The British electronic duo Autechre appears to have uploaded some 444 videos to YouTube over the course of 2018, beginning in January. As such a sentence is often followed up: evidence surfaced to this effect on [the Autechre board at Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/autechre/comments/9xcstk/mysterious_playlist/) in the past day. The full playing time is in excess of 13 hours. There are also discussions going on at [watmm.com](https://forum.watmm.com/topic/96046-xhk-xh-hx/), a forum focusing in large part on artists from the Warp record label, home to both Autechre and Aphex Twin, among others.

The Autechre videos are linked to from the period at the end of the sentence “THIS STORE IS OPERATED BY BLEEP STORES ON BEHALF OF AUTECHRE.” on the About page at [autechre.bleepstores.com](https://autechre.bleepstores.com/about?fbclid=IwAR2XPGxg5PBJVa_eI2JnGwGideSsma2pNN7AgqaGkMrzBa3R-IOb5dTpv-Y). While the earliest of the videos date back to the start of the year, it is not clear when the link embedded in that period went live. (And, yes, there is a unique pleasure to typing the sentence “it is not clear when the link embedded in that period went live.”)

Each video displays an array of colors going through some sort of transformation, accompanied by a rush of fomenting drones. There appears to be a strong correlation between sound and image, suggesting there is a direct connection, perhaps the images and sounds sharing a single source, or one being the impetus for the other.

All the images seem to be reflectively bisected at the horizontal midpoint. The result brings to mind a neural network’s combination of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s horizon-view ocean photography and Brian Eno’s colorful light installations. As is the case with many an internet Easter Egg hunt, the communal scrambling to make sense of the ambiguous material is reminiscent of the mysterious Russian video footage at the heart of William Gibson’s 2003 novel, *Pattern Recognition*.

A substantial number of the 444 Autechre videos are brief, under a minute, though some are quite longer. Of the first ten, all but two are under a minute. However, continue deeper into the playlist mix and number 24, the longest in the set, is 7:10. One of the Reddit members posted a [“Handy Dandy Sortable” Google spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UpkuQ2uuzfxvdz7AbJtAdgyOqVvfoJT4qosLEdOI1rk/edit?usp=sharing), which among other things helps identify that of the 444 videos, 278 have a running time of a minute or longer.

The expansive playlist caps a busy year for Autechre, which consists of Rob Brown and Sean Booth. They released [a massive box set](https://disquiet.com/2018/08/27/autechre-nts-sessions-1-4-listening-diary/), *NTS Sessions 1-4*, collecting an online residency they produced in April, and earlier this week shared production files of their own making for various pieces of widely used musical technology from the companies Elektron, Nord, and Akai (see: [factmag.com](http://www.factmag.com/2018/11/15/autechre-share-elektron-nord-files-mpc-samples/)).

Major thanks to Matt Nish-Lapidus for having drawn my attention to it. View the playlist at the hidden [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5zfEHRydVQ&index=1&list=PL5ow3ZyXAhopA4NUdSIuAfTCvWTemihut) channel. Interestingly, if you back up from the playlist to [the account](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGes3PdRSQG_8LylPxINrQA), attributed not to Autechre but to XH HX, none of the material, neither the videos nor the playlist, are viewable.

**Updates:** **(1)** Additional thread at [watmm.com](https://forum.watmm.com/topic/96021-ae-store-eastre-egg/), focusing on the visuals in the context of other “ae_store eastre egg” (ae being a common shorthand for Autechre). **(2)** A website, [444.frm.space/scans](https://444.frm.space/scans/), of scans from the 444 videos.

**Updates:** **(3)** I am [reminded](https://www.reddit.com/r/autechre/comments/9xcstk/mysterious_playlist/e9rwunz/) that “444” was the title of the final track off *Incunabula*, the Autechre album released in November 1993, or 25 years ago this month.

“Ghost Line” is a thoroughly compelling audio-video performance by Sideband (Lainie Fefferman, Jascha Narveson, Seth Cluett, and Mika Godbole) of music by Jeff Snyder, from Snyder’s forthcoming album, *Concerning the Nature of Things*. The album is due on November 9th on the Carrier Records label, with one preview track, the title cut, already up on Snyder’s [Bandcamp page](https://jeffsnyder.bandcamp.com/album/concerning-the-nature-of-things). But the real way to experience “Ghost Line” arguably isn’t the audio on its own; it’s the audio as a component of the video (on [vimeo.com](https://vimeo.com/178109305)). In most music videos, the video part of the equation is either a complement (whether a narrative or just associative imagery) or a document (of the performance, whether simulated or live). In the case of “Ghost Line,” the 12-minute video is, quite literally, both performance and score. And while the images may tend toward abstraction, those abstractions directly inform the music we hear.

In Snyder’s creation, each of the members of Sideband creates sound by adjusting aspects of one of four parallel frames. Each individual is seen within their frame, sometimes rendered as through x-ray specs, sometimes as if colored in during one of Andy Warhol’s more flamboyant phases (say, circa his album covers for Billy Squier and the Rolling Stones). At times the figures disappear entirely, replaced by raster concoctions straight out of a Ryoji Ikeda installation. Throughout, the music is heard to draw directly from the consequences of those images: alternately strident and subtle, buzzy and tonal.

A brief liner note clarifies the goings-on:

>Ghost Line … uses webcams as instruments, with the pixel data from the cameras interpreted as audio waveforms. The performers alter the sound by moving within the frame, or by processing the video stream (altering the x and y resolution, adjusting the focus, or changing the speed or direction of the image scan). Resonant just-tuned sonorities devolve into aggressive clusters of noise, producing a masterful mix of patient harmonic changes and dense, frenetic timbral shifts.

Snyder’s previous album was to *Sunspots*, performed by him on vintage Buchla synthesizers equipment. *Concerning the Nature of Things* is concert music, performed by a variety of ensembles. It’s available at [jeffsnyder.bandcamp.com](https://jeffsnyder.bandcamp.com/album/concerning-the-nature-of-things). Snyder is based in Princeton, New Jersey.