1) elyc9 7hres; 2) six of eight (midst); 3) xflood; 4) gonk tuf hi; 5) dummy casual pt2; 6) violvoic; 7) sinistrailab air; 8) wetgelis casual interval; 9) e0; 10) peal ma; 11) 9 chr0; 12) turbile epic casual, stpl idle.
General verdict: Messy, unpredictable, unreliable, and ultimately boring — so much more like the good old Confield-era Autechre to which we have gotten used to in this century.
Unfortunately, Autechreʼs second week of
residence at NTS seems to have... not exactly drain their inspiration, but
rather steer them back into their comfort zone of predictable unpredictability.
It is almost as if they suddenly realized that things were becoming way too structured and orderly, to the
extent that, God forbid, somebody other than a hardcore Autechre devotee could
begin to enjoy their music — and so NTS
Session 2 hastily corrects that embarrassing mistake by making the beats
more fussy and complex, the sonic effects more percussive and jarring, the programmed
melodies more dissonant and disjointed; in short, everything we have known,
loved, and hated about Autechre since Confield.
This means that, theoretically, all I could do
is try and make a few comments on individual tracks, but even those are hard to
come up with, since nothing about these particular compositions sounds
particularly fresh or original to my ears. Sometime after the first hour of the
usual casseroles clanging against each other in a randomly teleported kitchen,
the session begins to chill out: lengthy tracks such as ʽe0ʼ introduce an
element of ambience, which is a relief after all the chaos, but except for
giving your ears a break, there is nothing particularly interesting about that
ambience, either.
Since there is not a single track here that
managed to strike a chord with me, I will just say what I think about the five
of them that go over the ten-minute mark and, thus, must have been of special
importance to Booth and Brown. The first one, ʽelyc9 7hresʼ, is a good example
of the general judgement offered above: ten minutes of nearly melodyless
explosive electronic percussion, with no buildup whatsoever, so you learn all
about those festering sonic bubbles in the first twenty seconds and then have
to repeat your lesson for ten more minutes. The 15-minute long ʽviolvoicʼ sounds
like a fine-tuned digestive system of a stationary android: for fifteen
minutes, you get to hear him swallow, digest, burp, fart, and defecate, very
occasionally taking short quiet breaks as the next cartload of food is brought
in. (If it sounds intriguing on paper, believe me, it will not sound nearly as
intriguing once you get the actual hang of it). ʽe0ʼ is the first lengthy
ambient track, with a nice swirling, spiraling rhythm track that sounds like
nothing Brian Eno has nor already introduced to the world a dozen times. ʽ9
chr0ʼ is fifteen more minutes of messy electronic digestion, except in a
slightly more claustrophobic environment.
Finally, the pièce de résistance on the album
is arguably its final track — it has the (actually meaningful) word ʽepicʼ in
the title, it clocks in at 21:30, and its soundscape is clearly supposed to be
the most creepy and intimidating on the record, with a suspenseful vision of
some hellish alien environment that, for once, takes you outside the borders of
Autechreʼs computerized microcosm and transfers you into a parallel dimension.
I really wish I could enjoy it more than I do; unfortunately, twenty minutes of
an almost unchanging soundscape have largely outlived their value ever since we
learned all about the limits of the ambient genre in the Seventies and the
Eighties — and, even more unfortunately, the atmosphere in question does not so
much trigger any fresh associations in my mind as it reminds me of certain (not
half-bad, actually) generic soundscapes in old PC games (say, Phantasmagoria II: A Puzzle Of Flesh, if
you ever happen to remember that one from more than twenty years ago).
I can admit that there may be quite a few fans
out there who will enjoy the second session more than the first, since it so
much less rhythmic and, therefore, gives the riff-raff nothing to latch on. But
to me, it seems that at this point, even if Autechre have clearly ceased to be
a relevant force in modern music, they are still doing more interesting things
when they are doing them to a beat than when they are doing them to a primordial
soup.
Turbine is a big beautiful jellyfish propelling itself majestically along in the sea, overlayed with with a midnite beach gathering of witch folk dancing slow motion at a bonfire.
ReplyDelete