TWiS Listening Post (0026)

Autechre live, Nigerian ambient, and (virtual) driving in the rain

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INTRO

This issue of This Week in Sound is usually a thank you solely to paid subscribers — a bonus round, supplementing the free issues that feature a broader array of sound studies coverage. Since I missed Tuesday’s issue — due to some escapism in the form of a lot of book-writing — I’m sending this out to the full subscriber list (a little north of 4,600 people, a rewarding concept, let me say). Here’s this latest virtual mixtape of highly recommended ambient and (somewhat) adjacent audio. Enjoy.

Today we’ve got: a tour, a debut, and a drive.

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1. A TOUR

AE, MATEY: The British duo Autechre traffic in abstract music that veers between abstract sound design and challenging club music, which is to say they record what is known as IDM, and this past week they did what they seem to do every few years, which is to unleash an ungodly amount of their music out of the blue all at once. For background: There was the four-hour-plus elseq 1-5 in 2016, and the eight-hour NTS Sessions 1–4 two years after that. And of course, way back in 2015, there were the 28 hours of music comprised by AE_LIVE. Oh, and the nearly eight-hour AE_LIVE 2016/2018 in 2018. Bringing us up to the present: In 2023 Autechre released 7 full sets, packaged as AE_LIVE 2022–, from a tour that occurred mostly the year preceding, and then this week, rather than create a new catch-all title, they simply added another dozen sets from 2023 and 2024, bringing AE_LIVE 2022– (the hyphen still open, no end in sight) to a total of 19 sets, or nearly 23 hours of music. It’s a lot. Like, a lot, even on its own, and especially in the broader context of these 2001-ish monoliths, not to mention their studio recordings and other work. As I’ve done in the past, I’m going to try to tackle — and almost certainly fail — this motherlode by doing so in plain sight, keeping a listening diary rolling in public. It’s at disquiet.com/autechre_live_2024. Now, the point of this Listening Post series is to help pick out items in the vast miasma (sorry, I’m in the midst of reading Neal Stephenson’s new novel, Polostan) of modern music. I’d suggest starting off with AE_MADRID_100424. (I can’t embed it here, but you can check it out at autechre.warp.net.) Pneumatic beats are my jam. I love when the sound is all gated white noise, held tight to a firm stop, like nothing so much as highly pressurized gas being put to taut rhythmic use. This set is thick with such pounding, and with the turntablism and complementary hip-hop vocal snippets heard on some of the other recent sets. It was released by the label Warp.

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2. A DEBUT

DAY TRIPPER: I joke that since I’m not very handy, after the apocalypse my main utility will be sending out a community newsletter. It occurs to me I can also, when duty calls, serve as a DJ in the no doubt much-needed chill-out room. Let’s kick things off, then, in our virtual decompression zone, with the album Harmony / Balance by Nigerian musician Ibukun Sunday. The record opens with children’s voices heard playfully chatting amid woozy synth lines (“Half-Brothers”), and proceeds through glacial choral music (“Enemy of My Enemy”), gracefully echoing arpeggios (“The Chariot”), and much more, rarely enough to raise one’s pulse. The track titles can seem off-putting (“Arrayed on the Battlefield,” “To Fight With”), but don’t let them disincline you. The album, Sunday’s debut full-length, was released on Spirituals, a sub label of Phantom Limb, in late September.

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3. A DRIVE

CAR TALK: I’ve been doing a lot of research these past few years into field recordings, those of both the natural environment and the built environment. Bridging, in a manner of speaking, the gap between the two respective realms are the environmental sounds that fill video games, virtual reality, and the like. They are artificially created yet intended to give the impact of something real, something heightened or extrapolated, something — to use the ubiquitous term — immersive. Many of these high-definition sonic studio concoctions are derived from actual field recordings, while others are produced more synthetically. Such recordings are, of course, intended to be experienced in a given context. However, as with the one heard (and seen) below, in which a driver navigates the nighttime streets of the 2013 game Grand Theft Auto V, there is a large and growing audience for prerecorded video game experiences, and though they are, inherently, audio-visual, many of these fan recordings are couched in sonic terms, like “ASMR” and as “sleep aids.” There is something lulling, indeed, to this city drive, which the title informs us has “NO LOOPS” — which is to say, it is a constant, non-repeating stream of different journeys around the open world of the video game, courtesy of the channel named Video Game Weather ASMR. It is also, per the functional title, eight hours long. The primary things I found myself listening to are the car engines and the rain, and I found myself listening for variations therein. Your mileage may vary. I recommend starting at the beginning and then checking out the different scenarios, each from the point of view of a different driver/character in the game. There is a clickable table of contents to the video, helping situate you should you want to know where you are — or more to the point, who you are — at a given moment.

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INPUT & SUPPORT

Always appreciated. What are you listening to — or making?

Email: marc@disquiet.com