Rate this skittering collection

Rate This Day is (kinda) back!

What a crazy past few months. My other project at www.silenceincminor.co.uk is coming along nicely and while we gear up for our run of shows at the Edinburgh Fringe I thought I’d somehow resurrect the beast that is Rate This Day. The content of the site will change slightly and from here on in to plain ol’ music reviews. It’s always been about music for me and the decision was made after I realised that when not reviewing car parks, food or time, the majority of my serious articles were music reviews.

So from here on in it’s all about the tunes and the rock shows here at Rate This Day and to kick things off here’s a review of the new(ish) album from my favourite band, along with a lengthy introduction on the subject of DRM, piracy and my own rabid opinions on the state of modern music.

Rant This Day

I’ve been getting used to the three-year rhythm of Autechre releases. It works out as months of anticipation in the run-up to the inevitable album announcement at the end of the year with the March/April release window seguing nicely into a live tour that’s usually started before the release of the album, each time the UK shows generally falling around the same time frame as the album release itself. My experience this time round was no different until it was announced over the Warp (or it might have been Bleep, I can’t remember) mailing list that the album was to be made available for download on Bleep.com over a full month before the physical release, available as either high quality DRM-free mp3 or FLAC. At the same time a gorgeous special edition that featured a second disc was now available to pre-order.

I’ll be the first to admit as the fervent, long-standing Autechre fan, I jumped at the chance to hear the album in it’s entirety so early on. I diligently purchased the mp3 version at £7 and pre-ordered the £30 special edition having already purchased a £15 ticket for their London show at a car park in Hearn Street a few weeks previous. All in all I’ve spent £52 on the album experience, not just the album itself. I think this is perhaps important to bear in mind because by now Autechre for me have come to embody the perfect music experience when it comes to new music.

I have absolutely no problem in paying that sort of money for a whole experience and I really think there’s something here that says a great deal about the current situation of physical release versus… I don’t know, ethereal release? If the package is good enough, people will pay. The issue I find today is that with current CD prices it’s often the consumer that’s penalised for buying bad music. Downloading music free of charge is such a sticky issue because at the moment there isn’t a viable economic model for it. It’s a burgeoning industry that seems content to make up the rules and regulations as it goes along, slapping Machiavellian DRM on their product and denying consumers their right to enjoy their music in whatever way they see fit. You can’t blame the industry though for these knee-jerk responses to projected lost revenue. They see a down-turn in sales and want to stop the lil’ punks getting their stuff for free, so why not cripple them whatever way they can? Of course they’re going to do it, they’re in the business to make money one way or the other.

A recent controversy surrounding SecuROM technology, a piracy-prevention tool for PC games, has highlighted this. SecuROM works on a similar principle to Steam (a digital content distribution platform for PC games) in regards to anti-piracy measures. Steam works on the basis that you need a connection to the internet to validate the license key that’s bundled with the physical release or you can sign up, purchase and download the game all in the same program. Steam does need to be connected for you to play regardless of whether it’s an off-line single-player or a smack-talking session of twitchy gun play with foul-mouthed children in Counter Strike. Most people seem fine with this although it hasn’t always been plain sailing, the release of Half Life 2 was dogged with problems in product activation, all down to Steam (if memory serves). Recently however the news that Mass Effect for PC and notably Spore, the highly-anticipated new game from Will Wright, the genius behind Sim City, will feature SecuROM technology was met with higher than usual amounts of rage and bitterness from your friendly neighbourhood forum bods. The venom stemmed from the unspeakable notion that companies would somehow want to protect their IP and therefore not lose money. SecuROM requires that the game is activated over the Internet and subsequently checks in to a server somewhere every 10 days to maintain the validation. This is apparently to get round the idea that PC games are purchased and then immediately pirated, a constant polling of the SecuROM component would theoretically invalidate any copy of the game that fails this check. You can apparently still play the game offline but at some point you’d better make sure you get the sucker checked in otherwise the game is locked out. When pressed about the “10 days check-in” it was clarified that it is not a case of checking once on installation and then once ten days after that but checking every ten days. Oh noes!

