Summary.
The career of Manchester-based disc-jockeys Sean Booth and Rob Brown, better known as Autechre, actually comprised two careers. The first one was about dance music whose beat had been deformed and suppressed, melted into a watery substance, emptied of its narrative content, but relatively warm and organic.
The smooth and detached tones of Incunabula (1993), perhaps the most austere and implacable album in the history of dance music, coined a new form of ultra-minimal techno that was expanded on the more colorful Amber (1995), insinuateing those minimal/artificial sounds in the most obscure orbits of the subconscious, and on the more claustrophobic Tri Repetae (1996), that resorted to metallic sounds and subsonic frequencies.
These works were inspired by Steve Reich's minimalism, Kraftwerk's robotic trance, and Brian Eno's ambient music, but their emotional content (if any) was radically different.
Chiastic Slide (1997) was the dividing line, the discontinuity that caused a phase shift. The menacing texture of digital beats, repetitive noises and dejected melodies mutated into alien beings with a life of their own.
Autechre's second career, best represented by LP5 (1998) and Confield (2001), was about dissonance, icy ambience, irregular rhythm and non-linear development.
Both careers were characterized by austere, meticulous, intricate sound design. Autechre's tracks often seemed labyrinthine mirages: the closer one went, the more lost one felt.
(This section translated from my old Italian text by Nicholas Green)
Autechre quickly established themselves at the forefront of the new ambient dance music scene of the 1990s.
Sean Booth and Rob Brown, two DJs from the Manchester techno scene, were among the leading figures of this instrumental genre - inspired by the soft, ethereal electronic music of the 1970s - that took over raves. Rather than vocals or conventional instrumentation, their compositions used collages of beats and chords. Autechre debuted with their EPs Lego Feet (1991 - Skam, 2012) - reissued 20 years later in a 70-minute extended version - and Cavity Job (Hardcore, 1991), containing the tracks Cavity Job and Accelera 1 & 2.
The points of reference on Incunabula (Warp, 1993) are the late Tangerine Dream and synth-pop impressionist Brian Eno, as well as Indian classical music and hip hop. The South American rhythms and robotic metamorphoses of the single Basscadet
do nothing to change an equation that is fundamentally devoid of variables. As an alternative to the predominant styles, all of which are more or less alien-futurist, Autechre offered up a soft and understated sound, organic rather than mechanical, plastic rather than monolithic, as announced in the beginning with the subdued electronics and mellow rhythms of Kalpol Introl. This ideology is exalted in the velvety techno of Bike,
in which every minimalist vortex is finely tuned with a manneristic precision. The rhythm shifts constantly, moving effortlessly from the most effervescent ballets to the most austere pauses. What is important here is the background radiation, usually faint and sometimes imperceptible.
444 changes the praxis a bit, sticking the background drone (a glacial organ) around the sensual evolutions of a synthesizer, thus proposing a third way for trance that fuses Eno's
Music For Airports and Terry Riley's Rainbow In Curved Air.
The duo rarely tries to sound gothic, although with its minimalistic variations the sound becomes sinister, as on the sinister rumblings and metallic ticking of Bronchus 2, and especially the melancholy waves and syncopated polyrhythms of Doctrine.
Their practice has little in common with modern ambient music. If anything, it is reminiscent of the early, more tentative experiments in electronic pop. The slightly jazzy tempo, iterated melody, and dark undercurrents of drone on Eggshell (perhaps the most accessible and elegant track) bring back memories of Tonto's Expanding Head Band. Equally "old-fashioned" and classic-sounding are the metallic carillon and African frenzies of the semi-melodic Lowride.
The "underwater music" of Autriche represents one of the pinnacles of sophistication: a Gregorian choir of sorts is allowed to float among the galaxies while a series of jazzy solos on the keyboards follows thereafter, each one in a different timbre, and always somewhat "lysergic".
Fastidiously refined sampling, loops and drones triumph instead on
Windwind, perhaps the technological masterpiece of the record, whose inner complexity is concealed behind a highly polished surface.
The detached, nonchalant tone with which the duo's compositions play out enmeshes itself in the listener's psyche. Above all, the duo is interested in the tonal qualities of sounds, which are continually altered to create a sense of dizziness, a breakdown of one's bearings, an absence of reference points. Theirs is music for "chill out rooms" rather than nightclubs.
