Autechre NTS Sessions 1-4 Listening Diary
Even in our age of distracted listening and an overabundance of inbound music, among so much other readily available culture, an eight-hour box set is a thing apart. You don’t listen, not in the traditional sense of listening, to something like Autechre’s recent NTS Sessions 1-4 releases, comprising eight hours of music over four sets — not so much as you immerse yourself in them. The music may sound fully and purposefully artificial in its distraught scifi effluences, but the experience is no less environmental in its encompassing qualities. It may be proudly unnatural, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t vibrant and alive.
As it turns out, in our age of 360-degree, 24/7 culture, the most singular sonic object may be something that itself aspires to filling our senses past their periphery. This is why NTS Sessions is best appreciated alongside other recent cultural monoliths, like Stephan Mathieu’s Radiance (764 minutes over 12 CDs), Brian Eno’s Music for Installations (6 CDs), and such Important Records collections as the Harry Bertoia Sonambient omnibus (11 CDs), as well as performance corollaries like Max Richter’s night-long Sleep concerts (also available as a box set with 8 CDs and a bonus Blu-ray disc) and the “endless” generative music iOS apps of Peter Chilvers. Fight fire with fire, and overload with overload.
It’s worth noting that all these works, including the Autechre box, are abstract. They are slippery forms of sonic culture, lacking easily identifiable form. Even in brief excerpts, the music evades recollection. Extended over hours, they are in some ways only knowable while they are playing. Hit pause, or stop, and they tend to evaporate.
NTS Sessions isn’t even Autechre’s first monolith. The box is an hour longer than the AE_LIVE series that Autechre uploaded back in 2015, and twice the length of the 2016 elseq series. When elseq came out, I tried to wrestle with it. I started a “listening diary,” but only managed two detailed reflections before getting hooked on a single track, “TBM2,” which I listened to for days and then weeks. I only recently stumbled on words I’d written about “TBM2” (it felt a bit like finding discarded field notes in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach novels). Today, while listening to NTS Sessions, I tidied up those scribbles and belatedly appended my “TBM2” thoughts to the elseq diary.
Now I’m giving the listening diary another run, this time focused on Autechre’s most recent monolith, which is likely not their last. The following document is a work-in-progress, charting my path through and around NTS Sessions 1-4. And while it slowly accumulates, if you’re interested here’s my 1997 interview with the duo: “More Songs About Buildings.”
Track:1:1 “t1q1” (18:39)
[2018.08.27] The album begins like there is a bombing raid in progress, a full minute of overhead onslaught, muffled a bit by thin walls before the rubbery percussion and droid chatter come to formulate a rhythm. The thing chugs along at barely 70bpm. That pace and the track’s length, nearly 19 minutes, signals we’re in, as listeners, for an extended haul. Reserve your energy. The track provides the long and the short: expansive by contemporary electronic music standards, a drop in the ocean by those of this four-session collection.
Track:1:2 “bqbqbq” (11:15)
[2018.08.27] There was a moment, somewhere around the album Confield (2001), maybe as early as LP5 (1998), where for me Autechre went from swamp murk to dry, high land. Whatever boggy fumes had filled the voids in their earlier work gave way to a pristine, brittle present. That’s when my listening to them began to decline. This track, “bqbqbq,” captures that hyperdigital nature, and renders it as something almost light, a bit of melody repeated over and over, slowly adjusted. Where the opening track was an assault, this one is a respite, albeit an 11-minute respite. (When it comes to monolith music, all things are relative.) If the first track on NTS Sessions suggested the destination is way over the horizon, this one makes the journey seem doable.