The response to this news has been swift and characteristically bilious. But really, what would you do as a company? What long-term and mutually beneficial measure should they take that ensures everything is fine in the end and we can get back to picking flowers in the Sunshine Forest to sell at the Appledown Market and be home in time for milk and cookies? It’s never simple on either side and it’s a war that’s only being fought between the record labels cursed with accountants who see a hole in sales which they try to fill and cave-dwelling lesser human beings that don’t see the point in paying for anything (one particular comment that stuck with me was in response to Alan Moore’s disassociation from the V for Vendetta movie on artistic grounds as the creator. Some brazen idiot had the gall to say that Alan Moore shouldn’t complain about bad adaptations because as soon as writers, musicians, artists in general release a piece of work to the public domain it then becomes the property of the public, all creators of such work lose their rights upon release, but that’s a whole different article subject there). On the outskirts, but not necessarily in the minority, are the others who build up a record collection and still download music almost as a way to see if the CD is worth buying in the first place. Downloading and streaming content is very much a viable medium for broadcasting media, US television networks are starting to cotton on to this with such examples as Jon Stewart’s full eight-year run on The Daily Show being made available to watch online, all for free. There is a middle ground with this sort of thing and it’s up to the industry to find it, not the consumer. Ad-supported yet free TV downloads are on the horizon (I hope) and this could extend to films as well. Google seem to have done well with maintaining a “free is free” business model so it can happen. I’m certainly not advocating that we shouldn’t pay for anything at all and that everything should be free because there’s no such thing as true ownership in the hippy sense, that’s not how the world works. Musicians are still people who need to make money at the end of the day. That doesn’t mean that they’re cynically out to make money alone but that they simply need money to continue to pursue their art. It’s their job, their 9 to 5 and frankly I’m fine with paying for Bjork’s latest if it means she can continue being absolutely amazing in every respect, I’m not fine with paying an exorbitant amount for a CD only to find that it’s actually worse than the sound of dogs being nailed to a blackboard.

So it goes without saying that a review of an Autechre record that starts with a diatribe about downloading music has to mention cerebral guitar moppets Radiohead and their “pay what you like” stunt for In Rainbows (an album I don’t particularly rate by the way). I’m not sure what this episode highlighted other than “you get what you pay for”, people complained of snagging poor-quality mp3s when they decided to download the album for free. Now this wasn’t implied on the site but maybe they did hit on something here. A tier-based system of downloading music might be a possible solution. Albums could be downloaded for free if they’re encoded around 64 to 96kbps and the price gets comfortably higher according to quality. Bleep.com currently employ a similar approach that amounts to paying £6.99 for 320kbps variable lame encoded mp3 and £8.99 for FLAC. Other artists have followed suit with their own ideas, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame released something about free music about ghosts, or whatever. Each individual case where a band or artist supposedly pontificate about the current state of play of the music industry is greeted by wavelets of press but on the whole things don’t really seem to be changing as much as they would perhaps like. It seems like each time it happens it’s just a proposed solution that doesn’t really seem to take off or indeed revolutionise the way we think about acquiring and owning music, everyone’s waiting for their turn to say: “What about this? Why don’t we try it this way?”. I can’t help the feeling that this will continue for some time until someone cracks it, although I’m fairly certain as mentioned before that it will have to be the industry that gets the flash of divine inspiration on this one rather than Bono deciding in a year’s time to make the entire U2 back catalogue available for free to download provided you produce evidence that you’ve sold your carbon dioxide-emitting car and donated the funds to various third-world charities; just another possible idea.

To bring it back to the point in regards to Autechre it seems that this too is yet another response to the threat of piracy to the musician. However for the less cynical it could in fact be simply a reward for the true fans. The announcement was made using the newsletter and in my experience this has often been the source of juicy Warp-related goodness several days or sometimes weeks before the announcement makes it to Warp’s front page. Was it genuinely for the fans eager to be the early adopters? Knowing this was it a somewhat cynical attempt to gouge these eager fans into parting with their hard-earned several weeks early? It’s difficult to tell but all things considered it’s a worthy addition to the collection of stories surrounding the downloading issue kick-started by Thom Yorke and the Radio Heads.