(Additions after 1995, some of them also translated into Italian )
The EP Anti, ranging from the cacophony of Flutter to the
urban jungle of Djarum, accounced the multi-colored canvas of
Amber (Warp, 1995).
Foil (galactic frequencies, cycles of rustles, flamenco-style
tapping, soft cymbals that come and go)
and Glitch (electric shocks, undercurrent of tribal percussions,
ticking industrial clockworks)
insinuate artificial sounds in the most obscure orbits of the subconscious.
At the same time, these alien sounds come from a shared primitive source.
Piezo is a mini-concerto for
wadded timbres that seem to come from Peruvian flutes superimposed to
a drone that seems to echo a Tibetan mantra.
Nil is an elongated dub track mixed with ominous organ and accordion
sounds, almost a slow-motion gospel, and a wailing sound reminiscent of
Hawaian guitars.
Autechre smashes its sources and then uses debris to manufacture music that
does not seem to belong to this world's musical traditions.
The atmospheric polyrhythms and the looped accordion figures of
Furthur betray the pillars of Autechre's disintegration process:
Steve Reich's minimalism, Throbbing Gristle's industrial music,
Kraftwerk's robotic trance, and Brian Eno's ambient music.
There is still plenty of drama and of emotions, though.
The surreal ballet Teartear is simply a dramatic, emotional version of
Furthur's elements.
Compared with the rest, Yulquen has the solemn quiet of a piano
sonata: notes and beats have become one and the same, sounds that follow
each other to gradually bud into a mood.
The duo, in fact, is at the peak of its "directorial" skills, as proven
by the haunting scenarios of Silverside
(orchestral phrases ebbing and flowing a` la Klaus Schulze, syncopated
distorted beats that lash out at warped, shadowy voices that appear and
disappear in the background, a sense of impending catastrophe)
and Nine (a set of oniric, psychedelic reverbs, like
Grateful Dead's Dark Star played light-years from here).
On the lighter side, Slip is a simple vignette whose hummable melody
is carried by bubbling electronica a` la Tonto's Expanding Head Band.
In the charming Montreal a melodic fragment, looped around a frantic
micro-beat and a languid ambient phrase, spawns a pressing minimalistic
repetition.
Amber is another monumental work, although less austere and implacable
than its predecessor.
The monumental Tri Repetae (Wax Trax, 1996) increased
the project's claustrophobia by resorting to metallic sounds, subsonic
frequencies and dejected melodies.
Dael toys with syncopated polyrhythms that arise from a
texture of digital beats and repetitive noises.
A menacing analogic melody sweeps the hostile land of
Clipper, alight with crackling sequencers.
Both the melody (an ominous refrain in the low end of the spectrum) and
the rhythm (a spasmodic pulse)` are further refined in Rotar,
and the way Autechre first builds an elegant pattern and then turns into
a mathematical counterpoint resembles Bach's Art of the Fugue.
The melodic lines are barely audible in Stud,
and the rhythmic pattern is no less subdued. With these
robotic, repetitive and subsonic compositions, Booth and Brown coined
a new genre of music, almost the exact opposite of what rock music is
supposed to be (loud and emotional).
If the first five tracks are Autechre at their most theoretical, the next
five tracks are an abridged, popular version of the main ideas.
The symphonic variations of Eutow, the grotesque ballet of
C.Pach, the sonic refractions of Gnit, the aquatic echoes
of Overand, the exotic dance of Rsdio (with the main
keyboard pitched to sound like a didjeridoo)
offer a much easier path to Autechre's weird universe.
The common themes here are the frail and atonal sound of the digital percussions
and the almost obsessive use of loops.
These tracks also have in common the absolute absence of emotions.
They could well be random sequences generated by a computer and performed
by videogames.
The second CD of the American edition also includes two important EPs.
Garbage (Warp, 1995) contains four lengthy pieces:
the 14-minute industrial-shock ballet Garbagemx, a frenzied concerto
of chirping and bleeping assaulted and then swallowed by the strings of an orchestral adagio,
the dadaistic pastiche of vocals Piobmx,
the ten-minute post-techno ping-pong of Bronchusevenmx,
and the stately organ hymn Vletrmx, the emotional peak.
