Quaristice

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Quaristice

Quaristice.jpg

Artist Autechre
Released 3 March 2008
Label Warp Records (WARP333)
Untilted
(2005) 		Quaristice Digital Exclusives EP
(2008)

Quaristice is the ninth studio album by Autechre released on Warp Records. It was originally released on March 3rd, 2008.[1] Alongside the release of Quaristice was the limited edition Quaristice (Versions), followed a few months later by Digital Exclusives EP and Quaristice.Quadrange.ep.ae.

History

Around 2005, Sean moved to Manchester, which meant Sean had no studio set up and thus both him and Rob (in London at the time)[2] couldn't make music in the traditional sense.[3] Around the same time, they were performing a lot of shows during the Untilted Tour for money.[4] The outcome was thus that a majority of the material that would later become Quaristice were instead the product of hundreds of jams done on their live equipment rather than the heavily sequenced music of Draft 7.30 and Untilted.[5][6][7]

Much of it was done using their live setup which at the time consisted of "Apple Mac G4, Elektron Machinedrum and Monomachine, Clavia Nord Modular G2 and Nord Rack, Yamaha FS1R, Akai MPC1000, Alesis QuadraVerb and Lexicon PCM 80 and 90",[2] a majority of which were equipment carried over from Untilted.[8] The process consisted of months recording "two hour-long jams a day".[9]

After much of live jams were done, they realised they had too much material and spent the last six months before the delivery date editing down all the jams.[10][9] Sean noted in FutureMusic that there was a four month period of "just pure listening through and editing."[11] The mixes were first edited down to 6-8 minutes, then edited down even further, before creating the finalised edits in MOTU Digital Performer.[9]

Design

Quaristice was the first new artwork commission by The Designers Republic since Chiastic Slide.[12] Quaristice and Quaristice.Quadrange.ep.ae also marked the first time Autechre had covers made for individual tracks. Other releases to also have individual track art include Oversteps and elseq 1-5.

Regarding the visual style, Ian Anderson wrote: "The design began inspired by Norton Disk Tools’ disk defragmentation graphic, building blocks around the stretched and jittery text, pulled in and out of space and time. Ultimately, the boxes became surplus to requirement and the text became the design itself. The squares have no real meaning other than to suggest no meaning at all — and the colour references early consumer technology user guides, where the text was prescriptive rather than enabling. The experience is uncomfortable, dense and claustrophobic."[12]

Tracks

Altibzz

  • The title possibly comes from Audioease's Altiverb.

The Plc

  • The vocal samples on the outro of "The Plc" are from Run-DMC's "Here We Go (Live at the Funhouse)" [13]

IO

  • As demonstrated by Landon Lechner, the main melodic line alternates between two whole-tone scale lines, one ascending and one descending. When viewed in piano roll, it forms an X. [14]
  • A few of the lyrics in "IO" appear to be quotations of Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time"[15], however Sean has no memory of this being used.[16]
  • "IO" appeared during the 2005-2007 live sets. (example) and 2008 live sets. (example).

plyPhon

  • "plyPhon" was made by Rob on the MPC.[17]

Perlence

  • For "Perlence", the MPC bits were done by Rob and the Machinedrum/Monomachine bits were done by Sean. [18][19]
  • The snare sound in "Perlence" is the TRX Clap.[20]

SonDEremawe

Simmm

paralel Suns

  • Sean mentioned that "paralel Suns" was made by first recording a Nord Lead 1 through Lexicon reverb, which was then edited down in Digital Performer by having the "slabs" crossfade into each other to get the final track. [21]

Steels

  • Elements of "Steels" made an appearance in the 2008 live sets. (example)
  • In the Quaristice tour file dump, the MPC had a bunch of samples of sounds used in "Steels"; 64 samples of steeldif ("steeldif01.WAV" to "steeldif64.WAV") and 37 samples of steelxif ("steelxif01.WAV" to "steelxid37.WAV").

