Autechre – Envane

902 and Laughing Quarter are among Autechre's best tracks, how they could leave them off Chiastic Slide I don't know. The two other tracks on the EP are rather forgettable though.

One of my faves in the Autechre catalog. The scratched sample in Goz Quarter is from Dr. Octagon- No Awareness. The full line is "watch them jam like Autechre with old energy".

Bought at the time of release....... 'Autechre' at their best.

Just listened to this for the first time in quite a while and now I know why it's been so long. There are precious few ideas contained over these 35 minutes.

Each track has a hook; don't get me wrong. It's just that the hook is all they've got. Goz Quarter starts out promising with a fast hip-hop beat, but rather quickly devolves into endless repetition. Latent Quarter and Laughing Quarter also have interesting "pseudo-melodies," but are too long and devoid of any soul.

Draun Quarter is the real killer. It has the same framework as the other three tracks: a semblance of tune and the jagged, mechanical Autechre percussion programming. But it's more than TEN MINUTES LONG! It just goes on and on and on and on...around the seven-minute mark I had to give it the axe.

Looking back, this EP marked the beginning of Autechre's adventures down the rabbit hole. What a shame.

9 years on and this EP is still one of the memorable releases for me by Autechre that I look back on with fondness / nostalgia. Envane is more accessible than Ae's other works in that it 'conforms', as such, to rigid timing but it works especially on Goz Quarter (or '9oz quarter' as it reads as on the sleeve) with it's twisted hip-hop interspersed with an almost ambient-like brass melody. The scratching is a little 'normal' as such for Autechre certainly in comparison with their later work, but not out of place, the track wouldn't sound right without the scratching... I crashed my car while listening to Ae's piece de resistance on Envane - Laughing Quarter, no laughing matter.

I personally find the scratching on GOZ quarter to be kind of amusing. It is completely out of place in an Autechre release and whatever the hell it says sounds cool anyway. It's similar to the guy in "Ccec" on Ep7 or the rather quirky "Dial." from Gantz Graf. The latter half of the song is their rather overused technique of just kind of putting notes together that are in the same scale. They got rid of this annoyance after Chiastic Slide, and although I hate it can you think of anyone else who does it? The rest of Envane is, as everyone said, great, but I think Goz Quarter should be given more respect than it is simply because it's so damn catchy. Anyways...

I am relatively positive that it is Goz Quarter. If you look carefully, and compare the first symbol with the 'g' in "laughing", you'll see that it is identical. Now compare it with the 9 in the CAT# WAP89CD. You'll see a small corner has been cut from the upper right, making it different from the 'g'. There are other examples of 'g's in the fine print, which look a bit like 9s as well, such as the one in the word England. The confusing one is the 2/Z, which really frankly looks like a 2, but if you look at the 'N' in the word Latent, for example, you'll see that a true diagonal has been avoided by zig-zagging in the same manner, which is what causes me to lean towards it being a Z and not a 2. That leaves the O in the middle, but given that the other two are letters, and the numeral O is notoriously confused with the letter O -- I thin it is the letter.

I got this EP thinking it would just be a mini Chiastic Slide, and it definitely has shades of that album, but it's more like a funkier and more playful cousin to it. Laughing Quarter and Latent Quarter are prime pieces of twisted, electronified hip hop (albeit it a highly perverse form of hip hop) and are quite hypnotic. Goz (or it it 902?) Quarter is a quite a cool track as is Draun Quarter but they aren't a patch on the other two.

Decent introduction to Chiastic Slide. Latent Quarter in particular was superb at the time in my opinion. The first 2 minutes of the track are rather chaotic, but then with the addition of just the right (although admittedly simplistic) beat, everything fits. The track builds up tension until the beats burst in to save the day. All this is done in a very refined way. It's not just Autechre muting and/or unmuting different patterns in their sequencer as you can hear in some L'Usine-tracks (I love L'Usine though).
The opener and quasi-single '902 Quarter' starts off very very catchy and promising for about 90 seconds until it's somewhat marred by ridiculous scratching noises. The noises are so bad that I rearranged the order of the tracks for this review a bit. Some of my friends think '902 Quarter' is the best Autechre-track ever, though I firmly disagree at that. The third track sucks you in a spiral of weirdness, which actually becomes quite enjoyable after a while and I now consider it the best track on the EP. The third track 'Laughing Quarter' really is Autechre at their best. The closer of the ep is more traditional IDM-fare, but definitely not of lesser quality. It's a repetitive (but in a good way) emotional piece and a perfect (even if a little on the safe side) ending to this record.
Though on the balance i must add i feel 'Envane' won't be entirely time-resistant. Many of the overly-busy structures feel a little dated already. But that's due in no small part to the legions of frustrated musicians who try to copy Autechre's trademark style (mostly to no avail). Unfortunately, these hordes of bedroom-musicians lay bare one of Autechre's few shortcomings by turning it into a charicature, namely their striving for the 'avantgarde-ideal' wether it's in sound, in rhythm or in both (contradictory, this is also their greatest appeal for most). Which should hardly have been anybody's concern in the late nineties if you ask me. You can just taste their ambition from the first note onwards, which sickens me at times, especially when they pull it off!! In my opinion, they should have put more emphasis on just trying to make decent electronic (or whatever) music. As a sidenote: they actually went on to do exactly this with the 1998 'LP5', which shows them much more in control of both their gear and their ideas. 6.5/10