Com­ing in Feb­rua­ry, a full length LP by Be­lgian legends Autumn. Some peo­ple may know Autumn tracks al­ready, as many were re­leased as Li­near Move­ment and vice versa. Autumn was truly the pre­cur­sor to Twilight Ritu­al, pav­ing the way for a mag­nifi­cent col­labora­tion bet­ween Peter Bonne and Geert Co­ppens.

As young kids, Geert and Peter (Sen and Ense) were in­trigued by the ex­periment­al and co­smic music scenes, and wan­ted to ex­plore that di­rec­tion furth­er. At first, they had to rely on fami­ly and friends to sup­p­ly them with primitive keyboards, or­gans, and other synthesizer-like in­stru­ments. By 1980, they were able to put a band togeth­er and do some per­for­mances, which re­sul­ted in the first tape ‘Seven Days Autumn’.

They re­nted a two voice, an­alog syn­thesiz­er with built in eight step sequenc­er by Yamaha (the CS30) for a week, which they used to pro­duce a numb­er of com­posi­tions at their re­hears­al loc­a­tions, which were sub­sequent­ly bap­tized ‘Atem’ and ‘Attne’. In the mean­time, they kept on per­form­ing with the rest of the band which be­came quite known ac­ross Be­lgium. It in­spired them to set up a speci­al event cal­led ‘Hard Break­fast’. Hard Break­fast was built around the electronic music of Autumn, but as­sis­ted by live jazz-dance and live com­put­er grap­hics art and all came togeth­er 1981. Hard Break­fast re­quired a team of elev­en peo­ple of which five were on stage, and the band mem­b­ers were a total of seven­te­en. From that per­iod on, grap­hics began play­ing an in­creas­ing role.

On stage, Autumn used the brand new Roland CSQ600 sequenc­er (which needed to be re­prog­rammed sever­al times dur­ing the 2-3 hour show) with the SH-2 two voice mono­phonic synth as melodic rhy­thm unit. It was syn­ced manu­al­ly with a God­win Organ rhy­thm sec­tion which pro­vided a bright range of keyboard sounds such as love­ly smooth str­ings and a clavic­hord sound. Aside from that, they used a Yamaha C40M as a huge ef­fect generator man­ipulated live, a Roland Vocod­er, and a 12 chan­nel mix­ing desk com­pleted by some micro­phones, acous­tic and electric guitar, and flute. There was also one delay mac­hine which was able to pro­duce a single echo ef­fect. Con­sider­ing most of this music was im­provised, Hard Break­fast was quite an amaz­ing ac­hieve­ment.

Short­ly after Hard Break­fast, Geert and Peter were able to buy some syn­thesiz­ers for them­selves, al­low­ing them to dras­tical­ly in­crease their mus­ical creativ­ity and pro­duc­tiv­ity. This very quick­ly re­sul­ted in an ab­un­dance of tracks which were re­leased on sever­al tapes, and per­for­med live for many con­certs. They bought the re­volutiona­ry Roland TR 808 rhy­thm mac­hine to syn­chron­ize with the CSQ 600 sequenc­er and the SH-2 bass synth. The Roland Jupiter-4 was used as basic polyp­honic keyboard (4 voices, 8 mem­o­ries), and a Teis­co synth was chos­en for lead synth sounds. Ad­ditional­ly, they used two syn­drums (electronic per­cuss­ion), a 2x6 chan­nel boss mix­ing desk and a re­nted echo mac­hine.

By 1982, Autumn was a loose in­itiative rooted by Peter and Geert, but most often joined by Peter Koutsta­al. It al­lowed them to ex­plore dif­ferent styles again, which re­sul­ted in the for­ma­tion of two other bands, Li­near Move­ment and Twilight Ritu­al. They even re­leased a single ‘Syn­thes­ize’ which be­came a modest summ­er hit in 1982, which was re­cor­ded in a pro­fes­sion­al 24 track studio in only 7 hours (for both sides!). This album fea­tures these tracks along with selec­tions from their best materi­al. Not all, but a fine docu­ment of a pro­lific Be­lgian band.

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