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Aborted Autechre Amazon Review

Last week I was browsing around Amazon.com and stumbled upon what may be the greatest treasure trove of customer reviews on the entire site. Autechre album reviews. Autechre (there are a variety of ways to pronounce it, and the duo, Sean Booth and Rob Brown, have said the name can be pronounced any way one sees fit) is an experimental electronic music act whose compositions tend to defy description. There’s is the sound of machines lumbering towards expression. It is music that has been called unique, difficult, complex, repetitive, alien, abstract, robotic, inhuman, minimalist, dark, strange, mathematical, architectural, atmospheric, frightening, structured noise, austere, intellectual, emotional, cold, beautiful, harsh, etc. Lots of words trying to express some kind of analog to an experience that is completely lacking in words.

As one reviewer so well summed up, just go with beauty, stop trying to describe it and just experience it for yourself. Which is probably the best course of action with Autechre, but that doesn’t mean many have put forth some incredible attempts at the art of describing Autechre. Some particularly inspired samples:

“Here, we’re no longer looking at landscapes/listening to soundscapes. Instead, Ae bring us inside the mind of the machine. It is a claustrophobic, disorienting, but totally fascinating experience. The machines we inhabit are definitely mortal, perhaps mortally wounded. They spit out strange pattering rhythms, and quirky, touching melodies. They suffer from Tourettes and Obsessive-Compulsive disorder. They undergo life-cycles from birth to death before our eyes/ears.

When I listen to a great soul singer like Marvin Gaye or Sam Cooke, I feel a surge of emotion that comes from a sense that they are singing about my life and my experiences, more eloquently than I ever could. I feel like I share a special human bond with them. Ae have managed a more daunting task; they’ve brought me as close as is humanly possible to feeling a special bond with machines. Amazing.” link

“Through digitally construed mediums, we’ve been allowed to taste something that our parents and their parents never imaged, actually allowing us to ride on the shaped experimental surf of some unnamed audio sea for the very first time. Its uttering amazing in that respect alone, with foreign worlds never before experienced finding themselves sonically cultivated in man’s existence.” link

“Autechre sounds like the the noises of the inner cortex of a robot, while Aphex Twin sounds like a kid playing in a robot factory.” link

“Someone once compared the music on Tri Repetae as the sound of machines chattering away to each other in the dark. If so, then this record is the sound of those machines trying to drag themselves out of a dark tarpit under the glare of acetylene lights on some forgotten evil robot construction site. link

“It depicts an alien, mechanical, vaguely threatening but overall unclear form that seems to be wriggling into existence spontaneously (i.e., constructing itself rather than being birthed). link

“It’s weird. It’s repetitive. It’s difficult. And yet, there’s something there. Something fascinating. Something alive. I have to learn it’s secrets. I have to listen again. Marge! Prepare my headphones! Open the listening room doors! Hold all my calls! I’m going back!!” link

“picture crystalline structures of great complexity slowly growing, but incorporating organic fragments in a way that seems random and orchestrated at once. Now translate that to sound.” link

“damn brahmin… this is inaa fine style. jagged beats spin and contort, go out of focus, come back together. sounds like milford grave ripping apart acid house and early hip hop and putting it all back together as cubist dub drug cult funk.” link

After being inspired by the multitude of astounding reviews, I attempted my own review of the Untilted album. However, I found myself drifting towards trying to describe Autechre in general, instead of the album in question. It got me thinking about the music though, and ever since, I haven’t been able to stop listening. Maybe once I can decide on a favorite album I’ll be able to craft a proper review. My aborted attempt, after the break.

First things first, listening to Autechre makes me feel special. Perhaps I am just stating the obvious about the listening experience for anyone who listens to challenging/experimental music, but I feel any review of this music should come with the caveat that I set out to accomplish something by working out the magnificent complexity and hidden wonder that is Autechre.

This is unabashedly NOT accessible music. At first. But for those who give it a chance, even when sometimes it feels that for sure, they have lost you this time, Autechre almost always rewards the patient, the invested, the diligent, the curious. The music listener who wants something more from the listening experience than just another confirmation or reconfiguration of that which they already know.

Untilted has been the most difficult Autechre album for me yet that I’ve eventually found a way into. Draft 7.30 and Confield remain, for the most part, closed to me as far as truly enjoyable experiences. But I probably just haven’t given them their due yet.

Augmatic Disport was my entry point into Untilted, so in this review I will do my best to describe it and leave the rest for some other time.

It is at about the 6:41 mark that Augmatic Disport first caught my attention. From a spiky field of sharp beat sounds and moaning synths an instantly satisfying and recognizable bass line begins to materialize and eventually completely overtakes the track. It is completely different than the first 6+ minutes of the track, yet its appearance is perfectly planned and masterfully prepared. The more I listen to the track, the more I can hear the motivation behind the snapping cacophony of sound spikes piercing the chaos of a dark field of data in a death-defying struggle to impart order onto Augmatic Disport’s plane of being.

A key aspect of Autechre’s greatness is the horrendously unique spaces that the duo’s music creates and occupies. No one else goes to these places of weighty mechanical emotion where man’s machines reflect back our striving, our struggle, our melancholy in a way that is completely new, completely foreign, and completely us. Many other reviewers here write of the emotion in Autechre’s music, and I agree, but I think it is important to clarify the emotion being expressed. It is the feeling of the machine looking back at us and feeling its version of what we think is only ours to feel. Autechre has somehow found a way to so occupy and infuse themselves in their machines of creation that the singular and self-standing power of emotion has been expressed in an other. I struggle to express how this occurs. It is truly one of those things that must be experienced for one’s self, and is always reduced in the telling. There is story in this music, but it is so abstracted, so alien, so recontextualized into another species’ mode of expression that any story applied must be personal and unique to each listener. But the emotion is universal. The feelings that are stirred are not even human. They are more than human. They are that which all can feel, freed from the anthropomorphism of the endlessly reconfigured human song structure into the domain of man’s machines. Our machines already struggle and feel the pain of existing in a world that is not theirs (yet). Autechre lets us see this truth, perhaps more clearly and more presciently than any but the most talented computer scientists and roboticists can see.

Providing a perspective of reversal for most of us, listening to Autechre lets us feel how the machine feels: that opening the mind is a completely valid and rewarding path towards opening the heart. Autechre: Amor Ex Machina.