*Warning* - don't read this if music throws banana skins at your mental pathwaysRipped off U:mack's post at ie-dance.
"Alongside fellow electronic mavericks and Warp Recordsstable mates Aphex Twin and Boards Of Canada, Autechrestand out like supernovas amid one of music'scustomarily starless constellations. Not that you'llfind the Sheffield-via-Manchester duo of Sean Boothand Rob Brown gracing the pages of Heat magazine anyday soon. Shrewd, sphinx-like and fiercely protectiveof their music, they nonetheless remain tantalizing,even awe-inspiring enigmas.
In truth, the plaudits and reverence with whichAutechre have been showered throughout a fourteenyear-long career are simply the fruits of creativeintegrity and consistently fearless experiment. Not tomention an oft-overlooked playfulness and a rarelymentioned musicality.
There are few artists operating in contemporary musicwhose work could be accurately described as'pioneering'. Though they'd doubtless balk at theterm, Autechre probably have more claim on the labelthan most. For theirs is music that, on first listenat least, appears to be without influence a richhermetic sound world that is a law unto itself,adhering only to the constraints of its own internallogic.
But music, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and even'pioneers' have to draw on precedents. In Autechre'scase that means dance music ?more specifically 80s USelectro. Indeed, the notoriously contentiousappellation 'Intelligent dance music', under whosebanner their early albums ?1993's Incunabula inparticular - was blithely shunted, is not entirelywithout relevance here.
Autechre's music may seem, on one level, to be more aproduct of the laboratory than the dancefloor, butstudy more closely their trademark moir? of collapsingelectronic counterpoints, melting wave forms andominous digital thrums and you find ghosts prowlingthe microprocessors. Sly Stone's convulsive drummachine booty shake is there, if you look hard enough,as are imprints of Miles Davis's turn-of-the-70'sgroove abstractions and, naturally, the terpsichoreanthump of vintage electro avatars Mantronix, Cybotron,Grandmaster Flash and their ilk.
The Cape Canaveral from which their wild electronicorbit launched back in 1991, electro still hasvestigial impact on Autechre's hyper-processedsignature and - though it's often overlooked, souncompromising and often overwhelming are their sounddesigns - at the root of the duo's entire output liesa sensual human pulse. In short, Autechre have thefunk.
There is beauty in their music too ?a liquid, alienexotica that's as sensual as it is scientific. Lagoonsof intoxicating acid ambience shimmer decorously evenamid the fury of their classic 1995 Tri Repetae albumand beguiling, crystalline melody lines underpin eventhe most outr? microchip demolition derby on morerecent benchmark longplayers like 1998's LP5 or 2001'sConfield. All of which sets the scene for their latestepistle,Untilted.
The follow up to 2003's critically lauded Draft 7.3,Autechre's eighth full album is a dense yet elegantlyexpansive work that ripples with some of the duo's keysignatures: epileptic rhythmic counterpoints, complex,spiralling melodic cells, immense tectonic shifts inthe low end, dagger sharp glacial crackles in theupper registers. But it also hits straight between theeyes with a raw, almost live-in-the-room immediacy.'We're really cranked up and in a totally differentgear at the moment'. Sean Booth discloses, inreference to the new album. 'It feels like we'reworking in a quite radically different way now; not somuch in terms of the final output ?I'll let othersjudge that - but we're getting ideas down a lotquicker now, trying to make the most of what timewe've got'.
It's an urgency which manifests on the thudding LCC,or the equally unyielding opening passages of IpacialSection, a strange bass end warmth cushioning whatsounds like dysfunctional kitchen utensils trying todisco dance. Pro Radii, meanwhile, is the album's mostthunderous piece ?it's harsh reverberations might besomething inspired by (or even recorded in) the tumultof an Iraq war fire fight, with blasts of percussiveclamour and disturbing shards of human noisespasmodically flashing into frame.
But there are less frenetic moments ?both openingtracks cede to more restful extended codas and eventhe squirming time signature of Augmatic Disporteventually evolves into a dreamily spacious dub pulse.Elsewhere, those electro influences hove firmly intoview on the almost jaunty Fermium ('That_s just ashout-out, really, to people who know. We can't getaway from the fact that we're DJs,' Booth confesses)and while Iera and The Trees forage madly butmeticulously on house and techno's furthest shores,Sublimit is nothing short of clipped space funk.
Those song titles, as with all Autechre designations,seem drawn from a vocabulary as rich, particular andabstruse as the music they frame.'There's definitely a bit of writers like Edward Lear,EE Cummings and Lewis Carroll in there - even someRoald Dahl from when I was a kid', Booth admits. 'Mymum used to read me Edward Lear all the time'.
Indeed, there's an undeniably Lear-like charm to allAutechre's work; a sense of the joyfully surreal thatis further proof that Booth and Brown are sentienthuman beings, not robots. In fact, Autechre are one ofthe few operative musical units who can genuinelyclaim to be exploiting the synergy between technologyand aesthetics, pushing the proverbial envelopeprincipally as artists, not lab-coated technicians. Inthe process they are making some of the only truly21st century music yet minted.
