Autechre will beat you up and steal your lunch money.
A few years ago, I had the pleasure of arranging Autechre’s “Cfern” for Alarm Will Sound. Doing an arrangement requires you to listen over and over again to little bits of a piece at a time, which is an entirely weird sort of listening experience and allows you to hear all kinds of stuff that you might otherwise miss.
As I listened, I realized that there’s something that happens in the form of a whole bunch of Autechre tracks that’s pretty bizarre. In “Cfern” it’s subtle, but in other tracks (such as “LCC” from the album Untilted) it’s much easier to hear.
An oversimplified formal diagram might look like this:
Form in Autechre's “LCC”
A = OH GOD MY MIND IS MELTING! BUSLOADS OF NUNS AND PUPPIES ARE FALLING OFF A BRIDGE! TOO MUCH INFORMATION!
B = calm down
Two-part forms are common. What’s uncommon is the huge disparity between the information density in the first half versus the second half; the first three minutes are clenched-teeth frenetic insanity, while the final four are like a warm bath.
Even more interesting, however, is that it isn’t just the macro-level that’s “front-loaded” like this. It happens at the micro-level as well.
Here’s a transcription of the basic two-bar pattern that repeats through the A section:
Here at the phrase level, we see the information density is again much higher in the first half than in the second; like a fractal, the large-scale form is represented at the small-scale.
I hear this kind of structure over and over again in Autechre’s music. I’m not sure if this is something that they’re doing intentionally, but it’s definitely a characteristic part of their sound.
When I’m not busy spraying milk out of my nose because of something Sarah Palin said, this is the sort of crap I think about.
(Aside: I found a review of Untilted that discusses form in “LCC” as well. Or at least it uses the word “form” over and over again. As far as I can tell this is just hipster word salad with a side order of pretentious.)
Come see Alarm Will Sound play my arrangement of “Cfern,” along with a bunch of other crazy stuff, at Le Poisson Rouge on July 22.
Very cool observation. It does seem likely that they used fractals as some kind of inspiration-I wonder to what extent it informed their composing.
I’m not sure. They don’t talk much about the technique behind what they do, so this is all conjecture.
But even if it’s not intentional, it’s still interesting to hear patterns like this, especially when it occurs repeatedly across a body of work.
Thanks for your comment.
I heard this as incidental music on NPR this morning! I had to turn down the radio, stop the car “what am I hearing?” and spend a couple of moments with my mental archives to figure out the song and album. Brilliant work, man.