A Semiotic Essay on Autechre, IDM and The Era of Digital Reproduction

(c) 2006, Otto Lehto

Introduction: AUTECHRE - A SHORT BIOGRAPHY:

Autechre is Rob Brown & Sean Booth. They are from Manchester, U.K.

“Brown went to art school and studied architecture, and Booth attended an audio engineering and electronics school for six months. While Brown's experience with architecture would later provide reference points for the structuring of the duo's music, Booth's spell at the audio engineering school sharpened his sense of how not to do things.” (http://www.maxmsp.ru/files/fizzarum/ae/ae_review5.htm)

Architecture and engineering are some of the keys to unlocking their sounds. But rather than looking for interpretants of second- and third-order removes (like album reviews, biographies, profiles), I will let them do the talking – firstly through their music, secondly through some interviews they have given over the years. This I will relate to a more general theory of our age.

Their works span circa 1989 – 2006, including 8 albums. Their latest album, Untilted, was released in 2005. They are signed to Sheffield’s “Warp Records” label, alongside such names as Boards of Canada, Aphex Twin, LFO, !!!, Squarepusher, Nightmares on Wax and Jamie Lidell.

Their early works provided a fusion of Detroit and Chicago-inspired “techno” (characterized by Roland drum machines, Yamaha synthesizers, Asio samplers and sequencers) with what could be called “ambient” or “chill-out” (Brian Eno, The Orb, Tangerine Dream etc.). Their first albums Incunabula (1993) and Amber (1994) were right in this territory. Such a merger of the fast-paced and the long-winded, the dance-floor sounds and the bedroom sounds, proved fruitful for a long career during which their idiosyncrasies evolved, developed and transmuted. Tri Repetae (1995) and Chiastic Slide (1997) turned the course towards something different, more “industrial”. Their next album was issued untitled, but the fans dubbed it LP5 (1998). Confield (2001), Draft 7:30 (2003) and Untilted (2005) have followed, not to mention numerous EP’s and remixes. It has been called IDM (intelligent dance music), braindance, electro, ambient, techno and so on, but these genres are only pointers, more useful for reporters and historians than musicians or their audience. The semiotician may “take sides”, certainly, and become a reporter or an historian, but hopefully not an unoriginal one. I myself, I do confess, am first and foremost a musician, and only secondarily a semiotician, but this is hardly avoidable: a gardener needs the rain and the winds to make a living.

Thom Yorke, of Radiohead, has cited LP5 (1998) as one of the greatest albums ever made. Autechre have responded: “Well he’s wrong, we’ve done loads better than that. But it’s only an opinion.”

The work of art in the age of digital reproduction

The level of firstness in musical artistry is divided into levels of inspiration, articulation and wave form rigidification (idealisationàcompositionàmastering/recording/performing). Rigidification, in the digital era, possesses the unreflective certitude of “hot media”, as analysed by Marshall McLuhan. Indeed, the digital framework of binary oppositions (on/off) maintains an Aristotelian power of logical persuasion: vision and sound in the unmediated reproduction of “faultless” digital copies (CD’s, DVD’s, .Wav). This results in the uniform field of commercialisation, e.g. unit-based production management. But there is coolness in the air, in the air waves, in the waves.

