Autechre
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008Very excited tonight to be going out to see lifetime-favourite abstract-experimental electronic musicians Autechre play Vancouver. Champions of difficult music, they’ve been using generative processes, fractal algorhithms, incremental melodies and stocastic beats to explore a field of subtle sonic potentials which might be described as inducing artificial intelligence computers into hallucinatory grand mal seizures… Like other recent albums, their newest Quaristice shatters hip hop, introduces irritation to ambient, a cold romance to industrial, and dismissive disdain to the earlier IDM title… In fifteen years of making records they have consistently done everything possible to remain uncategorizable, while persisting as one of the field’s most respected producers. Their music is one of the strongest influences on my visual art, synaesthetically, and are the only band which still compel my fan-boy devotion to collect a copy of every album release - nearly impossible to do, as they also prolifically put out mysteriously uncredited (and always extraordinarily difficult to listen to) side projects under the umbrella of Gescom, an anonymous group project run through their Skam label.
Time to run… If you too wish there was still some fine art in popular music, and you don’t know Autechre already, please accept the strongest of recommendations from SWC and Bachelor Machines…
post script: playing a surprisingly dance-oriented set, below, Autechre bleep the bleeping bleeps out of Richards on Richards, Vancouver BC. April 8, 2008.