Autechre is still looking for its true voice, but each experiment
leaves a mark.
Anvil Vapre (Warp, 1996) contains the
14-minute jungle deconstruction Second Bad Vilbel, the
slowly shifting clockwork of Second Scepe, the hypnotic undulation of
Second Scout, the rhythm-less apotheosis of Second Peng.
Here Autechre has already matured into something coesive and unique.
Tri Repetae
simply removed the emotions from that "something".
From the recording sessions of 1996-97 Autechre derived the album
Chiastic Slide (Warp, 1997), possibly their masterpiece,
and the EP Envane (Warp, 1997), two works that radically altered the
perspective on their art.
This time around, Autechre's sound-sculpting is an exploration of cacophony,
both in terms of timbric dissonance and in terms of rhythmic inconsistency.
Basically, Autechre incorporated the psychological and harmonic
harshness of industrial music into their aesthetic of
rigor, discipline and precision. At the same time, they assimilated the
rhythmic discord of hip hop into their geometry of beat.
Cipater (that accidentally quotes
Lothar & The Hand People)
is a nine-minute cubist clockwork that slowly undoes a metallic metronome
by transforming it into a polyrhythmic ballet which, in turns, decays into
pure chaos of beats. Whatever melody was being maimed, the result of Autechre's
digital processing is an abstract soundscape of discrete events, like a crowd
of terrified animals surfacing from every direction. The melody is miraculously
reconstructed by keyboards that sound like a Japanese koto.
The brief
Rettic AC ventures into even more mysterious lands: frantic ruffling
noises disturb the quiet of eerie resonating drones.
Tewe populates that unfriendly vacuum with irrational percussive
pattern that seem to be largely improvised. This is the equivalent of a
jazz jam between a digital neural network and the quantum zero-point field.
Unlike the previous pieces,
the nine-minute Cichli starts out loud and maintains a high level
of electricity. Again, the vertical dimension is defined by the juxtaposition
of a floating organic drone and a thick tapestry of bouncing beats
(but the last two minutes are pure beat-less celestial ecstasy).
The "beat" is reduced to a mere trace on the radar of Hub, the most
disjointed of these futuristic watercolors, a psychedelic carillon
of alien subsonic fragments.
After the brief minimalist sonata of loops Calbruc, the ten-minute
Recury is the first track to actually "sound like" a known genre:
industrial dub. Its mutations are also the most subtle of the entire album,
almost an essay in reversal of roles.
Pule (eight minutes) tries a simpler idea: a table-like beat (not
the usual polyphony of beats) that fades away as the organic drone expands.
The closing 13-minute Nuane is the closest thing to hard instrumental
hip-hop. The spasmodic linear explosions recreate the effect of a melody.
Then they suddenly implode and become mere potentialities for the next
nine minutes. It is a cryptic, puzzling, mesmerizing ending to a
most challenging album.
The EP Envane (Warp, 1997),
divided into four "quarters", contains
the melancholy and oneiric eleven-minute
piano sonata of Draun Quarter (including a three-minute orchestral coda
with no beat). If Laughing Quarter might be too brainy (or humorous?),
it is impressive how coherent Latent Quarter sounds given that it
merges musique concrete, an industrial beat,
glitchy noise, funky sub-bass, and a bassoon-like melody, ending in
chamber music territory.
The ten-minute fantasia Goz is another multifaceted gem:
initially it sounds like the scrambled footage of a jazz jam, then a
scratching novelty of the late 1970s, and then a babbling melodic line
moves to the foreground, and nonetheless the whole disintegrates in some
comic synthetic chirping.
The highlights of the EP CichliSuite (Warp, 1997) are the
lively and intricate pieces:
the eventful, cyclic, syncopated, quietly acrobatic beatscape of Yeesland;
and the petulant skitting ping-pong of Pencha.
Less effective is the minimalist repetition of Characi,
and the duo still doesn't completely master the art of
the melody (which prevails in the slow, downtempo Krib).
Gescom started in 1994 as a joint project by Autechre,
Darrell Fitton and Rob Hall.
It continued throughout the decade with a series of collaborations between
Autechre and other musicians.
Gescom's album Minidisc (Touch, 1998)
contains 45 brief pieces which are meant to be played in shuffle mode, so
that each time they create a different composition.