Wave forms carry intention, but significantly do not possess the power of the will, even though their whole form is the being-in-time of a willing, i.e. Dasein. Indeed, time in music is on quite a different pedestal than it is in some other forms of art: listening to music is not at all like the tracing of eye movement on a canvas (from Mona Lisa’s hair to her eyes, her hands, the background, her dress and back to her face again – in the course of some 10 seconds). You may not start by listening first to the third bar of a Beatles melody and then jumping to the third verse and, say, only then listening to the intro. The same holds true, even more so, in classical music, where development and unfolding is considered the payoff for time-fixated self-control (i.e. a maintained physical position), for both the audience and the performers. Now, “performance art” is perhaps the most general term for a space-time fixating unfolding of human will: There is a venue (a set and a setting), one or more performers, one or more outside presences (unless one is performing for one’s self) and a duration. The duration is the duration of maintenance – maintenance of physical fixation, in whatever form (standing, sitting, playing, listening, dancing, walking, laughing, clapping etc.), of a self-engendering Dasein: one conscious of its own end. It is clearly a mixture of the planned and of the spontaneous. Spontaneity is not only the show-off of skill cultivation; it is moreover a factor of the inherent precariousness of life – the roof may fall in an opera house, the singer may suffer a heart attack, the audience may stage a walk-out in protest, the police/army/officials may enforce “law and civility”, the spirit of the event may be ruined in numerous unforeseeable ways. Such is the soul of the arts – the maintenance of an unlikely harmony; being-towards-end.

Now, what happens in the era of digital reproduction? I will focus on electronically oriented musicians, but the spirit of our age means that what I say holds true of ever more artists out there. Well, live performances of artists aside; with the prevalence of the gramophone’s offspring (equipment for music storage, propagation and amplification) the experience of musical unfolding gets relocated in a more dispersed setting. There still are parties, shows, festivals, events – yes. There are still precarious societies (secret or open), and there are still improvisation sessions. But the musical event is not “reproducible” manually or physically. There may be a way to get a hold of exactly the same instruments, the same music software, and the same hardware (although this is unlikely most of the time). Even in this case, it is often impossible to reproduce even the simplest of sounds of some of the more interesting artists out there. In fact, even the artists themselves would be unable to reproduce the material, if it weren’t for information stored in sequencers, audio files and DAT-tapes. This means that the product, the output, is the only trace of a particular Dasein. Then there is nothing but output; nothing but waves digitalized according to the PCM paradigm.

Says Sean Booth: “Working in the digital domain you're using approximations of things; the actual sound wave never enters the equation.”

This is quite different from the more mechanical tools of the past, such as score sheets, physical instruments and reverberating architecture; all of which were physical means of preserving, cultivating and reproducing a Dasein. Still, the ghost of the old lives on in systems like MIDI.

Now, what happens to the age-old spirit of artistic maintenance, upholding and conserving? The “maintenant”, the now, of a Dasein, used to be in the hands of upholding-maintaining-conserving facilities such as (the name says it all!) conservatories, libraries, concert halls and museums. But today the maintenance is no longer the unlikely outcome of a conventional structure (an Academy of Arts, a lineage of apprenticeship, a dress code, a shared vocabulary, a secret handshake). Instead, the conventions themselves are digitally codified according to the power of infinite, limitless reproduction. By recording a performance, its value as an event is nullified in hyperspace. Nihilism of values (not accidentally!) was first “discovered” during the decades when mass media were first taking hold (late 19^th, early 20^th century), and reactionary fascists have always been in favour of precisely this reinstating of the Spectacle as a non-reproducible “Triumph of the Will”. Even if Hitler had a love for cinema, the cinematic image was not a substitute for its object of representation. You could not fake the Führer – but was there ever a “real” Führer behind the façade of sound amplification, artificial lighting, favourable angles and stimulated crowd noise? In fact, propaganda (as co-invented by British intelligence and fascist apparatchiks), being the self-defeating model for the real to realise itself in myth and subterfuge, was a fake guarantee of authenticity masquerading as the saviour of reality – a false prophet at that. Goebbels’ “Big Lie”, however ostensibly white, was decidedly a modernist response to the threat of excessive realism.