Tankakern

  • The TR-606 appears on "Tankakern" [22]
  • The main samples on Tankakern are of an old oil tank (likely the origin of the title) alongside birdsong that was recorded in that same garden. Sean also mentioned that the samples for Tankakern were also used for the Skeng mix, Gescom's "Tangle Ill", and some other miscellaneous track [23]

rale

  • "rale" was made by Sean with his laptop using Renoise.[4][24]

Fol3

  • "Fol3" initially started in Max, compiling various sound sources, before getting cut up in Renoise on Sean's laptop.[4][24]

fwzE

90101-5l-l

  • Elements of "90101-5l-l" appear in the 2008 live sets. (example)
  • On some promotional copies, the track was labelled "90101-51-1".[25]

bnc Castl

Theswere

WNSN

  • "WNSN" was made by Sean with his laptop using Renoise.[4][24]
  • "WNSN" contains field recordings of rain buried deep within the mix.

chenc9

Notwo

Outh9X

  • "Outh9X" uses the NMG2 and Simmons SDE.[27]

nu-Nr6d

  • On the Japanese issue of Quaristice, the cover was altered to include the Japanese bonus track "nu-Nr6d" as part of the design.[28]

Quaristice (Versions)

Quaristice (Versions)

Quaristice Versions.jpg

Artist Autechre
Released 3 March 2008
Label Warp Records (WarpCD333X)

Quaristice (Versions)

Coinciding with the March 3rd release, a steel case edition of the Quaristice CD was released. It was limited to 1,000 copies and was sold out within a day after the announcement. In the limited edition CD set, a second disc is included, titled Quaristice (Versions), which consists of alternate and extended versions of certain tracks.

Altichyre

The PlclCpC

IO (mons)

Phylopn

Perlence range3

SonDEre-ix

Tankraken

fol4

  • "fol4" was first made in Max before being cut up in Renoise, similar to "Fol3" [4][24]

90101-61-01

chenc9-x

nofour

Tracklist

# Title Length
1 Altibzz 2:52
2 The Plc 4:17
3 IO 3:08
4 plyPhon 2:33
5 Perlence 3:25
6 SonDEremawe 1:21
7 Simmm 5:00
8 paralel Suns 3:03
9 Steels 2:56
10 Tankakern 3:39
11 rale 3:43
12 Fol3 3:47
13 fwzE 2:39
14 90101-5l-l 3:11
15 bnc Castl 2:52
16 Theswere 2:12
17 WNSN 4:57
18 chenc9 4:57
19 Notwo 5:34
20 Outh9X 7:15
1:13:22
21 nu-Nr6d (Japanese CD exclusive) 3:51
1:17:13
Quaristice (Versions)
1 Altichyre 1:43
2 The PlclCpC 9:18
3 IO (mons) 7:52
4 Phylopn 2:40
5 Perlence range3 7:37
6 SonDEre-ix 3:27
7 Tankraken 5:28
8 fol4 11:41
9 90101-61-01 5:10
10 chenc9-x 8:29
11 nofour 4:24
1:07:55
Total 2:25:09

Trivia

  • The CAT number, WARP333, was likely specifically requested by Autechre.
  • At the time of release, Quaristice had the most tracks for a singe Autechre album, totally at 20 tracks (excluding the bonus track on the Japanese CD). It would eventually be beaten by elseq 1-5, which had 21 tracks.
  • On Hanalgig, a 2007 demo from the Quaristice sessions was leaked.

