Confield

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Confield

Confield.jpg

Artist Autechre
Released 30 April 2001
Label Warp Records (WARP128)
Peel Session 2
(2000) 		Confield Gantz Graf
(2002)

Confield is the sixth studio album by Autechre released on Warp Records. It was originally released on April 30th, 2001[1][2], then later repressed on vinyl in 2023, alongside Draft 7.30.[3][4]

History

In the Sound On Sound Interview, April 2004, Autechre gave some context to the development of Confield, specifically noting the increased use of Max first in live sets and then in studio experiments "that weren't really applicable in a club environment" lead to what would become Confield.[5] Much of Confield was recorded in real-time as they manipulated the parameters.[6][7] However, Autechre has pushed back on the narrative that Confield was a purely 'generative' Max record.[8] In the same Sound On Sound interview, Sean expressed discomfort with how generative was taken to mean random when the material was based on heavily controlled set of rules alongside other analogue sequencers and drum machines for complex sequencing.[6] Rob noted that roughly 10% of Confield was properly generative,[9] and in an Interview with SB for Reverb Magazine, January 2008, Sean further clarified that only 3 tracks on Confield even used Max for sequencing.[10] Confield was instead mostly composed in Logic Pro.[11] The material shown on Confield was developed over 18 months.[12]

The record has gained a status as one of their most difficult records, however Sean felt that "it's like pop music compared to some of the stuff we had considered putting out!"[6] and that the record was "another album" similar to Chiastic Slide rather than a huge leap forward.[13]

Cover

For the promotion cycle of Confield, a page was posted by Warp on April 3rd, 2001, titled "Autechre: Confileid".[14] On the page, it featured an animated video of multiple 3D planes being scattered. The animation and covers were made by Autechre themselves.[15] Multiple frames of the animation went on to be used in the design of Confield, including for both the cover of the CD issues[16] - seen in the thumbnail of the article - and the vinyl issues.[17]

When Confield and Draft 7.30 was reissued in 2023, Warp put out a promotional video for Confield featuring the same animation but in higher quality. They also put out a series of shorts of album tracks played over animations; both of the original for Sim Gishel and Lentic Catachresis, as well as different versions including a fountain-like eruption for VI Scose Poise, Cfern, Pen Expers; a side downpour for Bine and Eidetic Casein; and a top-down view for Parhelic Triangle and Uviol.

A high quality frame from the animation was also used as a Twitch image for au7echre.

Tracks

VI Scose Poise

  • Sean mentioned that "VI Scose Poise" was made with a custom sequencer in Max that would just run on its own.[18]
  • A gamelan instrument (either a jegog or junlag) was used on the track. [19][20]
  • On the warprecords site on March 1st, 2001, they put out a visualiser titled "VI Code Spoilse", which may be the original title of the track.[21]

Cfern

Pen Expers

Sim Gishel

  • "Sim Gishel" only used some algorithmic elements.[22]

Parhelic Triangle

  • Sean noted that "Parhelic Triangle" didn't rely on any generative/algorithmic elements at all.[22]
  • In the July Twitch AMA, Sean explained that the process behind "Parhelic Triangle". He first recorded himself playing a reyong (a type of gamelan instrument) which was then taken into Logic. The "couple of MIDI parts laid over the top" of the track were detuned to 9 EDO to be in key with the reyong. The loose pulse of the track is due to the reyong being played somewhat irregularly by Sean and him having to manually time it up in Logic before overlaying the percussion to it. The percussion was assembled from "rubber bands in a shoebox sampled on an Emu E-synth". [23] Sean also noted on Mastodon that the timings were tapped in.[19]

Bine

Eidetic Casein

Uviol

  • A 16-minute version of "Uviol" was played during the 2008-02-23 Webcast. In the WATMM Ask Autechre Anything, Sean mentioned that the longer versions are often parts of the real-time jams without as much editing. [24]
  • "Uviol" was one of the tracks to use a lot of Max sequencing. [22] Sean clarified that it was specifically one with a ton of parameters that they manipulated in real time.[25]

Lentic Catachresis

MCR Quarter

  • The title is likely a play on Envane's "Quarter" naming aesthetic, and MCR likely is just short for Manchester.
  • As listed on the Japanese CD issue, "MCR Quarter" was recorded in 1998 at Manchester's Band On The Wall, however it reappeared (possibly just replayed the bootleg recording) at Warp's 10th Anniversary event on November, 5 1999.