So, even anti-modernist thinking is deeply entangled in the faux paradigm of mechanical and digital reproduction – one need only mention nature documentaries about ever decreasing habitats, of “wild reservoirs”, whose sole existence is captured on screen at the precise moment of their annihilation. If DNA-banks fail to act as the Noah’s ark for lost species, to be resurrected in some Jurassic Park of tomorrow, there is nothing but archival footage to show our grandchildren. This is precisely the horror story of digital reproduction, since “shooting” a scene is in many cases not any different from “shooting” with a gun. This is the curse of “enframing” (Heidegger’s Gestell). Likewise, the reproduction of wave forms as “faultless” copies must be challenged to the degree it in fact annihilates its creative point of origin, its raison d’être. If there is no moment of re-appropriation of the musical event by Dasein (~subject) there is nothing but background noise, nothing but a modular anticipation of a background continuum (e.g. elevator muzak). To me listening to a well-crafted pop song (a #1 du jour) on headphones is too often a disappointing experience. This is not because of a lack of ideas (indeed, a well-crafted pop song can be a well-spring of ideas), but rather because the mastering of the record aims at fine-tuning its frequencies and volumes to fit the industry standards of radio and MTV play. Thus, there is no secret to be found on closer inspection, because closer inspection is not only discouraged but simply impossible. The medium is the message, quite consciously. What plays well on radio is meant to be played on radio. Radio usually plays in non-committal social space (like public transport, supermarkets, market streets, hospital lounges and so on), and thus a devaluation of a piece of art is in direct proportion to its ubiquity as a casual soundscape to which one pays little to no attention.

This is elucidated in an interview Sean Booth did for Pitchfork:

“Q: Do you feel that the world now is less receptive to the kind of detail-oriented complexity of your music because people are often listening with only an eighth of their attention? SB: That's definitely the case. But we listen with so much attention, that we're probably absurdly [i.e. non-trivially? - Otto] interested in what we do.”

What, then, precisely happens in art? By necessity, the avant-garde (and avant-garde is simply the name of the inner spirit of a form of art in a given period) embraces new methodologies of exerting its Will. The signs of the Dasein turn towards a repudiation of a piece of art’s forced self-image as a ubiquitous (read: valueless) commodity of exchange. This is a matter-of-factly truism of 20^th century arts. Here we must recognise the pioneering examples of Dadaism, Cubism, Surrealism, Art Brut, Warhol and others. However, even that period is already passé. The facts of the new New Economy (let’s call it the 21^st century, or the digital age), are decidedly less materialistic. This corresponds to a turn from mere left-anarchic anti-institutional terrorism (of Dada) to something closer to libertarian-communitarian utopianism, since the erosion of copyright protection leads to such issues as property demarcation becoming de facto things of the past. How fitting is it that we remember Duchamp for his urinal, since it is precisely the mammalian urge to mark territory that is left behind in the New Economy – simply because space is no longer finite. Corresponding to this infinite universe, an implosion of signifiers takes places – no longer their explosion as in the past.

Full four-dimension space-time opens up from a one-dimensional point.

Says Rob Brown: “I studied architecture and we love lots of architects [he later cites Felix Candela & Santiago Calatrava]. I can appreciate when some people say our music gives them a sense of space – it would. Mine and Sean’s senses are developed to know from a sound what kind of space we’re in, and that gives us untold amounts of freedom. If we can make things sound spatial for a reason then we will, but it’s not directly influenced by architecture. It’s just an aesthetic.” [my emphasis]

The signifying realm of artistic distribution must still incorporate methods of survival, but survival no longer means the survival of a “hot” message (i.e. hot medium), but the survival of a self-differentiating ethos, a “cool” counter-current. Again: the explosive hotness of the mechanical is transmuted into the implosive cool of the digital. So, there is a specific task in the age of digital reproduction, not present in the mechanistic (e.g. analogue) age, corresponding to the level of de-materialisation of the substratum of information. Everybody knows that nano and micro are terms that are offered to explain the disappearance of the perceivable into the hyperreal. Ultimately, there is no matter corresponding to the form that digital information takes; the silicon-aluminium circuitry of a computer or a digital disc (CD, DVD etc.) becomes so cheap to manufacture that data itself becomes virtually free (pun intended). A term such as “hyperspace” is not mere metaphor: it is mathematically accurate, corresponding to the new Dasein of virtual space-time. Like all liberation movements, a counter-current in such a system must both embrace the environment at its disposal and to establish a “sub-Dasein” of independent statute. There are various ways to do this – and indeed the only way a semiotician can understand the challenge particular to artists of the digital age is by searching for these surprising signs of cool, implosive acts of self-constitution. These signs one must meet as signs of the liberation of the power of art from the ilk of crass mediocrity – because all artistic mediocrity is precisely the mediocracy of uncritically mediated media-noise. True artistry becomes the “massage” that McLuhan envisioned; a composite bath of freely interacting signifiers. Far from being a signifier devoid of its object, a sign in such a world becomes the signified of its own making, in a being-in-time (Dasein) proper to it, and to it alone.

