doctorvee

My decent into Autechre fanboydom continues, as I have bought the latest Autechre-related release. It’s the second installment of Autechre’s collaboration with The Hafler Trio, entitled æo³ & ³hæ. Apparently it’s limited to a thousand copies. If the experience of the first installment — æ³o & h³æ — is anything to go by, though, it’s difficult to always trust a ‘limited edition’ tag (the guy behind the label apparently turned out to be, to put it lightly, a bit of an arse according to this page. Kind of puts me off buying it (it slipped under my radar at the time)).

On to the music of this second collaboration though. It’s difficult for me to know what to say about this. That’s because I feel that this is more about music making than it is about making music. And since I don’t have the first clue how to make music like this, I can’t really comment on that, and I won’t bother. It is also my shame to report that, although I am very aware of the name, I have not knowingly heard any other work from The Hafler Trio, so I can only look at this from an Autechre angle.

This album is clearly all about soundscapery and experimentation. That’s why I say it’s about music making rather than making music. It’s not something you could dance to or anything. This is for beard-strokers only. It’s just as well I have a beard then.

It’s nice though. Don’t let yourself get stressed out by it and just let it do its thing. Sometimes it’s pleasent, sometimes it’s startling. Most of it is quite slow-moving and quiet. During some of the quieter moments I realised that it’s quite difficult to listen to without being interrupted. That bloody dog across the road was barking for a start. It’s a bit like the whole thing with John Cage’s 4’33″ — the ultimate in aleatoric music. There is no such thing as silence.

Unless my ears and memory deceive me, some of the music on this album was also part of the autechre.ws broadcast. I think the final piece of music on this album is the track which was known as Org on autechre.ws. It lasts for ages, fading in very slowly, and fading out also very slowly. Droning notes seem to float in and out, and through each other.

You could maybe sum up the whole album like that. This album is droney. It’s quiet but noisy. I think they’re just seeing what they can do. That’s fine; it’s their prerogative. Do I like it? I dunno. It’s okay. I’ll listen to it anyway, but probably not much.

The packaging is really cool though! Very elaborate. Good to see tracing paper in there; I always like it when tracing paper is used in CD packaging.

• Buy from Boomkat
• The Hafler Trio
• Die Stadt
• What WATMM thinks

While I’m on the subject of music, I was looking around the Bleep site today, and noticed that you can do all sorts of fancy things now. Like linking to a release. Or doing this:

I think you might have to hit play every 30 seconds, but that’s a small price to pay for being able to listen to the whole Bleep catalogue for free, and stick it on your website. Aren’t they lovely?

I’ve actually never bought anything from Bleep yet. I like my fancy boxes too much of course. I could buy some Gescom or something from them though, when I can get round to it…