Gescom also released the single ISS SA (Skam, 2003).
Compared with Autechre's masterpieces,
LP5 (Nothing, 1998) is a minor work.
The mechanical clockwork of Acroyear2
and the bouncing rubberband of Arch Carrier
are content with recycling themselves.
The impenetrable intricacy of 777 fares better than both.
The standouts, however, are probably
Drane2, that sounds like an odd remix of country & western music,
and Under BOAC, an explosive remix of Caribbean music,
a bombardment of missile-like beats.
EP7 (Nothing, 1999) is actually an album of 11 tracks for a grand total
of 60 minutes. But it is another minor work, that confirms the period of crisis.
The trivial dancefloor ditty Rpeg is redeemed by the
sinister ten-minute panzer dance Outpt (although the coda is basically
a separate track whimsically attached to this one).
Too many pieces are mere excuses for tampering with digital equipment.
The results sound more like demonstrations than compositions. Some degree
of success is achieved in the sinister android crackling and chirping
of Left Blank and Liccflii.
Maphive 6.1 is different from the other pieces of the album because
it actually displays some evolution. The brooding pomp of the beginning
sets the tone for the story of a frail metallic melody trying to
survive inside a colossal cyclic rhythmic pattern.
Like in the case of LP5 these is little substance to justify a full album.
After several works of dubious relevance,
Confield (Warp, 2001) is a more convincing follow-up to the program
enunciated with Chiastic Slide .
After the odd introduction of VI Scose Poise, with its sporadic
Brian Eno-esque ambient piano notes in a bed of metallic glitches,
the album starts in earnest with a sequence of austere concepts:
the catastrophic drumming of Pen Expers, obliterating an
incomplete organ melody;
the ringing fibrillating undercurrent of Parhelic Triangle,
stuck in the swampy main beat;
and the hysterical sizzling beat crushed in the dark vortex of Bine.
They rank among their most uncomfortable compositions.
The nine-minute closer, Lentic Catachresis, piles up
tiny chaotic dissonant events over the dark shroud of a drone until
we only hear the crackling in the foreground and the drone has been
vivisected to become a stuttering loop.
By comparison, Sim Gishel lines up some
relatively straightforward dance steps, and Cfern is lounge muzak.
Eidetic Casein, despite the crunchy glitches, is a clownish
parenthesis, a dance for drunken gnomes;
and the nine-minute Uviol stands like an intermezzo of sorts,
a quiet oneiric nocturnal shuffle.
The compact disc includes as a bonus track the
relentless hyper-Caribbean Mcr Quarter, performed live.
The duo is doing more than merely surveying a hostile territory: it is
mapping a new route through that territory.
The 20-minute EP Autechre (Warp, 2002) contains three pieces that are
relatively upbeat and straightforward: Gantz Graf,
the six-minute rave-up (for their standards) Dial,
and Cap.IV, which sounds like a lengthy remix of the previous track.
Consistent with Autechre's previous works, Draft 7.30 (Warp, 2003)
didn't break any new ground but sounded like a self-indulgent revisitation
of old ideas.
Theme of Sudden Roundabout sounds simplistic at best.
Xylin Room, V-Proc and IV VV IV VV VIII are mere
reprocessing of Autechre cliches. However, the 11-minute Surripere
ranks among their most intriguing musical metamorphoses,
constantly off-center but also constantly focused.
Compared with some of their lifeless soundscapes,
Untilted (Warp, 2005) is a hysterical work: the music jumps up and down,
unrelenting and recklessly indisciplined.
If Sean Booth and Rob Brown are trying to make an art out of
straddling the border between the adventurous and the confused, many pieces
here are highly successful
(Pro Radii, Ipacial Station, the 15-minute Sublimit).
The edgy Lcc simply condenses what other tracks dilute over long
distances.
At the same time, the album is frequently shapeless (the dubby Augmatic Disport), although in a meaningful way. Of all the undefinable music they have
produced, this might be the hardest to grasp and label. Thus it is not
surprising to meet the eerie (even by their standards) The Trees.
Aeo3/3hae (Die Stadt, 2005) is a self-indulgent collaboration
between
Autechre
and
Hafler Trio.
