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It is possible to imagine Autechre's discography as a process of progressive disintegration of the gravitational bonds of certain bodies whose mass is always greater and increasingly rarefied. To put it less poetically, like a solar system. From the early records, more human, more regular, more defined (from Incunabula to Tri Repetae) to the more glitchy and irregular range, dense with satellite-EPs (from Chiastic Slide and LP5 to the depths of 2010, the minor Oversteps), the highest zone of the duo, where attention to detail mixes with an inspiration that must have seemed inexhaustible. From Exai, things, and those who know will agree with me, become less and less dense, distances increase with exponential vertigo, and each record is increasingly immense.
This year, from deep space, comes an unprecedented monolith, a dark slab from the unconscious of the cosmos, a cold and expanded Oumuamua. First of all, appreciate the nature of Autechre's recent outputs, less and less compromising, increasingly simply but truly alien. This behemoth consists of four sessions, each two hours long, for a steep total duration of eight hours, double that of the already prohibitive elseq.
The sound disintegration continues, as I said. The tracks are increasingly gaseous, more formless, more detached from human hand. It feels like observing foreign, non-Euclidean mechanisms. Unfathomable laws and structures. Already the first track, t1a1, offers a fully hostile overview, a forest of immense reflections of sheets crushed by diverted masses. Fortunately, all tracks differ from each other while maintaining a cohesive identity. bqbqbq is a maze in which it is barely possible to glimpse a spectrum of some piece by Richard D. James. It is useless, clearly, to continue describing the other tracks.
What's different from previous works? My suspicion, perhaps destined to remain so, is that the two are increasingly less hands-on with the monsters they produce, leaving the sounds themselves to get involved. Already in elseq I had a feeling, and here the titles of many tracks (clustro casual, dummy casual pt2 – an incredible track, by the way, etc.) push me more to believe that the computerized component of their music is becoming increasingly prevalent. Like giving input to a system equipped with partially random values and then tweaking the aleatory result. It's rigorous to arrive at this, and those familiar with their production will agree with me. Of the triad in this style (Exai-elseq-NTS), this is the greatest. Alongside undoubtedly weaker tracks, like the shorter ones or turbile epic casual, stpl idle (generally the less interesting parts are the second half of the first session, along with the second "volume," except for violvoic, dummy casual, and e0; I would suggest skipping from l3 ctrl directly to splesh on the first listen) we find incredible masterpieces like debris_funk, tt1pd, perhaps the most monstrous thing from Autechre, a completely out-of-control sound swarm, ending with the biblical drone of all end, end disk, not a melodramatic title as some might think but a simple command to impart to a program, severing docile channels. Only the bittersweet idea remains that nothing more than this will be right to release under the name Autechre, only increasingly broader fragments of sounds in total acceleration on the present – they have not accustomed us to anything less.
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