Autechre - Quaristice

Scree, whoosh, burble… you know the score

The very definition of an acquired taste, you will already know whether you find Autechre’s endless glitchy circlings round the Warp bubble an unassailable emanation of the music of the spheres, or a formless waste of tiresome knob-twiddling. If you fall into the former camp, you’ll thrill once more to the alternately transcendent and tense distorted samples, synth washes and beats like the heart of a small frightened animal that fill their ninth album. If the letter, you’ll find nothing particularly new here to convince you. Occasionally, there’s a harder, streeter sound about Quaristice than previous albums, faintly recalling Aphex Twin or DJ Shadow. Often though, as it burbles along in its odd bio-mechanical way, you don’t (and this isn’t really a criticism) fully register its unassuming presence.

Autechre’s music, is, as Thom Yorke divined, something like the background radiation of 21st Century life, beauty and confusion in equal measure humming along to itself. It just depends whether you’re happy listening to the static, or feel compelled to look for a definite station.

Warp | WARPCD 333

Reviewed by Emily Mackay
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