ATTN: LMNO PEE: I IZ TOO STOOPID TO "GET" AUTECHRE

[navkat]

Please to be explain: Why the fact that I am not thoroughly knocked out by this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyJfHU4GoOQ makes me the equivalent of a musical troglodyte.

Okay, look: I'm not musically trained but I'm fucking smart. I was born with a natural ear and (from what I've been told) perfect pitch (I used to hum the dishwasher, cars and refrigerator as a child). I just never had anyone telling me "You're talented! Go ahead and try to do something musical because you have a chance at making that work!" (are you hearing the irony and understatement in that? Yeah? Yeah, yeah?)

To me, it sounds like a basic syncopated rhythm pattern (oh jesus. Okay, okay, you win the breakbeat argument) with some multi-tap-delay-techniques, autotune and my 7-year-old at the controls of a synth with sound samples from both Trons and one of the last Terminator movies fed in. I mean, I feel like I could make this stuff.

To my high-brow, uber-smart musician fuckers, it sounds like Deus ex machina, so to speak. Just fucking genius.

Is the Emperor nekkid? Or am I a fucking moron?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I don't get it either. Is there something I'm missing?

[navkat]

RIGHT?!?

Fuck.

[Don Coyote]

I don't get it either. Is there something I'm missing?

I don't get it either.

[Cainad (dec.)]

I have musical gifts on par with an average toadstool, and I must say that the above link sounds like donkey turds being fired out of a potato cannon into my ears.

[East Coast Hustle]

Navkat, you are totally correct here. LMNO probably only enjoys Autechre for the very reason that it makes other people confused and a little upset when they don't "get it". That should probably not be interpreted to mean that there are actually people who DO "get it".

tl:dr version: Autechre is just noisy crap.

[navkat]

I have musical gifts on par with an average toadstool, and I must say that the above link sounds like donkey turds being fired out of a potato cannon into my ears.

So....is that vid at the point like, in the beginning when the cannon just starts firing up? Or like, after it's been going awhile and the donkey turds have started to build up in your ears a bit?

[navkat]

Navkat, you are totally correct here. LMNO probably only enjoys Autechre for the very reason that it makes other people confused and a little upset when they don't "get it". That should probably not be interpreted to mean that there are actually people who DO "get it".

tl:dr version: Autechre is just noisy crap.

I didn't even realize there was an existing thing about this. I asked LMNO because he's the only highbrow music snob I've ever argued with on this board.

[The Johnny]

Are your friends arguing from the side of the technical difficulty of creating it?

Some musician friends fap to things like this because of the difficulty thru the method for creating it...

But yes, aesthetically speaking, not amused.

[Phox]

Muscian Hat: Kinda neat, but at points it borders on annoying as piss. And by " at points" and "borders on" I mean "after about 30 seconds I want to punch the monitor until it stops".

[navkat]

Muscian Hat: Kinda neat, but at points it borders on annoying as piss. And by " at points" and "borders on" I mean "after about 30 seconds I want to punch the monitor until it stops".

Right. I don't understand how people can voluntarily do drugs and listen to this. #1 way to kill a good roll IMO.

[Triple Zero]

I sometimes like Autechre. There's various reasons, some of them more personal than others:

- first, some of their albums is just plain beautiful electronic music. I'm thinking of Incunabula, Amber and Tri Repeatae and possibly LP5 though that one borders on the unintelligible, I do really like it.

- after Aphex Twin, Autechre were the second artists that brought me into contact with the truly weird electronic music. Third was Squarepusher, so those three will always seem kind of special to me.

- some (possibly all) of their weirder tracks have this "trick" or "gimmick" to it, a kind of concept or idea behind it, that if you don't know what it is, it'll sound like unintelligible clicks and noise, and as soon as you realize what it is, you can notice a structure, things fall into place and the track becomes real interesting (though not necessarily beautiful) to listen to. this "key" to a track doesn't always have to do with musical theory, either. For instance Fold4,Wrap5 doing something really odd like Escher's staircases for tempo, seemingly going slower and slower but in actuality, not. Cichli has some really odd on/off logic to its melody, like a ballpoint clicking, hard to explain.

