Amber: Autechre: Amazon.ca: Music

Product Description

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The dense, mathematical music Autechre pioneered on their debut album Incunabula is given a new twist on their follow-up, Amber. While percussion took center stage on their previous works, highly evolved melodies and textures dominate here. The spirit of electro still lives in the muted beats, rhythmically complex and strangely funky. But they don't merely provide a background; they meld seamlessly into dense layers of strings, wandering synth hooks, and massive shards of white noise. It's highly intellectual, but by no means is it unemotional. While tracks like "Glitch" and "Peizo" are dense and impenetrable, most of Amber covers emotional territory from quirky and upbeat ("Slip") to melancholic ("Nine"). This highly emotional "machine music," continued to great effect on their later albums Tri Repetae++ and LP5, makes Autechre one of the few genuinely memorable artists of modern electronic music. --Matthew Corwine

Album Description

Limited re-pressing vinyl on the Warp label.

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Customer Reviews

8 Reviews

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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Average Customer Review

4.9 out of 5 stars (8 customer reviews)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Utterly unique, Dec 24 2008

By

Pieter "Toypom" (Johannesburg) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER) (HALL OF FAME)

This review is from: Amber (Audio CD)

This magnificent album has an utterly unique sound even within Autechre's body of work. It may be electronic music but the sound is anything but clinical with its strangely compelling textures and beats. Evoking vivid imagery, the mood varies from eerie and distant to weirdly inspirational and delicately moving.

The album opens with the whooshing synths & crackles of Foil, while in Montreal the percussion is in the foreground with the wistful synths adding desolate melodies somewhere behind, far away. The symphonic Silverside has some muted vocal samples, while tracks like Further evoke the pitter-patter of raindrops and other nature sounds.

Not all tracks have a beat & tempo shifts occur throughout; Slip is mid-tempo to fast, Glitch with its echoing horn-like sounds & the warbling percussive Piezo have a fast beat, while the bleepy Nine and delicate Yulquen unfold at a slow pace. The complex arrangement of Nil allows for rhythmic segments alternating with pure ambient synthesizer sounds.

The closest I can come to a comparison would be to the instrumental work of Peter Baumann like Trans Harmonic Nights, and then only to a certain extent, as Amber is charmingly diverse. I suppose one could describe this as classical electronic music, and Amber certainly is a classic in more than one sense of the term.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Nine, Feb 16 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Amber (Audio CD)

The best and most depressing track from Autechre...."Nine". Just take some time and listen for yourself.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Amber., Jan 26 2004

By

"leather-palmz" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Amber (Audio CD)

The deconstruction of classic musical arrangements and melodies has always worked for Autechre, who, after 1994's Incunabula and before 96's Tri Repetae++, created the next complicated piece in their ambient saga entitled Amber. In the same vein of Incunabula, Amber deconstructs melodies and molds and reshapes them in new forms, inducing transient states of euphoria in the listener. While Incunabula has more of a sense of internal buildup to climactic ambience and controls the texture and soundscapes with silence and subtle manipulation, Amber controls you in immediacy: its extremely external and variant. Minimalist beat loops and patterns are evident in sharp and abrasive coherency. But the euphoria instead comes from the innovative obscurity of mixing various sounds and creating new musical soundscapes that are at times brilliant and others horrific. But this is what Autechre got together to do, and its nearly impossible to say that Autechre have failed in creating a compelling follow-up. They have, and they will continue to evolve in abstract style and substance, even if IDM does not. Amber is a brilliant mix between the melody based music of Incunabula, and the chaotic and brilliantly deconstructed atmosphere of Tri Repetae++.

Essential tracks: Silverside, Slip and Nine.

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Most recent customer reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Amber.
The deconstruction of classic musical arrangements and melodies has always worked for Autechre, who, after 1994's Incunabula and before 96's Tri Repetae++, created the next... Read more

Published on Jan 26 2004 by leather-palmz

5.0 out of 5 stars Amber.
The deconstruction of classic musical arrangements and melodies has always worked for Autechre, who, after 1994's Incunabula and before 96's Tri Repetae++, created the next... Read more