Quaristice (Warp, 2008) contains 20 brief tracks that sound like a
random assembly of ideas that they are no longer capable of exploring.
Episodes such as Simmm and Rale sound like disoriented takes
on the digital music that has overtaken them.
The techno impression of Chenc9 sound like an admission of age.
However, the dark ambient music of Notwo and Outh9x prove
that they can still be on top of the game when they find the right
concentration; but, overall, this is the worst album of their career yet.
(Oversteps) (Warp, 2010) reverted the descent into frigid shapeless
textural poetry thanks to a single-minded humanistic strategy.
These are still vignettes (the longest piece is "only" six minutes long)
and more melodic/charming than ever.
R Ess unwinds a looping melody and then disintegrates it.
Known(1) spins a gentle folkish carillon-like refrain played (or, better, stammered) in a harpsichord-like timbre, despite the interference of a harsh synth.
The main thread of Treale even evokes cinematic soundtracks of the 1960s,
and there is an echo of Morricone's spaghetti-western scores in
Yuop.
The atmosphere itself tends to be more humane than it ever was in their classics:
the sub-bass and drum-machine of Ilanders exude pomp and grandeur;
on the other hand the floating keyboard notes of Qplay radiate a jazzy psychedelic feeling in the cubistic beatscape;
Krylon is their take on celestial new-age music;
etc.
These "songs" carry out a linear mission:
to match sophisticated beat constructs and simple melodic ideas.
There is the occasional beat-less break
(the fluttering multi-layered minimalist patterns of See on See)
but mostly that is the routine.
Within each piece there is relatively little variation. The exceptions don't
always work: D-sho Qub sounds like an early synth-pop ditty before the beat gets hit by industrial distortions, devoured by furrowing rodents and swallowed by a galactic choir; but the end result is not convincing.
That is the problem: when Sean Booth and Rob Brown run out of inspiration,
they don't shelf the project but deliver it unfinished. Ditto for
St Epreo, a mostly rhythmic structure that could be a demonic
funk strut but instead is left at an embryonic stage.
By comparison with the half-baked compositions of the previous two albums
(the substandard Quaristice and the merely passable Oversteps),
there are much more ambitious compositions on
Exai (Warp, 2013).
The beat reigns unchallenged in the industrial bacchanals of Fleure
and Prac-f, in the relentless cyborg assault of Spl9.
More calmly, VekoS also presupposed an aesthetic that is purely
about rhythm, or, better, anti-rhythm.
The program stretches all the way to the
jovial pseudo-calypso of T ess xi and the acrobatic tapping of Flep, far away from the glacial mood that is more typical of Autechre.
Then, again, existential melancholy emanates from the laconic 1 1 is
and the way it drifts towards extinction; and plain neurosis propels, or,
better, deters, the progression of the nine-minute Nodezsh,
a repetitive piece that in theory should be hypnotic but ends up being more
horrific than hypnotic.
The chopped, irregular beats are also used to craft the
harrowing soundscape of Runrepik and the
abstract dissonant chamber music of the ten-minute Cloudline.
This album almost undoes the "melodic" current that swept through
Oversteps. In fact, it stands as its ideological counterpart.
Deco Loc, the user-friendly track that mixes cut-up vocal samples with
hip-hop beats, feels out of context.
So does the eight-minute Yjy Ux, which could be an upbeat remix of a
minimalist concerto by Terry Riley
until it decays into a ghastly fever of drones and scrapes, and it keeps
decomposing until very little is left of the beat amid whirring echoes.
On the downside,
the ten-minute Irlite is typical of the confusion that
keeps Autechre from making coherent statements: too much happens and too
little remains.
The twelve-minute Bladelores is swept by a quasi-melodic breeze
but, again, it doesn't seem to know what to do next, and the beat is
surprisingly trivial by their standards.
The nine-minute Recks On repeats a banal leitmotiv for a while and
then, again, doesn't quite know how to handle it.
No matter the redundancy and the sloppiness of the lengthier compositions,
the sheer quantity of ventures and probes is enough to create a semiotic
jungle for generations of aspiring PhD students.
Autechre's Elseq 1-5 (2016) was a download-only release of
almost four hours of music, divided into five volumes.
Rob Brown and Sean Booth composed/improvised it using software,
and produced software.
