Warp Records recently delayed shipment of 1,000 special edition albums of Auctechre’s ninth album (Quaristice) because the intricate photo etching process on their steel cases took longer than expected. The finished product looks beautiful even as a picture. Quaristice’s cover was created by The Designers Republic, who also designed Warp Records’ website and the infamous “X-Ray” cover for Supergrass’ self-titled album. All this artistic and product elitism visually encapsulates Auctechre’s indefinable musical career with its stark tracking of characters juxtaposed against nodes of dense text. The avant garde typography mirrors Autechre’s own ascetic approach to music, whether you stamp the duo of Rob Brown and Sean Booth as elder paragons of IDM or not. Booth and Brown’s new glitchy experiment is bursting with so many microscopic sound fluctuations and burbling detours that many people will be left scratching their heads from chasing sounds. You can’t hope to discover too much microcosmic cohesion in Auctechre’s de rigueur, you can only hope to grapple their complete soundscape.
This isn’t new territory for Autechre’s 20-plus-years of unintelligible music creations. Autechre has mined this approach to illustrious effect on the stark Cornfield. That album’s themes were pulled through a musical maelstrom—the proverbial camel pushed through the eye of the needle. Recent albums failed to reach the kinetic and focused milieu that swarmed around Cornfield, although Untitled’s pinging electronic beats came close.
Quaristice doesn’t mark a return to form, because Autechre dismantle their formula with every new release. You may consider electronic music that’s meant to be only played in the bedroom to be staid and emotionless. Autechre aim to prove the naysayers wrong with the warm synth ambience of opening track, “Altibzz.” It’s the constant echo in a chamber organ’s liturgical soup. “The Plc”’s electro beats warble and wash out into digital distortion.
An industrial mid-section whip-cracks and chortles into clipped vocal beats. “IO” is a speech synthesizer nightmare alongside programmed drum blasts. It’s one of many tracks on Quaristice that belie the album’s long running time, moving away from detached glitch experimentation by resembling something more than quirky swathes of sound malfunctioning into your ears.
There is plenty of experimentation to be had though, on clockwork tracks like “Perlence,” which split the difference between skittering backbeats and gooey dub glitch. Sewers of sounds rub up against electronic minutia. “SonDEremawe” is nothing more than a 1:21 minute ambient piece and “Simm” sounds like an assembly line pummeling digitized blocks into spiders that arc and short circuit. Just before you think you have the track pegged, seesawing tone bursts take over.
For good measure “Steels” and its coughing engine and phaser blasts could be Decepticon theme song. “rale” is by far one of the most intriguing assemblages on the disc. Dark and foreboding synths percolate in a blissful space jam. These types of intricate descriptions can go on forever, something the actual songs don’t do. Quaristice holds the distinction as being the only album to have mostly songs that are shorter than the average 7 to 8 minute Autechre song. Despite the ostensible attention to the listener this time out, Quaristice is still a tough nut to crack. You’ll need a few hyper-focused listens to let it all sink in. At least this time the UK duo give us something more interesting to bend our minds around.
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