through objectively calculated means.  In this sense, Autechre is a unique symptom of a music world that has little to do except categorize sounds in order to expand a sonic palette for its own sake.

And yet if Autechre is unique, it is because of their ambiguation of sounds, resistant of easy categorization.  Though some of their music is rhythmic, it can’t be easily understood as such in its fractured patterns.  Though some of their music has straightforward tonality, it is far from being tonal, or even atonal.  Nor is their music random noise because it is incredibly structured.  Recognizable sounds?  Rarely.  Autechre’s is a music of ambiguation, and this is entirely accidental, or at least an unintended artifact of an exploratory process.  One gets this most overtly from the sketches that constitute Quaristice.  Oversteps is unfortunately more prosaic than Quaristice’s timbral experiments, or Untilted’s rhythmic workouts, for example.  Rhythms on Oversteps are more conventional, and tonality is less processed, while each are layered atop the other separately, as opposed to unified as they are in certain areas of Quaristice.  Much of the album is comprised of fairly recognizable square or saw waves layered over simpler breakbeats in a more or less typical acid style that has seen some resurgence lately in the alternate works of James’ AFX.   Some of the tracks have a crystalline chime quality to them which is almost too preciously stylized but not processed to oblivion.  In general Oversteps is more lethargic and less surreal than the charged plasticity of previous albums.  Treale, for example, which is a solid representative of the album has a very dark acid style which is somewhat more serious and one-dimensional than Quaristice, or the Untilted album, where categorical distinctions between tone and percussion disintegrate.  Of course, the craft of acid is an intricate and difficult one.  0=0 starts with an 80’s style synth-chime, with reverb and some skittering percussion, which doesn’t morph into something else, as is typical for Autechre, but rather remains meandering in its given convention.  Processing and meticulous effecting of sounds is less the program on Oversteps than formatting to a given style.  Absent are the surreal a-tonalities and rhythmic a-progressions.  The closest we get to such is on ‘Known(1)’, a beatless assault of warping metallic tones which both glisten and collide awkwardly within their minimal frame.  Of course, this is all counterpoised to their high standard program of using style against itself.  This isn’t to say that Oversteps is conventional in any way, but compared to the exhausting scrutiny of Quaristice (for example, tracks like The Plc or IO), which bred bizarre sounds and demonstrated their arrival in ways never heard before, Oversteps seems simple and less alien.  However, ‘alien’ should not be considered the high watermark of music’s potential.  But when ‘alien’ sounds are an accidental by-product of a singularly intensive methodology of given conventions on given products, we should listen.