Matthew Ingram's excellent write-up of the new Autechre lp (as much a career to date overview as a review of exai) in the latest issue of The Wire made me want to reconsider their oeuvre.... which I'd always distantly respected but never really loved ... indeed most of the CDs I'd got rid of a few years ago in a fit of hardhearted purging...
Thought I'd start at the beginning and go all the way through...
I never fully registered before that Autechre started out as near-enough hardcore with "Cavity Job" - nail-gun breaks and acideous gabble and sample-smear riffs, not a million miles from DJ Trax and Rabbit City and Edge#1 'Cmpnd' (very Autechre-ish title now i think of it). Makes perfect sense, though, seeing as Booth & Brown were electro kids into graffiti, just like your Danny Breaks and Liam Howletts and Hypes and so forth.
The Legofeet stuff (which I guess is strictly speaking before the beginning) is protean and protozoan -- sketches and doodles that are fractured intimations and hinting glimpses-forward to jungle, IDM, and the avant-beatizm of such as Req (Skint's purveyor of deconstructed hip hop)
Now onto the albums proper...
Req = very Autechre-like in its conversion of B-boyism ("wreck") into something ciphered and abstracted and also graphically pleasing...
1 comment:
They've always held a special place for me, up there with Aphex as the sacred cows of electronica. Ive been going through their work over the last year or so myself. I'd always held 'Tri Repeate' and 'Garbage' to be their best stuff, but Ive been leaning more and more towards LP5 as their quintessential work, the perfect balance between the the traditional sequenced approach and the generational software methods that have pretty much dominated their stuff ever since.
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