But then, I like contemporary art as well. Something can appear completely incomprehensible, until you find out what the artist was trying to do, or how they did it. If done right, it can even make completely white paintings interesting. Which is what I hated about MoMa in NYC, they had loads of contemporary art on display, but hardly any explanations. And then a hanging bridge fashioned from kitchensink sponges is just a stupid crafts project. Which was very disappointing cause I didn't travel to NYC and pay $20 entry to see incomprehensible crap and pretend I can guess the artist's intentions behind it--which is clearly impossible unless it's a famous artist because you already know what Pollock, Warhol and Duchamp were trying to do. And that is when it becomes pretentious, IMO.
To contrast, we went to a museum in Beacon, called "Dia", which was also filled with contemporary art. Now, some of it, like Autechre, was just damn impressive, pretty or interesting all by itself. But everything had a nice text next to it, explaining what it was about. So the huge hallway with metal plates that you didn't pay attention to at first [because some other art piece was immediately and more obviously grabbing your attention], suddenly becomes interesting to look at as you find out the artist has done something clever with the number of silver and gold dots in arithmetic progressions. Or the guy that's painted dates nearly every day, why and how he did that. Some of his date paintings were also in MoMa, which just looked like someone painting "3 DEC 2007" on a piece of canvas because those fucks didn't bother to explain the what how and why behind those paintings. Like everybody's supposed to know him.

So yeah, I guess that point is that some of AE's tracks have a special meaning or "idea" behind them, and if you don't know that idea, it's perfectly reasonable and normal that you can't appreciate the track as anything but a load of noise and clicks. I can also understand that's frustrating, it frustrates me as well sometimes, just like MoMa's lack of explanations frustrated me. The difference, though, with MoMa you just have until closing time to see it all and figure it out. And it pisses me off when I pay the entry fee and spend one of my limited days in NYC in their museum they do such a bad job of communicating their art to me. With AE you buy or download the album, you can listen to it as many times as you like, read about it, discuss it with people, etc.

It's also one of the reasons why I wouldn't go out of my way to be able to see AE perform live. If they're in the neighbourhood, sure, just for the hell of it. But I wouldn't travel or pay exorbitant fee to be exposed to 90 minutes of machine-improvised noise clicks and bleeps that are impossible to "get" on the first listening anyway. That's definitely different than Aphex Twin or Squarepusher, btw.

- Finally, there's another part. A lot of their music is "generative", and so are the graphics in the videoclip you linked. Generative Art is a kind of art that's based on computer programs and algorithms generating patterns. A lot of what comes out is noisy crap, but part of the coolness is the process behind the generating of the data. Hence "generative". Like it matters if your noise source is data grabbed from video feed of a lavalamp, or audio-feedback via two mobile phones or a robot arm with a paintbrush controlled by electrodes in a piece of rat's brain tissue on the other side of the fucking continent (that was fucking awesome even though the paintings were hideous).

I like generative art. A lot of Autechre's more complex rhythms are produced by very tiny logic programs following simple rules like "go bleep-tick if the clonky noise went blang five times". What I love about that is that you can make up very simple rules, and you set them off, and something very complex and unexpected comes out. That unexpected part is the whole reason why I'm in love with computer programming, most kids start learning to code because they want to make computer games. I wanted to create life on the computer.

(See for my examples my multiscale turing patterns thread and the "design doodles" I bumped in Bring & Brag)

One thing that I can imagine to be a result of this for Autechre is this. They're in their studio, playing with their awesome music tools and computers. Some of the bits are also built in electronics, not just computer programs btw. And they're just playing and making up stuff and trying out things and weeding through all the stuff that comes out for the most interesting and cool bits. Very law-of-fives like. I can totally imagine that after doing that for ages, you're going to hear patterns and structures and melody in other-worldly sounding insane glitch crap that no normal human being could ever comprehend unless they spent years doing the same. But you hear it and you build a track around it in the non-Euclidian rules and warped sense of musical logic that you are certain is there, and through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods — the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyautechrotep.

Oh and one thing that I immediately loved about the video you linked, is how extremely well-synchronized the 3D graphics are to the music. That's another advantage of generative art, it's all just data, and you can link the Machine that goes P:ING!BZT straight to the part of the polygon model that goes flash-twhirl. The software they often use for this is called MAX/JSP btw, a very popular tool in generative art.



Well I hope that explains a little. And if you still think it's pretentious: SORRY FOR LIKING SOMETHING YOU DONT LIKE OKAY


Cause I have to say, you do seem upset about the fact that some people like it and you apparently do not. I can't stand lots of music but you don't see me making a thread taking a dump on country music and how people that like it are so pretentious because others that don't like it obviously haven't lived through enough hardships to truly "get it"...

