Leave Autechre alone!

Well, i spent last evening over at a friends place who got Autechre´s new album as a download from bleep. We listened to this 20 tracked thing called "Quaristice" three times. It was a bumpy night.

Being children of the Breakdance generation, the Autechre sound grew from late bleep/clonk inspired music into a monstrous wall of sound that evoked breakdancing robots in an alien factory on sunday.
Or, considering that they named a song after a small German village near the Frankfurt Airport (Bad Vilbel) they got all inspired by farmers and dung after taking the wrong exit on the Autobahn.

For me their absolute highlight came with their third album "Tri Repetea". A gigantic album that managed to create and destroy entire worlds in just one hour.

With this Autechre invented a sound that was not made for gazing into a lava-lamp. Much more would it encourage you to smash that damn lamp and rub your fingers in the wax, the oil and the splintered glass.

After that, their sound would get more and more abstract. Losing any form of organic flow and humanity, Autechre became the sound of machines programming machines. Math music. And I always hated math!

From "LP5" onwards, which came out ten years ago, the perception of Autechres music would be comparable to the endless discussions of the David Lynch Oeuvre. You either "got" it or you didn´t.

"Quaristice", is somehow a self fulfilling prophecy as nearly everone was expecting a return to a more accesible sound.
And this is - partly - coming true. Although I think that we get a sort of mix/mash-up of Autechre ideas. Ambient pieces stand inbetween rattling and clanging collages.

While the album as a whole is more "listenable" than some of their recent efforts, I still find it hard to get into the experience.

I will get myself to listen to it more often to find out if something has yet to "click". But on the other hand, apart from a few impressive tracks, I found the whole album too incohesive and I had a hard time to keep up the interest during my second listening.

But enough of MY rants! Thanks to youtube we now get the equivalent to "leave Britney alone" for the "idm"-set. You want a video run through of all twenty track, complete with emo-glasses-wearing-kid? You got it:

And to top it all there is also the response (sadly without picture) to make it even more hilarious.

LEAVE AUTECHRE ALONE!