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48 of 54 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Who can number the grains of sound by the seashore?, April 19, 2005
"Untilted" is another fine installment in the Autechre canon.
While their music has been called chaotic by detractors, any electronic musician who has attempted to emulate Autechre's unique sound will tell you that their programming is fiendishly complex and very, very precise. Randomly programming beats into a drum machine will no more get you Autechre's sound than dribbling paint on canvas will get you a Jackson Pollock painting.
This stuff obviously isn't easy listening, but it isn't really esoteric, either. Autechre are simply exploring the physical properties of sound, especially those liminal points--so dispraised in popular music--where a sound moves across the traditionally policed categorical distinctions between melody, rhythm, and texture. We hear texture becoming rhythm and rhythm becoming melody. Hearing such music can be discomfiting because there are no functional parts to recognize ("Hey, where's the bass line?") but only particles of sound arranged into new constellations (just as in a Pollock painting representational space has been left well behind). Such discomfort, however, is only a precursor to the excitement of experiencing the world anew--free from the dull constraints of habit and expectation. Autechre makes new music, but, more importantly, they give us new ears for all music. They make music itself new.
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25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Still godly, May 14, 2005
Decades ago, a famous sportswriter, apparently tired of criticisms of his favorite sport, wrote "baseball is dull only to those with dull minds". While that point is certainly debatable when it comes to the national pastime (this guy wrote before the days of three-hour games), it applies equally well to the work of Autechre. This English duo (Sean Booth and Rob Brown, if you want to get all specific) has spent the past decade or so composing some of the most original and experimental electronic music ever made (oh, screw it, this is some of the most original and experimental MUSIC ever made, period), winning a small army of enthusiastic converts while alienating others who apparently can't figure out how an hour of glitches and bleeps constitutes music. That said, there aren't a lot of artists out there who can consistently come out with something at least interesting, and whatever one thinks of them, Autechre do manage to challenge perceptions and screw up minds with each successive release. In spite of some accusations, whatever else Autechre may be, they're not dull.
Anyway, this all leads us to Untilted, the eighth album in the Autechre canon and one that should please all those looking for their customary blend of bizarrely arranged bleeps, sweeps, and creeps. Despite occasionally bringing in sounds somewhat similar to the dronings on an MRI machine, Untilted is a surpisingly musical release, occasionally managing to sound catchy even amidst a flurry of determinedly abstract time signatures and song structures. At the same time, Untitled is still an Autechre release, and as such the focus remains on feeding your brain first and foremost. As you'd expect from the group that brought us Tri Repetae ++ and Confield, intellectually severe, high-speed musical calculus is the order of the day.
I personally found this album to be somewhat more instantly gratifying than its predecessor Draft 7.30, but that doesn't mean there aren't voluminous reams of complexity for you to decipher. Tracks open with a frenzy of spastic beats and pummelling percussion before gradually evolving into slower, more atmospheric pieces without sacrificing Autechre's trademark mathematical precision. Dense, rapid-fire sensory overload steadily gives way to hypnotic drones that are only somewhat interrupted by the jagged sounds that skid over them. Booming backbeats, out-of-time glitches, and even some subtle melodic underpinnings are interspersed into bizarre, ever-shifting sonic landscapes. New and fascinating uses for the drum machine are repeatedly discovered, with slice-and-dice programming (especially on the brilliant Augmatic Disport) that almost redeems the machine's use on countless boy-band atrocities. And the epic, 15-minute closer Sublimit cycles through every trick in Autechre's book, easily ranking among the most convincing displays of their demented genius as it staggers and stutters through a dizzying array of beats and textures.
In the end, Untilted is a quintessential Autechre album: strange, abstract, unique, and sure to be divisive. However, as a fan of Sean and Rob's work, I for one wouldn't have it any other way. While the forthcoming Meshuggah full-length will probably ending up grabbing my coveted album of the year designation, for now Untilted holds the top spot.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Music that doesn't exist in this universe, April 20, 2005
With this release, Autechre has successfully merged the abstraction of ep7 and Gantz Graf with the minimalist beauty of Amber, or even Confield. It's not overly dense, as some of their more experimental work (experimental being a VERY relative term here) tends to be. "Ipacial Section" and "Augmatic Disport" are particulary stunning, in terms of how those two tracks evolve and shift. What would be called a "change up" in a conventional song structure is more of an inversion or transformation, and it's done in such a way that would be damned hard, if not impossible, to reproduce with acoustic instruments.
And that is the key to grasping what Autechre is doing- it's not "cheating" as many traditional musicians say about electronica, by programming everything and not actually playing an instrument. Booth and Brown seem to be using their tools appropriately, exploring what can be done when traditional structure can be discarded, when the drummer doesn't have to keep a particular time, and the guitarist doesn't have to know what key the song is in. These aren't songs. They're constructs made of sound, and I was able to "get" Autechre much better once I began to think of it in those terms. The mental image I get most frequently is of music that exists in a space independent of any other reality, in a direction that you can't point to.
It's definitely not for everyone, and that's not a criticism- I know many people with great, eclectic musical tastes who don't care for this at all. But if you spend the time and find that you do get it, the payoff is so worth it. This one in particular is one of their bests, and a culmination of the stylistic changes they've been trying out over the last few releases. Some will say to try earlier, more accessible releases first if you are new to Autechre. "Untilted" is well executed enough that anyone who will approach it openly should dive right in.
One last thing- be sure to use good equipment, preferably a pair of Sennheiser or Grado headphones. Most portable CD players have such mediocre sound ouput that you are much better off encoding to a high-variable bitrate and listening with an iPod, or a headphone amp connected to a component CD player. There are subtleties that you WILL miss listening to it over computer speakers, cheap (under $50) headphones or cheap department store boom boxes. This is true of all Autechre releases, and this one in particular.
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