Autechre - Quaristice

Author

Paul Lindsay

Published

Wednesday 12th March

Warp

Left-field producers don’t come more revered or more ingenious than English duo Autechre. Rochdale natives Rob Brown and Sean Booth are perhaps one of the best known and most high profile acts on the Warp Record label this been their 21st year of making music after forming in 1987 when they started trading mixtapes between each other. Following these mixtape trades they began collaborating together with a heavy emphasis on blending the old and new both in ideas and the choice of equipment they use. Autechre’s work spans over 20 releases to date as well as remixing notable artists such as Stereolab, Tortoise, and Surgeon. These releases have won many fans including Radiohead Thom Yorke who cites the duo’s 2001 release Confield as a influence on Kid A and Amnesia.

Their current release Quaristice is a chaotically blissful journey through 20 tracks of the mind bending sound explorations. In recent times Autechre have deserted their melodic tendencies that was once a staple approach of their early work for more calculated and deliberate experimentations with more mechanical sounds and content that has been the embodiment their latter releases. The tracks on Quaristice are a conflict of lapping, swirling, and stabbing electronic and machine sounds that are shrewdly and intelligently forced to ally and betray one another in the same instance before acrimonious peace treaties are signed and the conflicts are brought to their sometimes calm but often awkward resolves. Autechre’s music continually seeks to bend cognitive processes and redefine musical schemas in fresh and exciting ways in the face of an industry plagued by prefabrication and materialism. This is in no uncertain terms a beast of an album.