Autechre: Quaristice
Kickin it old-school with Autechre?
You don’t often hear people talking about Autechre as old school. Despite their obvious affinity for electro and old-school techno beats, they’ve been known for 15 years now as the guys riding the very front of the electronic wave. And since 1998’s LP5 (my and many others’ first exposure to them, since the predecessor Tri Repeatae++ had made them underground stars), they’ve been taking their unapologetic brand of software experimentalism farther than anyone else. Aphex Twin sort of petered out, Coil went back to singing, but Autechre got more and more dense and oblique.
Now I love abstract music, even abstract beats, but Confeld (the last LP I actually bought from them) lost me a little. It seemed to exist for its own sake, and that’s perfectly fine (I’m not going to get rid of it, it’s on 180 gram for fuck’s sake), but there’s not much enjoyment to be derived from listening to it. Some Autechre tracks require ages to decipher the location of the beat, but Confeld’s tunes didn’t always have something to decipher. Draft 7.30 came back to earth a bit, but Quaristice is really what people like to call a “return to form.”
Old school, if you will.
Almost all tunes have beats, save the bookending ambient tracks — and recognizable ones. Of course, there’s nothing four-on-the-floor about this, but the connection with electro is far more evident than it has been since Tri Repeatae++. They have clearly learned from their experiments: While nothing here really resembles throwing beats up against the wall and recording the shattered pieces, certainly the rhythms of “Chenc9″ were roughed up a little bit.
The occasional melody peeks out, as in “WNSN,” which resembles an Aphex-y tune. And the sounds themselves are still straight out of the future, satisfyingly artificial but with enough thud and smack to give them impact, unlike say EP7’s fuzzy bit-crunched sounds.
Overall, this is unlike anything they’ve done for a while, and structurally it’s unlike anything they’ve done ever: Twenty songs, all reasonably varied, and all (save the closer) 5 minutes or under. It’s also the most satisfying thing they’ve done in ages, and the first since Tri Repeata++ that is actually a blast to listen to front to back. If Autechre lost you in the past few years, come on back and kick it old school.
- Mike