AphexAcid
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2015–2023
3:56 · 502K views · Oct 27, 2012
The official music video for Autechre's 'Gantz Graf', a dense, glitchy electronic track paired with abstract animated 3D visuals reportedly made by hand in 2002.
It comes up as an example of challenging, dense electronic music and as a hand-made visual-sync piece predating generative tools.
3 comments from Hacker News
I'd say Autechre - Gantz Graf[1] was a closer match as it has the dense production while still having some essence of a melody (albeit in the less traditional sense of the term). But since we're talking about Aphex Twin, Mt Saint Michel[2] deserves an honorable mention. (bonus points to anyone who's familiar with the Tate Modern exhibit that was based on this track and a video of a cyborg monkey drumming) [1] this video [2] [LINK]
The assumption that music the author doesn't like must be a — likely political – statement is, let's just say, revealing and itself highly political. People appear to enjoy things which are bitter, or ugly, or complex, or an acquired taste. Either they're all lying posers, which certainly some people believe, or there really is something to Scotch whisky or James Joyce or Autechre which speaks to some people and not to others. I believe the latter, and I feel sorry for the former. The idea that human experience would be so narrow that some forms of expression are good and all others are bad on a single axis! And music, especially, one of the most cultural-context dependent forms. A bunch of traditions wouldn't even recognise the Western canon, which tends to seriously lack rhythmic complexity, _as_ worthwhile music. So: taste varies and that's the point. I love Autechre, and I find real beauty in their work, but I would place significant money that more than half of the audience here would find this – this video – somewhere between modem line-noise and actively painful. Is it pretty in the way, say, Teenage Fanclub (who are also magnificent) are pretty? No. It's not trying to be. It's communicating something else.
One video brought me memory of Autechre - Gantz Graf music video (warning, hard IDM style ;) [0]. It was made manually in 2002, per Wikipedia: "Rutterford also stated that there was no generative element to the imagery; every three-dimensional object in the agglomeration was painstakingly and manually synchronised with a specific element or frequency range within the track" [1]. [0] this video [1] [LINK]