In the age of DVD box-sets of television series, this was the musical equivalent
of a television series.
It was followed by the eight-hour NTS Sessions 1-4 (Warp, 2018),
composed/improvised in the same way.
These invisible digital files that replaced the physical LP and CD
have the property of being virtually infinite. As the capacity of
computer memory increases exponentially, one could program a computer to
generate millions of hours of "music".
Listening to (parts) of these releases, two questions came to mind:
1. What is the definition of "garbage" in the world of software?
2. Can repetition be chaotic?
The second question is an oxymoron in mathematics but not in art.
The first question is about value in a world whose population increases
more than exponentially (the population of software objects).
Walter Benjamin was obsessed with "the age of mechanical reproduction",
but the world is rapidly entering into the age of mechanical creation:
the issue is not that we can make an unlimited number of duplicates of
an artifact, but that we can make an unlimited number of artifacts, each
different from all others.
The digital media of production and distribution enable
the serial multiplication of artifacts.
You can define "garbage" as something that is
useless or as something that is disgusting. Both are relative judgments,
so what is garbage for you may not be garbage for me. However, one can
also define "garbage" as something that is worthless or disposable.
That is a quantitative definition because you can measure how "worth it"
something is. The more artifacts you have, the less "worth it" each one is.
When the supply vastly exceeds the demand, the value is zero.
The misunderstood importance of presence began in the visual arts,
with the works of Frank Stella, Robert Morris, Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly,
and so on, the evangelists of the "less is more" ideology.
The justification of presence, however, is not trivial.
Absence, instead, is always ok. Absence can be thrilling, stressful, poignant.
It can mean a lot of things.
Presence, on the other hand, must have a reason to be
present; otherwise it's disposable, it's garbage.
Otherwise, "less is less".
Great music is when a note is worth a thousand words, not when
one hour of notes is not worth a single word.
Cage argued that every sound deserves to be heard.
True. But two sounds next to each other don't necessarily deserve to be heard.
Nor three, nor four, nor one million. There must be a reason for them to
coexist. One hour of sounds needs a lot of justification, otherwise no,
they don't deserve to be heard. And, as a rule of thumb, unless your last name
is Mozart or Bach,
the more sounds you make, the less likely it is that they deserve to be heard.
Elseq doesn't have a center of mass.
The loud, lumbering and distorted anti-techno of Feed1 is hardly
representative of the rest.
The peak of pathos is in Spth: flaming synths spurting out from horror drones (unfortunately with an annoying beat in the background).
The 27-minute Elyc6 0nset (perhaps the standout) is a concerto for bagpipes and rodents with beats that melt and explode.
Unfortunately, in order to achieve variety at all costs, Autechre
leave too many ideas at an embryonic stage.
The 12-minute robotic synth ballet C16 Deep Tread decays slowly
(not exactly a groundbreaking development).
Pendulu Casual is basically nine minutes of pointless repetition,
and the closer, Oneum, is a massive organ drone that goes on for eleven minutes.
The more or less melodic theme of the 22-minute Eastre is tortured and vivisected for more than 20 minutes with no clear strategy in mind.
A bit more original are the the jovial drum'n'bass dance of
the seven-minute Curvcaten,
the frantic fragmentation of the 14-minute Latentcall,
and the
eleven-minute Freulaeux, which is the most driving percussive piece.
Then there's the 12-minute Pendulu Hv Moda,
the 13-minute C7b2,
the 24-minute Mesh Cinereal...
By the end of the fifth disc, the music of Elseq feels like a
collection of leftovers, of tentative and unfinished compositions, of
experiments to be continued.
NTS Sessions are a mixed bag. There is an incredible amount of "garbage"
but there are also better developed, more cohesive, compositions than on
Elseq.
The best and most cinematic moments are:
the extraterrestrial fauna of L3 Ctrl (16:51), with
frenzied beats and thick organ drones;
the lively and aggressive Tt1pd (22:11), with chaotic insect-like buzzing, unstable beat and harsh dissonance:
and Shimripl Casual (25:19),
one of the darker and dirtier pieces, with static noise and ghostly drones,
but also with underwater effects, evoking
a journey through the sewer system.
