Track By Track: Autarkic – Terms and Conditions

As Autarkic, Tel Aviv’s Nadav Spiegel brings a melting pot of influences to his productions, connecting the dots between psychedelica, dub, techno, wave and trance, to name but a few.

First debuting in 2015 on Golf Channel Recordings, he quickly followed this up with a string of EPs for labels including Turbo, Höga Nord, DGTL, Bahnsteig 23 and Life And Death, as well as two albums for Disco Halal 2016’s Can You Pass The Knife? and I Love You, So Go Away the following year.

2019 saw Nadav move into the label world launching Age Of Self, alongside his friend Neil Cohen, as a music and visual arts platform, the first release of which came from Nadav himself.

This year saw him return to DJ Tennis’ Life And Death imprint, the label that housed his Heavy Dreamer EP in 2018, for his third album Terms and Conditions. Here he guides us through the LP, track by track…

“’Terms and Conditions’ was created to celebrate the moment in time that is now. The moment we became peasants in a new digital-feudal world, happily giving away our privacy for the privilege of owning a smartphone.”

UX

UX was the last track I recorded for the album and somehow it got to be the opening track. In a way it makes sense that the opening track would be recorded from the rational thought about the album as a whole, when the concept is consolidated it is easier to choose your first words.

Trancelate

During the time I am a musician, I am in constant search for samples; digging records, files, youtube etc. Using vocal samples is always a problematic issue so when I stumbled into google translate voice feature I was enlightened! Suddenly I could create my own vocal samples. The Gtranslate vocal textures and lack of tone made me think of Michel Houellebecq’s book “The possibility of an island” where Daniel communicates with his clone in a resemblance for the upcoming world dystopia. In my mind it is heavily related to the deepfake era that we are facing.

Keyboard Riot

For that track I used samples from several political demonstrations that took place in Israel and played them randomly using a slider on my Octatrack sampler. I was trying to create a chaotic feeling and to give some unusual sounds to a 4×4 dancefloor track.

Solid States

I think that’s this is the only song on the album that is in a way about myself and the struggle I have maintaining the need of doing something artistic for a living in a brutal capitalistic world.

Terms and Conditions

The album ‘Theme song’ if you wish. If you felt recently that somebody is following every act you do, surprisingly offering you stuff you need and people “you may know” – you are not alone.

The Exploiter

Some years ago my music was sometime tagged as ‘Oriental’ and that annoyed me as it never was and I tried to distance myself from people riding that oriental wave. I love Arabic, Indian, African music and therefore I cant stand hearing tracks with an “Eastern” appeal as what they actually do is give a superficial representation of a rich musical culture. Eduard Said’s book ‘Orientalism’ talks a lot about the East through the West’s lens so I chose to take a whole paragraph from the book and run it through a Text to speech app to create a hybrid between House and Hip Hop.

Simplify, Reduce

Robert Wyatt is my all time musical hero, I adore his way of making complex musical moves in a way which sounds so simple. I recorded a cover version (where he actually covers Chic) of ‘At last I’m free’ on my debut EP on Golf Channel back in 2015 and now I used lyrics from Wyatt’s ‘Left on Man’ on a primitive breakbeatish track I made on MC505 groovebox.

St. Satan

That track is the outcome of me listening to Madlib and J.Dilla just recently for the first time (!) and aiming to create a track/song that contains 80% samples from records. The track started as a 4×4 track and I felt it was not going in an interesting direction and then Tamir Chen came and played one of his special bass lines and made the track to what it is now.

A Curve Ball That Doesn’t Quite Land

Technically not much to say about that track, I had some Whatsapp recordings of my laughing friends and I did the thing I love to do the most in the studio – to reverse things. The result is in my opinion one of the musical peaks of the album.

Shut Down Nation

In my albums I place the songs I like the most at the end (or close to) as I naively feel that the album’s end is the most important part of it.

Buy Terms and Conditions. Follow Autarkic.