Several things occurred to me yesterday as I was reveling in the wonderful, unexpected metallic stutterdrone that is English IDM duo Autechre’s forthcoming WARP records release Quaristice. The first of these was, for any and everyone who’ve clung to the straws of hope that the beloved to the point of cult near-celebrity status duo would end the toneless calculator experimentations of Confield and Untilted and return to making music– head-fucking, depth-plummeting, brain-twisting music but music nonetheless–finally, after what feels like a decade, are vindicated. Beyond vindicated, actually-yesterday, as the echo that at times wooshes in to fill the nature-abhorred vacuum of nullspace that Autechre actually allow room throughout Quaristice, I felt pretty damn chuffed for being the last of my circle of “when we say dance music we don’t mean indie rock” friends to still give a damn about Sean and Rob as Autechre.
Autechre’s Incunabula, from ages ago, is a hands-down brilliant record. Gorgeous, glorious, and very close to the windswept soundscapes and structures that formerly-acoustic singer-songwriters are now resorting to to plump their stuff with relevance. The rest of their back catalog is smart, metallic, demonic and brainy, slowly moving further and further away from those straight-up warehouse raves that handed them their start.
2001’s Confield was the first sign something was wrong with the sounds coming from Camp Autechre. Sounding fairly like an hour of hubcabs on a highway, it was the first thing they’d ever done that was almost universally hailed as not only unlistenable, but incredibly uninteresting.
The resulting tour, however, was cataclysmic in the best way possible, a way that only Autechre can pull off.
Then came Untilted, basically Autechre’s Metal Machine Music, and a tour that found them larking and joking on the fans who dared pay 25 bucks to see them turn the bass down, the treble up and hammer cats with tin cans before microwaving them.
I pretty damn near gave up, and would have continued to do so, if not for initial whispers ’round the WARPfire about this year’s forthcoming Quarisitice being not just a return to form, but a new and humbled beginning. Shorter songs, working as a unit, and at times flat-out raving.
And that it is.
Today’s PeeFork review of the Steve Aioli Aoki mix for Dim Mak served as another contextualizer, for me, of Autechre’s cultural place. With the watering-down and Dafting-up of what electronic music is and was, how many of the skinny jeans kids actually know who the hell Autechre is, and how many would care?
Quaristice forces care. “Simm” is the most immediately accessible song on the album, and one that immediately sums up the concepts Sean and Rob play with over the disc’s 20 tracks A dirty, twisted and tin electro-rave jam slowly distorts, becomes minimal and then, sensibly but emotionally, drops away into a wash of warm shoegaze.
This is the sort of stuff Autechre had seemingly abandoned, and it’s refreshing, warm, a bit scary, and entirely welcome. Nice to have y’all back.
Go ahead and do that thing-pre order a copy of Quaristice .
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