Autechre - Quaristice

Don’t be fooled by Autechre. They might look like a pair of stuck-up, noodling electroknobbers, but Rochdale’s finest purveyors of ambient noise-based rhythms are on their ninth album. In fact they’ve been going since 1987, which technically makes them older than the IDM genre they’re meant to have co-invented, as well as only slightly younger than electronic music itself. Their fluffy tenacity earns them respect across the board, and rightly so: anyone who can stick around as long as the gap between two Kraftwerk albums deserves a medal, even if it is a bit of a crappy one.

Autechre will go down, alongside Aphex Twin and Squarepusher, as the act who most finely encompass the sound of Warp Records, and ‘Quaristice’ is a comforting continuation of this trend. Lovingly homemade patches burble over clickety rhythms, stop, start again, go a bit slower, then stop. Everything on show resembles more a sketch than a composition, expressing an intention to paint soundscapes and push new techno-boff boundaries, rather than provide anything resembling a tune. It’s all chin-strokingly nice, but don’t even think about looking for a ‘song’: Autechre don’t do songs, and never really have done.

The lack of continuation in ‘Quaristice’ is where Autechre fall down. The snippets of sounds which you might like are quickly washed away into a froth of something you probably don’t like. Sadly, the only constant in this effort is the distinct similarity between this and their previous eight long players, some of which are noticeably more appealing and creative. The stop-start approach here is irritating and elusive, like watching someone flicking through infinite TV channels, looking for a documentary on Chinese steam engines, insisting on saying ‘no, not that one’ after every inevitable disappointment. The sketch-show-like treatment of composition, along with their impenetrable title policy, renders the individual components impossible to analyse, so it’s all very simple: you’ll either like it sitting in your collection or you’ll hate it. Best of all, you’ll know which side of the fence you’ll be sitting on before you’ve listened to it.

‘Quaristice’ has been released in a limited edition steel case with photo etchings and other nice stuff like that. There are 1,000 of them, they have sold out, and it all smacks of cynicism. Knowing of a loyal army of Warpheads to back them up, Autechre have cobbled together something consisting of 10% ability and 90% reputation, and will soon be flying around the globe with it. And who can blame them? When it comes to this kind of thing, Autechre are part of the furniture. They even helped design some of it. Nowadays, after two decades of little progression, they’re more like the awkward, chintzy lampshade in the corner that no-one can quite bear to throw out. Once a fruity trendsetter for the likes of Two Lone Swordsmen and Prefuse 73, at the moment it’s hard to convince anyone why they should bother.