Also intriguing are
T1a1 (18:39), in which an anemic plod is the canvas on which the duo paints a parade of abstract sounds and the canvas itself gets warped as the piece advances;
and
Turbile Epic Casual Stpl Idle (21:32), that stages a
dialogue between sturdy drones and a fragile wavering cartilage.
Then, just like in Elseq, there is certainly a lot of variety.
Initially Four Of Seven (13:05) sounds like a tribute to 1960s pioneer Morton Subotnick, whereas
Xflood (9:24), with its brisk flow of dissonance under a floating choir, sounds like a tribute to Stockhausen.
Debris_funk (10:25) is a dadaistic sonata of static noise, whereas
Gonk Steady One (22:25) is a cubistic funk jam, and
Column Thirteen (17:02) imitates avantgarde chamber music of the 1960s mixing it with the amateurish electronic sounds of the 1950s.
They don't quite reinvent the wheel, but they do seem to (consciously or
unconsciously) retrace the history of 20th century music (without adequate competence).
There is also the abstract synth soundpainting of E0 (15:44)
and the industrial metronomy of Violvoic (15:00), that splits into multiple competing metronomies until only arid soundscape of sparse reverberating beats are left.
Several compositions are clearly research projects:
the viscous substance of 32a_reflected is the medium to test
the relationship between timbre, time and space;
the drone of Shimripl Air explores an intriguing timbre that sounds like an underwater vibration;
and so on.
Then there are
Clustro casual (11:03),
Acid mwan idle (11:56),
Glos ceramic (13:26),
North Spiral (15:03),
Chr0 (15:44),
Icari (20:01),
...
And Gonk Tuf Hi (7:52) is a good example of how repetition can become chaotic (not a compliment).
Perhaps the worst offender, the ultimate definition of "trivial" if not of
"garbage" is All End, a
symphonic drone that spreads its wings for almost 59 minutes
with minimal variations.
(I capitalized all the song titles because Autechre's lower-case habit is misleading. It may lead to confuse
the music with the design: the lower-case titles are part of the design,
and the design has indeed remained high-class; but that doesn't translate
into an appreciation of the music, although one could claim that the
"content" includes both the design and the music).
Several of these pieces could have been cute and even important if the duo
had edited them down to duration proportional to their semantic content.
Autechre's music used to be complex and articulate, but it was rapidly
becoming the epitome of facile and puerile, and sometimes even pedestrian.
Sign (2020) indulged in the fat timbres of vintage synths.
M4 Lema, with its waves of disorienting and muffled industrial noise, is indeed a powerful statement of human+machine music;
nine very intense minutes.
Unfortunately, F7 is embarrassing.
and the bombastic Si00 is only marginally interesting (the subbass cello line).
The Bach-ian church chorale Esc desc is amusing, like an amateurish attempt at what Constance Demby achieved with her Novus Magnificat, but
Th Red A, that starts from a similar premise, goes nowhere.
Psin AM is mildly interesting as techno music for chill-out rooms,
but
Au14 and Gr4 are just monotonous and Metaz Form8 is, again, embarrassing in its simplicity.
Sch.mefd2 and R Cazt sound like really bad remixes of a film soundtracks.
The music is a bit like the titles of their songs: it used to look cool that they used lower cases and digits, but now it simply looks annoying.
Plus (2020) was maybe meant as "B-side" material, leftovers that they didn't want to throw in the dustbin, but maybe it has more interesting ideas than Sign.
Many pieces are ridiculously childish, like
the musique concrete of DekDre Scap B or
the sci-fi videogame fantasia of 7FM ic.
Some are cute but not exactly groundbreaking, like
the twisted Bach-ian toccata Esle 0
or the battle between an
intense radio signal and a lethargic metronomic beat in Marhide.
Three longer pieces stand out, and make this album more than just a collection
of tedious leftovers:
the 15-minute Ecol4 sounds like an update of Morton Subotnick's vintage electronica, or the
free-jazz version of their digital soundscaping (but after seven minutes it doesn't have anything else to say and keeps going just because it's cheap to make a 15-minute piece);
the twelve-minute X4 juxtaposes an
acrobatically syncopated glitch polyrhythm and a sort of atonal accordion sonata;
and
the eleven-minute TM1 Open is a manically accelerated synth-pop ditty with, again, some jazzy touches here and there.