Autechre
Draft 7.30

Are these two still human beings? There's no clearer answer than the sixty-plus minutes of "Draft 7.30." Stop. End. Complete evolution, those few shreds of skin that still covered them have completely detached, their creation is no longer of this world. Even titles and covers are no longer of this world; absence of emotions, total asepticism, annihilation of feelings is what the two machines communicate now. Perhaps they can't communicate anything else: it's not even 'abstract' or experimental stuff anymore: it's simply music composed by cold and apathetic machines. And machines don't feel emotions. It's well known.

Who else could have created "P.:NTIL" and who could have conceived its title? Or the madness of "Tapr"? It’s true, all those self-indulgences like irregular rhythms, digital errors, industrial dissonances, vandalism that even Steven Stapleton couldn’t match.. but do you think something like "6IE.CR" is made with the heart? Not to mention "Xylin Room" and that incredible trip that is "Surripere", remnants of old-school electro, resurrected in digital format, clearly with lots of sub-bass, syncopated beats, 808.. but also rhythms with minimal progress, others more click and pops, others still rotten and freezing cold - that we can no longer even call rhythms, much less sounds, rather signals or programming errors - confirming a humanity now gone).

Sometimes machines can also malfunction, and then they come up with "IV VV IV VV VIII", which incidentally is the most devastating and terroristic beat branded Ae, second only to "Calbruc" from that "Chiastic Slide" that only saw the early stages of the dehumanization of the two Englishmen). Sometimes they work better and try to bring out some emotion, some soul-stirring melody, rhythms with a human touch, basically that stuff like "Shine On You Crazy Diamond". At least they try when they program "Theme Of Sudden Roundabout" and "VL AL 5": dirtily filthy tones at very low resolution (not 8bit but almost), harsh and decomposed hammering, melodies (or rather signals) alien-like, ultra-precise micro-finishes and geometric glitches (in an equally quantized evolution and without the slightest touch of human error) is all that comes out.

Aseptic chaos, arhythmic, amelodic, more simply cynical. After all, they are machines. Machines that can create, emulate, respond to certain inputs, perhaps the one of emulating something already existing: on "V-Proc" they effectively throw out a drumming that says Dj Shadow (and it screams it loudly) but then they reveal what they are, and here we go with deformed glitches, industrial clangors (but industrial in the true sense of the word, not the genre) metallic echoes and counter-echoes, anxious noise-making, paranoia, slowed down, sped up and re-slowed sounds that appear, disappear, and reappear only to vanish into nothingness, sent into orbit to then re-land: the precision is robotic, the intelligence is artificial.

Perhaps Rob Br... the two Autechre, had time to do something, act when the transformation was not entirely complete: "Reniform Puls", which even has a title now more regular, is that something: linear rhythms, synthesizers that draw mysterious, Gothic arabesques and scenarios of nostalgia (is it an emotion?), but now it's too late, because the human rate is very low, and what plays this is halfway between chiptune synths and worn-out toy keyboards, along with the usual glitch virtuosity, reaffirming that no, they are no longer human. The verdict is confirmed at the end of the work, where the track abandons those few remnants of melody to make way for pure rhythmic abstraction, allowing these remnants (echoes, feedback, dissonant and disheveled fragments) of those now unrecognizable notes to serve as rhythmic surplus / (non)scenic landscape, anticipating what is in all respects a machine-driven little concert: two minutes of digital sound-making, never so distant, never so inhuman, closing the evolution and the grandiose, wonderful, exciting work, the negative of this splendid change.  

But are we really so sure that machines don't feel emotions? Or that they are worse than humans?

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