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Baker's Dozen

Embedded In The Skull: Colin Stetson's Favourite LPs
Cian Traynor , March 9th, 2017 10:27

As the experimental multi-instrumentalist prepares to release an envelope-pushing solo album and play the Quietus-partnered Big Ears Festival in Tennessee, he takes us through 13 LPs that have shaped the journey so far.

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Autechre – Chiastic Slide
I could have included Squarepusher's Feed Me Weird Things here just as easily. This is another one of those things that has been with me for a long time. I remember listening to the title track and thinking, 'I want to sound like that.' There's so much realness there: it's the pointedness of the percussion, the ambiguous source of it all, the way things come in and stick around in an interesting loop throughout.

Those sounds are so reminiscent of how the saxophone's mechanics feel to me when I'm playing. A lot of it is essentially just me exaggerating the sound structure of my personal experience because I hear certain sub-frequencies that nobody else hears the same way – like teeth biting down on the top of the instrument or getting the key-work to sound like mechanical spiders. I feel and hear percussive sounds with a depth that no one else does because I'm right on top of it.

It's interesting that you mention depth and sub-frequencies because not long after this album came out, it was described as the aural equivalent of being at the bottom of the sea. Does that sound right to you?

Yeah! Totally. I hadn't heard that. But that's exactly what it sounds like to me.