Gescom
Minidisc

When it comes to Autechre, we already know from the start that we'll have to deal with ideas and sounds that are never conventional or easily conformable: in the case of "Minidisc" - the only full-length by the Gescom collective (of which the duo are the main minds) - this uniqueness is multiplied by a thousand (a figure that is anything but hyperbolic). The album discussed here is indeed one of the most experimental artifacts ever written on any format.

Experimental even in this format itself, given that the format in question is none other than Sony's epoch-defining flop, the minidisc. In fact, this is the first album intended ONLY for this format (and not as an alternative to CD and vinyl editions, as typically happened in its short life), although a much more accessible reissue on CD has recently been published.

Designed to be played in random mode, and released in 1998 on the radical OR, "Minidisc" is simply an avant-garde record for its release date (and in many ways it still is today), consisting of 45 tracks dissected into 88 micro-tracks, almost all of them very short and with equally random titles, 88 tracks that, almost as if to challenge the supposed technological dimension of the Minidisc, ooze digital from every microsecond, from every micro wave, from every noise assault, wrapped as they are in that not too reassuring magma of dark glitch textures, excessively processed sounds, gratuitous noise, nervous and disjointed fractures, microsound apocalypse, and expressionist canvases with the not insignificant side effect of mental fog: someone might call it organized chaos.

The atmospheres are cold, cryptic, inhuman, labyrinthine, and channel historical influences (concrete, industrial, acousmatic) into much more technological - but no less free - glitch/laptoptronica/idm deviations, unfolding highly complex and destructured random evolutions, inexpressible cankers of amorphous noise, morbid permutations of noise aimed at auditory collapse and at the same time a displacement of pure Sound, far from certain cloying academic exercises model Empreintes DIGITALes (although there are more human interludes between ambient and electro, more typical of what are Gescom's classic coordinates).

Definitely anarchic sounds, multidirectional interweaving, unheard levels of abstraction, and a total rejection of any musical rule is the result of the careful sound analysis regurgitated by the English project, which here confirms the quality of its artistic path - we are in the midst of the inhuman evolution involving the post-Chiastic Slide Autechre - aiming now more than ever at an intelligibility of intent and a look at a future probably still distant today, not only trying to create what has not yet been created but particularly coining an entirely new way of conceiving the common 'music', an immaterial, inorganic, abstract way.

Beware of urban legends and gigantic hype, the true genius of Autechre resides right here.