[East Coast Hustle]

I have to respectfully disagree. If an "artist" creates "art" that, upon seeing or hearing, you see no intrinsic artistic value in and can only find meaning in it AFTER the artist explains it to you, it may still be art but it's also utter crap. It seems like basically the artistic equivalent of forcing other people to read your LiveJournal. Good art (and yes, I believe there is objectively such a thing) should speak to you on its own and allow you to appoint your own meaning to it.

[Fredfredly ⊂(◉‿◉)つ]

it sounds like someone took an electronic song i might like and then fast forwarded it until it made fast screechy noises at me 

[Triple Zero]

I have to respectfully disagree. If an "artist" creates "art" that, upon seeing or hearing, you see no intrinsic artistic value in and can only find meaning in it AFTER the artist explains it to you, it may still be art but it's also utter crap. It seems like basically the artistic equivalent of forcing other people to read your LiveJournal. Good art (and yes, I believe there is objectively such a thing) should speak to you on its own and allow you to appoint your own meaning to it.

Yeah, I heard this before, and it doesn't really work.

Example: Pollock. Is considered art.

According to you, its artistic value only exists because apparently there's people that immediately see intrinsic artistic value in what can not be explained [following your attitude of "non crap" art] as anything but random splotches of paint.

Except that:
- people tend to enjoy Pollock's art more as they learn more about Pollock and his methods
- people who generally do not enjoy random splotches of paint suddenly find themselves intrigued by Pollock's paintings as they learn more about it
- other paintings that actually are random splotches of paint are not held in as high regard as Pollock's, while without the artist's story behind it, they would be functionally equivalent.

Additionally, this attitude is one of the things that Modern Art rebelled against. Or, I'm not good with art history maybe it was dada or post modern or something else, and there was a political aspect to it as well.

But part of the idea is that the process as well as the artist's intent can lend as much artistic value to the art piece as the end product itself.

And it goes much deeper than that. How about art from other cultures? There's things I could not appreciate unless I'd learn about and immerse myself in that culture first. Sure, some things may be pretty all by themselves, but you're not seriously suggesting aesthetics is the only aspect of art that makes it non-crap, right? So I'd learn about that culture and suddenly I could appreciate the delicate way in which a piece of carved wood is painted with reindeer droppings or whatever, which would have been "just crap" without that background knowledge. Same as some tracks by Autechre are just pretty by themselves, and others I could only appreciate after I knew more about how they work.

Or how about, in MoMa I saw framed cartoons with a political bend from Africa, they weren't particularly good or well-drawn. They were decent, good enough, I guess. But knowing a littlebit about Africa's political background (as well as that in this case, MoMa had seen fit to include some plaques explaining--cause you know, american visitors can't be expected to know about these things), the pictures and the content became all that more poignant.

So again,

Good art (and yes, I believe there is objectively such a thing) should speak to you on its own and allow you to appoint your own meaning to it.

I do agree there is such a thing, yes (maybe not strictly objectively, but at least shared by the majority of people).

However, if that's the only way something can be Good Art, you're excluding a whole bunch of stuff.

The extra background information can even make Good Art even better.

Oh and then of course there's Kitsch. Which is not Good Art, but it can look really pretty! Or a picture of a beautiful pink and orange sunset. Or a Bob Ross painting. So it goes both ways. I can see something that is extremely pretty (so it does speak to me all on its own) but as I look at it longer I see that that is pretty much all it has to say, because the "artist" never saw fit to put any other layers or meaning into his work.



I can also see how, if you accept art in that way, how it really becomes quite easy to pass of something that actually is utter crap as High Art, as long as you have a good story to go with it. That's a bit of a shitty problem, of course.
But on the other hand, this is nothing new. And on the other other hand this is exactly the sort of paradoxes and conundrums that have been explored by modern and post-modern art movements. Which IMO is highly interesting.

What things have artistic value because of their backstory?
You can't deny that there isn't any art, real art, that is only significant because of its backstory, unless you want to only count art that has stood the test of time, the Bach and the van Gogh stuff.
So the next question becomes, how much artistic value can we pump into some art piece by backstory alone? (again, this is also nothing new)
And then the question becomes, can we pull it off by backstory alone? Which is when you get stuff like white paintings