Autechre Haters

[luka]

Leo got very pissed off with Barty recently for his inability to grasp that dance move, the beyond the street transcendence it is based around.

I thought at the time that this is an interesting tension and worth exploring. Leo has the house music utopia on his horizon and balked at Bartys contention that gang culture is synonymous with cool. A hyper masculine, pleasure fearing, ego driven, rigid world of violence and status with no room for surrender, swooning bliss, ego loss, women, sex or the gays. How can this be cool? Asked Leo. It's the very opposite of cool. It's the least cool thing that can be imagined. It's hopelessly retrograde. It's a toxic cesspool of the marginalised and left behind. The victims of history killing one another off. A heteronormative, toxic dead end.

 

[version]

Is barty in any gangs other than Dissensus?

 

[chava]

I thought at the time that this is an interesting tension and worth exploring. Leo has the house music utopia on his horizon and balked at Bartys contention that gang culture is synonymous with cool. A hyper masculine, pleasure fearing, ego driven, rigid world of violence and status with no room for surrender, swooning bliss, ego loss, women, sex or the gays. How can this be cool? Asked Leo. It's the very opposite of cool. It's the least cool thing that can be imagined. It's hopelessly retrograde. It's a toxic cesspool of the marginalised and left behind. The victims of history killing one another off. A heteronormative, toxic dead end.

Rock is the voice of The Ego/Individual.

HipHop is the voice of the masculine street gang.

Dance/Rave is the voice of what exactly? The collective? The unconscious? The collective unconscious? Nature itself?

 

[version]

God.

 

[luka]

God as the collective unconscious!

 

[luka]

If I could get Barty to read (I can't) I'd lend him more brilliant than the sun. See what he made of the argument.

 

[luka]

 

[DannyL]

I would say dance music is meant to represent the collective for sure. But Autechre aren't that though they do have an absence of signifiers that one might associate with the collective (think this was covered at the beginning of the thread).

What are Autechre the voice of? Wire Magazine?

 

[DannyL]

Dance/Rave is the voice of what exactly? The collective? The unconscious? The collective unconscious? Nature itself?

The faceless, raving crowd and its desire for screaming, hands-in-the-air epiphany.

 

[luka]

Autechre is the bedroom headphone listener lost in sound. The stoner shut-in.

 

[luka]

Barty says at the beginning of this thread autechre is for "beta males" "Incels" "people with failed impotent inwardly collapsing fathers" "people with itchy skin conditions" "the repressed" "the asexual" "the socially maladept"

Corpsey said it is music for autistics.

 

[luka]

the 90's is really a year zero for the new white psychology. craner had that brilliant thing about the 90's ushering the first bnp councillors, morrissey waving the union jack, brit pop. you have fight club and autecher too.

'straight out of compton' was presumably the anticedent to all this. that was the point cool whiteness became untenable.

This is a good illustration of Barty excising dance music from history entirely. It's a vision of history in which the second summer of love never happened. No raves. No acid house. No hardcore. No ecstasy. Just NWA of all things.

 

[luka]

A vision of history in which NWA is somehow more culturally siginicant than the rave scene. Totally weird. Basically insane.

 

[luka]

Plus this weird fixation on race. Whites are this, whites are that. Well weird. Pathological. Obsessed with race.

 

[luka]

So these are some interesting threads to tease out.

 

[sadmanbarty]

me and nina power are launching a kickstarter to take luke to court for defamation of character.

 

[luka]

Setting today's agenda

 

[CrowleyHead]

I have vague memories of Woebot getting upset once because Autechre said they listened to Stockhausen and didn't think it was all that, started going in on their "anti-intellectual posturing" with their always appearing in streetwear in promo photos. The irony being here, the thread mostly going in on their nerdy intellectualism. There's maybe something there about how they could be guilty of both these things, I dunno.

I do appreciate that whenever they do those essential 6 hour DJ Mixes that the electronic music community loses their mind over, there'll be an old Public Enemy tune or Rakim's "Lyrics of Fury" and it sounds way better than everything else, but inevitably more than a few of their fans think they're taking the piss. As if they don't y'know, talk about trying to be breakdancers as kids.

Maybe that's part of it.

 

[sadmanbarty]

crolwey's breadth of knowledge is breathtaking.

how the fuck does he know so much about autecher (a band he's seemingly not even that interested in)?

 

[CrowleyHead]

Because I recognize everything I like might secretly be bad and everything I detest has strengths and points of attraction. A friend joked "Your whole thing can be boiled down to 'There's something good, and it's actually good, and I think it's good.... but. What if it was AcTUALLY BAD!'." and he was making fun of me for y'know , thinking I don't enjoy The Fall or some shit. But he wasn't off.

I know a ton about Joy Division. Fucking hate that band. Likewise I've surrounded myself with Autechre nerds and experts and by osmosis picked up a bunch about them but never can enjoy them outside of the abstract.