Gallery

  • Altibzz

    Altibzz

  • The Plc

    The Plc

  • IO

    IO

  • plyPhon

    plyPhon

  • Perlence

    Perlence

  • SonDEremawe

    SonDEremawe

  • Simmm

    Simmm

  • paralel Suns

    paralel Suns

  • Steels

    Steels

  • Tankakern

    Tankakern

  • rale

    rale

  • Fol3

    Fol3

  • fwzE

    fwzE

  • 90101-5l-l

    90101-5l-l

  • bnc Castl

    bnc Castl

  • Theswere

    Theswere

  • WNSN

    WNSN

  • chenc9

    chenc9

  • Notwo

    Notwo

  • Outh9X

    Outh9X

Links

Credits

References

  1. ↑ https://bleep.com/release/9230-autechre-quaristice
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Easy to be Hard, April 2008. "Autechre's latest release, Quaristice (Warp, 2008), is more fuzzy and emotional than you might expect. Working on practically identical rigs in separate cities (Booth, Manchester; Brown, London), Autechre pursued conventional recording methods for past efforts like Confield (Warp, 2001) and Untilted (Warp, 2005), but Quaristice is the result of the duo's live improvisations, recorded largely on its touring setup: Apple Mac G4, Elektron Machinedrum and Monomachine, Clavia Nord Modular G2 and Nord Rack, Yamaha FS1R, Akai MPC1000, Alesis QuadraVerb and Lexicon PCM 80 and 90."
  3. ↑ FutureMusic Interview, 2008. "Even by your own high standards, some of the frequencies employed on Quaristice go further than you've gone before. Was that a conscious decision? Sean Booth: "This album sort of happened by chance really. I moved up to Manchester in 2005 and for about six months we were messing around with ideas and half doing tracks. We had to rewrite stuff for the live set but we thought 'before we do that we'll put down the stuff we've already got in the kit.' Soo we had a lot of the live set running in the studio and were putting down some long jam versions of the tracks, which we'd then cut down into much shorter tracks. So it just happened like that. Rather than us consciously thinking we'd do a load of live tracks it was more like we'd been doing it and having fun doing them, and the tunes were coming out so quickly because we were so used to working with the interface." Rob Brown: "I was just gonna say that it was quicker because of the hardware. When Sean was moving house I could’ve been in a state of limbo but I'd built a studio at mine and I'd been using the equipment from our live setup and stuff was just coming out — deeper stuff than you'd usually get from an afternoon’s work. You can spend three weeks working on something and end up with it sounding really staid compared to the original idea, but this stuff was coming out queasy, really weird and nice.""
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 Sean Twitch AMA, July 2022. "Is there a major shift in your methodology around the transition from Untilted to Quaristice? What was going on behind the scenes? Yeah, I mean, fuck, you know a lot of stuff for me. I mean my dad died in 2004, so that was a blow and that sent me off on a weird spiral of not knowing where the fuck I was or who I was, and then a lot of stuff that my family had kept from me came out, and then we toured and then, I'm not gonna talk about any of that stuff, so don't ask. And then me and Chantal [Passamonte, fka Mira Calix] split up [in] 2005 and then I moved to Manchester and I hardly had a studio for ages because we were just doing gigs for money. So for about three years, I didn't really have a studio. I just had kind of a live setup on a desk in a room and my speakers and a mixer and I was building a studio up slowly while we were doing that. So Quaristice is the sort of sound of me putting the studio back together, plus a few tracks that I did on my laptop in Renoise, sort of mixed in there. So like, Fol3, fol4, WNSN, rale, they’re all Renoise tracks. And then there's a bunch of like, Rob’s MPC things, you know, Rob was doing like MPC tracks and then yeah, I don't know like, that was a good fit, so yeah. I don't know, like a bit of a mixed bag really, of things happening, you know what I mean? But I was enjoying being in Manchester in my new space and feeling quite free and liberated and not really wanting to work with DAWs because I felt like I'd reached a bit of a ceiling with them and I didn't really want to go much further into it. I started getting a bit bored with timeline sequencing. Starting just wanting to do things in the room and have a bit more of a live vibe to them, which was a bit more like a return to roots, which is the kind of thing you do when you just split up with your wife that you've been with for ten years, you know I mean? So in a lot of ways, I was returning to my roots, really, you know, going back up to Manchester and then doing all that. I hope that offers some understandable context for that."
  5. ↑ We control the dice, 2008. "With their new album Quaristice, however, Autechre have traded scrupulous construction for spontaneity, looseness and improvisation. Since the turn of millennium, a gap existed between their ever more experimental album releases and their (slightly) more straightforward live sets, in which their uncanny rapport reaches its fullest expression. The new album draws heavily on this live methodology. "We were putting live tracks down in the studio, messing them up, making them into versions, which eventually became new tracks," explains Booth. "We put down loads of hour-long jams of bits of the live set that we were going to edit later. But we found ourselves just writing new tracks on the same set-up. We'd got to the point where we were fluid enough for stuff to just come out." Brown elaborates: "Anything that existed from the live set we'd already been changing for a year or more. We were totally adept at getting stuff from nowhere. So the new tracks are like ghosts of what we'd been doing live." Bearing in mind their famed meticulousness - by Booth's own account they are "incredibly anal and precise people" - it seems remarkable that they made the decision deliberately to limit the scope for tampering with the fine details of the tracks. "I wish it were that romantic, but basically we'd barely set our studio up after I'd moved to Manchester," admits Booth. "It was just convenience. We can't resist temptation; it's more that we've learned to remove it. Once you record something as audio, two channels, you're pretty much stuck with it. So we've learned to prevent ourselves from being able to do it.""