Autechre – Quaristice

Quaristice is Autechre’s ninth studio album and as such it’s quite a departure. Gone are the grandiose suites of six to eight minute sounds of a Nord synthesiser and 808 drum machine engaging in mathematical warfare and instead we have a collection of bits and pieces. It’s a collection of off-cuts and out-takes that was supposedly constructed from beats and textures that were lying dormant in the duo’s live equipment used in the previous tour around the release of 2005’s Untilted. It’s a formidable record that feels initially quite disparate and with twenty tracks to it’s name it’s easy to see why.

The album commences innocuously enough with soft pads and stuttering ambience before plunging headlong into the not exactly atypical beat-orientated “The PLC”. This contrast between thoughtful yet slightly washy ambience and plunging rhythmic thunder is essentially the album to a tee but it’s the overall pacing and how easily it flits between the two that makes Quaristice so engaging. It’s been quite some time since the pair have dabbled with beat-less soundscapes (in my my mind the best example of this was “VLetrmx21″ from Garbage EP) and the short vignettes peppered throughout the album serve as interesting way points. The heavily edited rhythmic pieces never quite outstay their welcome with the average track length in the two to four minute range, considerably shorter than their average track length.

Listening to Quaristice is an exercise in music consideration and appreciation. It never seems that tracks are around long enough to warrant a response that goes beyond cocking one’s head to one side and musing thoughtfully on the past few minutes, maybe even stroking a beard or making a “hmm” noise while frowning slightly. The pace is considerable but never breathless, stand-out tracks are much more noticeable as a result. Pieces like “IO”, “rale” and “WNSN” are glorious examples of funked-up booty-shaking electronica that really jumped out but there are plenty more gems buried low in the mix once you’ve given the thing a few listens.

That’s always been the issue with Autechre albums. Initially they’re imposing beasts but over time their reveal their inner beauty and impressive construction. Quaristice is no different, I’ve been listening to it on and off since the release and I’m happy to say that it’s one of their finest albums. It’s quite a bold achievement for them as at times you do have to wonder how many times they can keep putting out records using the same formula. I managed to get hold of the special edition which features a bonus disc of longer cuts of a handful of the more prominent rhythmic tracks from the main disc. This disc is fairly interesting but serves no other real purpose other than to emphasise to the listener that they really were pulling this stuff out of the machines in real time. Hear that? That’s some sucking dolby hiss from some arcane piece of technology, it’s real dammit! Real!

It all adds up to an altogether different Autechre album which is mostly enjoyable as a collection of intriguing moments. Possibly cursed by it’s own breadth and scope Quaristice is less an album in the classic Autechre vein but more a rare insight into the duo’s working habits. Three years on from Untilted and with another three to go before the next one (at a guess) I must admit I’m finding it increasingly difficult to reconcile that this is a full-on Autechre release. Fun, yes. But below the surface it seems almost a lazy record, an officially sanctioned bootleg for the fans. Whether it justifies a fully-fledged release is difficult to say as for me the whole experience was never simply about the CD. I managed to catch the live show on the Tuesday after the album was released, this took place at a seemingly run-down car park in Hearn Street. The show was fantastic and consisted of an hour of thudding electro and hip-hop inspired dance floor devastations, all in almost complete darkness. Autechre’s live sets in recent years have consisted almost entirely of unique material with only a smattering of recognisable moments from the latest record. This is a testament to the band’s keen ear for the application of sound. They approach music in different ways according to the final domain, in this case a live environment calls for more repetition, punchier rhythms and less emphasis on abstract glitch noises.

Quaristice serves as this document for all their live shows over the past few years, punctuated by quiet contemplative moments. I have an inkling that if I had missed their live show and let the gorgeous photo-etched steel special edition slip through my fingers that the single-disc version would have been a bit more of a disappointment.

Rated: 5 out of 7