One of the goals of this Crater’s Edges series is to examine the evolution of a band or artist through their peak, to see what they picked up over the course of their career that leads them to make their masterpiece and how they move on – or don’t move on – afterwards. Writing about electronic music narrows this down to its purest form. Electronic musicians aren’t superstars, their personal lives aren’t packaged as a narrative, and if they have the equipment, then they can bust out albums without even setting foot in a studio, making for less music-label drama. In a ton of electronic genres there aren’t lyrics. It becomes a pure exercise of identifying the sounds and examining how those evolved.
Autechre, over these three albums, show a very tangible evolution in their sound. Their first album, Incunabula, was a compilation of previously-released tracks that cast them as meditative ambient techno artists in the vein of Global Communication or Orbital. They were pretty good at this. Some ambient techno artists preferred to deploy vocal samples, but Autechre kept it strictly instrumental and let their synths carry the tracks alongside breezy breakbeats. Nobody regards Incunabula to be a classic, but standout tracks like “Bike” had an exploratory, pastoral vibe that showed promise. When you compare it to their later albums, it sounds downright cute.
Amber is Autechre’s first album that was meant to be an album, and the long-player format allows them to settle down and stretch out. Slower tempos and simpler melody lines abound. This is the closest that the band ever gets to straight-up ambient music. Having listened to it a lot to soundtrack my end-of-the-day readings and unwind, I can tell you it works well for that. These songs just don’t draw a lot of attention to themselves.
If you’re listening to it intently, you won’t find a lot of missteps, either – it’s a very consistent album even though there are clear standouts such as “Montreal,” a lost early Aphex Twin song if there ever was one, and “Slip,” which contains the album’s most intricate melody. That said, they all drag along far too much. Again, this isn’t a problem if you regard the album as utilitarian and are just looking for a quiet soundtrack to throw on while you do something else. But the songs don’t have enough detail packed into them to justify their extended lengths (only two songs clock in under six minutes).
But there are signs that a different path awaits for them. “Glitch,” true to its title, hums along on a distorted computer-modem sample, pinging in and out of the speakers like a living thing. It’s not quite accurate to say it’s the best song on the album, as Autechre are still invested in their ambient techno sound and spend more time exploring the limits of that. But it is the song that gets the most mileage out of the least input. It’s a clear sign of where Autechre’s true talents lie.
The Peak:
Tri repetae is a massive and satisfying moment of things clicking into place. The ambient techno sound is gone, and now Autechre are pioneers of what we all recognize today as Intelligent Dance Music (or IDM, since like most critics I hate the name and will avoid using it). Most of what substantively changes on Tri repetae are the drumbeats, which have gone from gentle waves pushing the song along into mechanistic locked grooves. We now have something less reminiscent of a trip through space than a trip through a brutal Industrial Age factory.
As for the sounds, well… when Autechre made “Glitch,” the sound of a glitchy tape was such a novelty in their catalogue that they named the song after it. But now that sound is the standard. I don’t know if Autechre had studied the work of noisy contemporaries Panasonic, but a punishingly minimal song like “Rotar,” which rhythmically punches your eardrums with analog blurts, shares undeniable sonic elements with them. And through it all, the uneasy bass tones provide invaluable color. The way they use those low tones on this album to keep the tracks engaging throughout reminds me of a jazz-fusion trumpet, if you can believe that.
For the first time Autechre sounded like the Autechre as we know them today, fearlessly diving into abstraction, minimalism, and harshness. Even the song titles reflect this; they weren’t quite the inscrutable keyboard-smashes we’re used to, but they had at least stopped being real words. They had discovered their palette, and were now free to paint on it.
The Comedown:
Chiastic Slide is little-remembered and little-loved, standing in between the twin triumphs of Tri repetae and LP5. In practice, Autechre discovered an entirely new sonic world of intricate glitch constructions and then regressed a bit. Chiastic Slide sounds more like a precedent, a building-up to their magnum opus than an antecedent to it. Its sound reaches for a synthesis of Amber and Tri repetae, and though its feet are still planted in the latter, you can still see why they chose to push their sound to one extreme.
Take the opener and album standout “Cipater”: it has the loud and minimalist drum programming of latter-day Autechre, but those drums are allowed to sputter and clash with a plaintive synth melody. It works very well, but in any other Autechre album the priorities would be reversed. The melodies would muster their forces and ultimately fall short, scattered around a brutalist drum loop. “Cichli” strikes a better balance with its curious, lightweight synthesized harps existing alongside, but never quite melding with, the glitch bursts. It’s the sound of an unfettered soul making its way through a terrifying labyrinth, blissfully unaware of the danger.
The result is that Chiastic Slide is their most lucid full-length, a democratic album that’s about as appealing as you’ll ever make glitch music. Even with the grinding drums in play it’s the cutesiest Autechre release since Incunabula. But it just doesn’t hold my attention the way their best ones do; the band doesn’t go full-bore on anything here, and as a result the tracks don’t have the bracingly hypnotic quality that keeps me thrilled over nine whole minutes, which Autechre songs tend to extend to. This sounds like they’re coloring outside the lines of what they’re best at. It’s still a tense, tight listen, but I just prefer Autechre acknowledging that aspect of their music and deciding to double down on it. That’s when the truly mind-melting stuff happens.
But can you blame them for trying? When an artist’s magnum opus is also the album where they find their sound, their unique niche, it’s natural to see where that sound can extend. They would dive down the hole of opaque brutalism on subsequent releases LP5 and Confield, but Chiastic Slide had to happen so they knew to do that in the first place.
The Verdict:
A toughie – both albums are skirting around the edges of the territory where Autechre would stake their claim as visionary electronic artists, dabbling in things that made them sound more like their peers. But they’re good for different reasons. Amber is a relaxing bed while Chiastic Slide is a jogging companion.
I’m going with Amber today. It works better in the utilitarian sense of putting it on to work to without taking too much of your attention, and in fact works better that way. Plus as a second album of ambient techno, it’s about as refined and well-judged as Autechre would get in that genre before throwing the whole thing out and coming up with something new.
No comments:
Post a Comment