Autechre
Amber

Before and after "Amber," Autechre have or would probably have done better.

Yet, for strictly emotional reasons or even for the abyss that a track like "Foil" continuously reveals to me, this is their album in which I find myself the most, right from the first track (still "Foil"), from that continuous sound, in its own way magmatic, which extends with minimal variations like a carpet on which the remaining sounds (not many, to be honest) settle, gradually contributing to create the alien landscape that this album attempts to describe.

Alien, but not too much, especially when compared to what they would have subsequently done (increasingly metallic and deconstructed sounds of ever more difficult fruition and/or assimilation). Here the landscape, however, still retains human traces, an attempt to coexist with these two souls perhaps even from the cover image, a photo of some place in the Cappadocia region of Turkey, a land which, in its own way, is alien and fairy, but still earthly.

Autechre would not have would have no longer made covers with earthly images, lost (always and perhaps still) in their journey to who knows where, the same journey I managed to glimpse when, passing through the alleys of Naples next to a record store, I heard for the first time the dark and continuous sound of "Foil."

Going in and buying the album was a moment, without even knowing who Autechre was: it was the first electronic CD I bought, I would buy others, I would fall in love with other sections of Amber ("Montreal", "Silverside", "Yulquen", "Nil", the drops from the stalactites in the cave of "Further", the dark threat in "Teartear"), I would discover after years, in a distracted listen, but evidently not too much, the beautiful and minimal variations/embellishments of "Piezo") but "Foil" would always remain in my heart, so similar to me, so much so that it became my nickname somewhere in the universe of the internet, but that is another story…