Tracklist

# Title Length
1 VI Scose Poise 6:57
2 Cfern 6:41
3 Pen Expers 7:08
4 Sim Gishel 7:15
5 Parhelic Triangle 6:04
6 Bine 4:41
7 Eidetic Casein 6:12
8 Uviol 8:35
9 Lentic Catachresis 8:30
1:02:03
10 MCR Quarter (Recorded Live At Band On The Wall, Manchester 1998) [Japanese CD exclusive] 11:03
Total 1:13:06

Trivia

  • The CAT number, WARP128, was likely specifically requested by Autechre. 128 is the seventh power of 2.
  • Confield was originally titled "L.E.D." on a promotional CDr, distributed by Source 360°

Links

Credits

References

  1. ↑ https://bleep.com/release/23107-autechre-confield
  2. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20040102053922/http://www.warprecords.com/artists/news.php?offset=0&ti_id=241&filter=ae
  3. ↑ https://twitter.com/WarpRecords/status/1622631137762746368
  4. ↑ https://twitter.com/WarpRecords/status/1629134504320200704
  5. ↑ Sound On Sound Interview, April 2004. ""When I first encountered Max, I thought it was totally head-exploding," recalls Booth. "We came up with some pretty interesting stuff as soon as we got it. It was almost exactly what we needed. We initially got it for making MIDI applications, and it was a way for us to make sequences in which we could manipulate and generate data on the fly. We could do any combination of things. For instance, if we wanted to have a snare sound late, and the bass note as well, we could have the tracks sync'ed and variables sent across. Before then we had to do this manually, but with Max we could connect things in a very literal way. This made it a lot easier to work with drum machines. You could now jam with them during a live set, and get a pattern to slide the timing. We began using Max for live work, and then ended up using it in the studio. Most of Confield came out of experiments with Max that weren't really applicable in a club environment.""
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Sound On Sound Interview, April 2004. ""There's a lot of maths and generated beats on Confield, but we never considered that album very difficult," asserts Booth. "It's like pop music compared to some of the stuff we had considered putting out! And even when the beats sound like they are moving around in time and space, they're not random. They're based on sets of rules and we have a good handle on them. [...] "When we do generative stuff we work with real-time manipulation of MIDI faders that determines what the rhythms sound like. A sequencer is spitting out stuff and we're using our ears and the faders to make the music. There's no event generation taking place other than within the system we've designed. Sometimes we'll stripe a whole load of stuff down as MIDI data, because there may be a couple of things we want to change. We generate these beats in Max and with home-made sequencers. And there are models of analogue sequencers in the computer that are doing manipulation like gating and compressing some of the beats. "On Confield we also used analogue sequencers and drum machines, because you can do a lot with restarting patterns. You can hack things and maybe use a control volume to determine what step the drum machine is playing from. Perhaps you send that control volume from an analogue sequencer, so the drum machine is skipping around. And then you get another analogue sequencer to drive that analogue sequencer with a different timing."
  7. ↑ Sean Booth Interview taken by Peter Hollo, March 2005. "A lot of the tracks on Confield are like that – they’re basically made in real-time using sequencers where we’d spent a lot of time making this thing that would generate music according to a few set parameters, and then we’d mess around with the parameters in order to make the music later, when we were in a different frame of mind."
  8. ↑ Q1541, WATMM Ask Autechre Anything, November 2013
  9. ↑ Q1194, WATMM Ask Autechre Anything, November 2013
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Interview with SB for Reverb Magazine, January 2008. "But looking back to the likes of Confield, where you were well documented as being users of generative software like Max/MSP.. ...Well, there was only 3 tracks on Confield that had Max sequencing. It’s ironic, I mean Pen Expers was made using a minidisk, like by pausing a DMX drum machine, I could go through the whole album and be really boring. But there’s only 3 tracks on there that are really generative really."
  11. ↑ https://www.reddit.com/r/autechre/comments/9of3dv/autechres_tsugi_interview_translated/
  12. ↑ "ALL Ae Q/A from Warp Records". https://web.archive.org/web/20031024135223/http://www.autechre.nu/cgi-bin/newspro/news.cgi?newsid1018136565,21609,#:~:text=it%20spans%20about%2018%20months..%20it%27s%20a%20selection.. Archived from the original on 24 October 2003.
  13. ↑ Q795, WATMM Ask Autechre Anything, November 2013
  14. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20030507103110fw_/http://www.warprecords.com/news/?offset=220&ti_id=346