  6. ↑ Autechre: Dancers in the Dark, March 2008. ""Quaristice was all made from massive long jams,""
  7. ↑ We control the dice, 2008. 
  8. ↑ Easy to be Hard, April 2008. "“There are all sorts of limitations implied with algorithmic music based on the way the system functions that we wanted to get around,” Booth continues. “That is what the last two albums were about, really. We used almost the same hardware for Untilted as Quaristice, but in a nonreal-time way, where we programmed all the sequencers to run in quite complex ways, retriggering each other and receiving each other's outputs and inputs. That was press and play and leaving it for a while and adding slight bits of unpredictability. This one being live is a completely opposite path.”"
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 Easy to be Hard, April 2008. "“This album was made from really long live jam sessions,” Booth explains. “When I moved to Manchester in 2005, the first thing we did was set up a new studio with the live kit and record these really long jams. It turned out good, so we just kept doing it and writing new stuff with the same setup. Having that ability and so much drive capacity nowadays makes it easy to record everything. We did two hour-long jams a day. It took six months to edit it all down to six- or eight-minute tracks. Then we would reduce them again and again. We had a lot of different versions to choose from. We were also reusing bits of sequences from other tracks. Once we got them in a rough format, we used [MOTU] Digital Performer for all the editing.”"
  10. ↑ Autechre: Dancers in the Dark, March 2008. ""Six months before we had to deliver the album we realised we had too much and we were like, 'shit we'd better start editing now!'"
  11. ↑ FutureMusic Interview, 2008. "SB: "We did have about four months of just pure listening through and editing, but Digital Performer has all those new tools like Slide, where you can move the audio within the sections.""
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 https://www.thedesignersrepublic.com/quaristice
  13. ↑ https://www.whosampled.com/sample/126386/Autechre-The-Plc-Run-DMC-Here-We-Go-(Live-at-the-Funhouse)/
  14. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAZPhRLqpOs
  15. ↑ https://www.reddit.com/r/autechre/comments/1f86v4a/some_possibly_all_of_the_lyrics_of_io_are_from/
  16. ↑ https://imgur.com/a/sean-ae-mastodon-2024-09-05-io-stephen-hawking-sample-https-post-lurk-org-sean-ae-113084508782375421-CvQrfU0
  17. ↑ Sean Twitch AMA, June 2022. "No, plyPhon was, I think it was MPC. It's Rob’s, so you've got to ask him."
  18. ↑ Sean Twitch AMA, July 2022. "Some of the tracks that [Rob] did with [the MPC] like Perlence, I think are just fucking amazing."
  19. ↑ https://forum.watmm.com/topic/102698-twitch-ama/?do=findComment&comment=2923175
  20. ↑ Q28, WATMM Ask Autechre Anything, November 2013
  21. ↑ Sean Twitch AMA, July 2022. "paralel Suns is a Nord Lead 1 through a Lexicon reverb, and then slabs of that were then taken, and kind of edited and faded into each other, kind of thing. So I had loads of different notes in the DAW, which I think was DP at the time. And then I was doing loads of crossfading between all these different slabs. So yeah, it's a bit long process really to get the result, considering it's just a sort of short ambient thing. But it was, it gives it that weird wet but dry sound, so."
  22. ↑ FutureMusic Interview, 2008. "Is that the trusty old TR-606 Drumatix dusted down for an appearance on the track Tankakern? RB: "As with every album, a facet of the older stuff perhaps comes alive again."
  23. ↑ Sean Twitch AMA, June 2022. "do you use bird samples? i’m fairly certain theres some in tankakern and the… Yeah, that's true. There is, I think there is in Tankakern because Tankakern was an oil tank in the garden, or one of the sounds was. And yeah, there were birds in the garden. So I've used that old tank on a few things. It's on Tankakern but it's on the Skeng mix and a few things. Still got them samples. I think the first track we used them on was Tangle Ill?"
  24. ↑ 24.0 24.1 24.2 24.3 https://imgur.com/a/sean-ae-mastodon-2024-08-12-renoise-tracks-PLdJ5Wb
  25. ↑ https://www.discogs.com/release/9192508-Autechre-Quaristice/image/SW1hZ2U6MTEwMzE4MTU4
  26. ↑ Interview with SB for Reverb Magazine, January 2008. "Having had the pleasure of taking in your live set in Glasgow back in April ’05 (and being totally blown away), I wondered if any of the material released on Quaristice had featured in some guise or other in that Untilted tour…was sure I detected something familiar about chenc9 for example? Yeah, a couple of bits, there were a couple of bits here and there…yeah there’s one riff right at the end of chenc9 and the bass thing. It’s hard to remember now, we did so many versions and re-versions and odd mixes of a melody of this bit and melody off that bit, it all got really mushy."
  27. ↑ Q1004, WATMM Ask Autechre Anything, November 2013
  28. ↑ https://ia802202.us.archive.org/21/items/mbid-8bc65240-4c57-4f21-b49f-fb80f0bea5bb/mbid-8bc65240-4c57-4f21-b49f-fb80f0bea5bb-35945482710.jpg
  29. ↑ https://www.discogs.com/master/2472-Autechre-Quaristice
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