Says Sean Booth: “[Our music is] quite claustrophobic, and I think it is to do with the amount that we're exposing people to one particular point.”

I propose that artists such as Autechre have turned the available signifiers against themselves, as a strategy of liberation – and what is art ever but the art of liberation?

Autechre quotes:

[SB=Sean Booth; RB=Rob Brown]

In this section I have gathered relevant quotes in which Booth and Brown themselves can help to elucidate the connection between electronics, wave forms, the internet, hyperspace, musical architecture and signification:

[all the emphasis in what follows is mine]

1) SB: “I'm quite into the idea of engineering being beautiful.”

2) SB: “I don't feel that any of our stuff is particularly serious-- maybe it's just that a lot of serious people are into it.”

3) SB/RB: “Every record is an asymptotic approach to something-- there isn't a perfect Autechre record, just a series of tangential curves towards and away from the same point.”

4) SB: “I think we have a natural ability to recognise harmony and I think this exists as much within an engineering context as it does within music. Working in a studio is really no different than building a bridge from metal girders, isn't it? Constructing harmony from a load of predefined frequencies is essentially no different. To me it's all construction, building.”

5) SB: "Working in the digital domain you're using approximations of things; the actual sound wave never enters the equation. You deal with sections of it, and you're able to do so much more by just reducing the information to a finite amount. You're able to perform really complex mathematics.”

6) SB: “I don't think that digital storage is necessarily a good thing, but I definitely think that digital manipulation is interesting.”

7) SB: ”You're bringing everything up into the conscious at the same time as you're exploring other areas of your unconscious”

8) SB: “America's a bit of weird place. I mean, it's simultaneously many different places and the same place.”

9) SB: “That's the best thing about the internet: you can go directly to things, whilst still be connected everything else if you want to be. It's getting close to being the perfect literal communications medium, but as we've seen before, it gets clogged with shit after a bit.”

10) RB: "You can go too far, but then that's for you to decide. We've found ourselves thinking at times that we might have gone too far. But we've always been in our own space -- it's hard for us to imagine where that datum or line of reference lies."

11) RB: “Some classical musician probably thinks, god what a racket – and then other people say, “Oh that’s totally Wagnerian.” It’s got us where we are now and we’re comfortable with the fact that sometimes we don’t know anything, and sometimes we’re exploring areas where other people won’t go because it doesn’t fit black and white textbook stuff.”

12) SB: “All the best tracks that we hear are the sort of tracks that tweak you, by almost distracting you when you're listening to a part of it, and then something happens and you're forced to move around within the track.”

13) SB: “[Y]ou can have your entire track changing piece by piece as it rotates, and that's what we're into. We like things like a puzzle where it's revealing itself and changing. And you can almost follow it, because it works the same pace as your brain works. The trick is not to get it to work faster or slower, but to get it in tune with yourself.”

Cited interviews:

http://www.maxmsp.ru/files/fizzarum/ae/ae_review4.htm

http://www.disquiet.com/autechre.html

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/interviews/a/autechre-05/

http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~reynolda/music_ae_092801.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/collective/A3895806

http://www.thewire.co.uk/archive/interviews/autechre.html