  15. ↑ Q21, WATMM Ask Autechre Anything, November 2013
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 https://www.discogs.com/master/1374-Autechre-Confield
  17. ↑ https://www.discogs.com/release/8434-Autechre-Confield
  18. ↑ Sean Booth Interview taken by Peter Hollo, March 2005. "‘The generative stuff – some of it’s process-based; a track like ‘VI Scose Poise’, for example, is completely process-based. That was a process made in Max [a program for creating sound-generating and -processing objects from the ground up] as a kind of sequencer, spitting out MIDI data. It was built just to run. It had various counters that would instigate various changes in the way the patch. We’d hit “Start” and listen to it, and if it did something wrong we’d change whatever variable it was that was making it go wrong, then run the process again. This was completely hands-off."
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 https://web.archive.org/web/20240609014251/https://post.lurk.org/@sean_ae/112581799023952175
  20. ↑ Sean Twitch AMA, July 2022. "Right, so there's a gamelan in Parhelic Triangle. Where did you get it? Bali. I always suspected you borrowed the one Tom Jenkinson brought back from Asia which he used in Gong Acid. Yeah, it's funny that because when I went there, he was about to go there and he was really weirded out. So we actually got, ‘cause I bought like quite a lot of gamelan stuff when I was over there, because it's cheap basically, and they'll export it for you and everything, so as long as you're willing to wait for the shipping. It's really cheap to get it. And they’ll, you can just get them to custom build you it basically. So I've done that and so yeah, it's around the same time but I think we went to different places. I'm not sure if we've gotten built in the same place. But yeah, I gave them away to the Suffolk Schools gamelan when me and Chantal split up, which is like 2005, so I haven't had them since then, but I had them all the time I was living in Suffolk. So I've got, basically bought them in ‘99. Got them shipped to Sheffield and they sat in boxes for ages, and then the lads who were storing them in the studio, which was a studio in Sheffield. A lad called Dave Willie, don't know if he's Wilkinson or Williamson, but he's a lad who lived in Sheffield and they'd opened them up. Him and this other lad, Ross, who were working on stuff, and they used them a bit, I think. And then so, and then I took them to Suffolk and I had them from about 2000 to just before, like late ‘99 to 2005. So yeah, I had them and I had them downstairs and so we had a studio, it was in like a barn, and then downstairs in the barn, I just had all the gongs laid out, like a whole room full of them. But I only used them on a few tracks. I used them on VI Scose Poise and Parhelic Triangle, that we've released and there's a few probably unreleased ones as well, so."
  21. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20030507103630fw_/http://www.warprecords.com/news/?offset=220&ti_id=162
  22. ↑ 22.0 22.1 22.2 Q1193, WATMM Ask Autechre Anything, November 2013
  23. ↑ "How the hell were the sounds on Parhelic Triangle made? You also said it wasn't generative. Yeah, I know, I'm. Yeah so, like the main kind of gong pattern is, oh what's it called now? Is it a reyong? I can't remember what it's called. It's like a gamelan instrument. There's like a row of like little pots. Metal on suspended. So that was played live and then the percussion track, so that, I took that and then put that in Logic and then the percussion track was done with samples of, yeah, like rubber bands in a shoebox sampled on an Emu E-synth and sort of, using the filters in that a bit. And that was programmed, so what I had to do in Logic, rather than like, because I didn't, there's no flex time or anything then so, I just basically timed up the project to the live gong playing because I weren’t playing to a click or anything. So I didn't have any, so it was drifting, the timing basically. So I had to time up the Logic project to the gong track, and then I'd made the percussion stuff over the top of that. So it was kind of the time, that's why the timing slips around because it's just my shit playing of the gongs to begin with that dictated the timing on the track. So yeah, and then there was a few of a couple of MIDI parts laid over the top, but I had to detune them a bit because the gongs were a bit, well they're weirdly tuned, aren't they? So, sort of, I think it was like 9 EDO or something. Yeah, I can't remember now."
  24. ↑ Q289, WATMM Ask Autechre Anything, November 2013
  25. ↑ Sean Booth Interview taken by Peter Hollo, March 2005. "‘Then a track like ‘Uviol’ was made using a sequencer we’d built that changed what it was generating according to parameters we set with faders, so we’d spend a lot of time building it very soberly, and then we’d spend a lot of time very un-soberly playing it."
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