Untilted

by

Autechre

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"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.

I love and bow down to Autechre's brilliance as much as the next guy, but this album is subpar to their previous efforts. I can't criticize the direction they go in, because they are on a different plane, but I can say that I don't get anywhere near as much out of this record as practically anything else by them.

I miss the melodies of Tri Repatae and the layers from Amber,... the driving rhythmic sliding of the intense drum work of LP 5 and EP 7. Every album of their's has had an intensity and a drive that comes out of nowhere and sounds like nothing else. Admittedly, I can't think of any other artist that sounds like this album, but that doesn't necessarily make it compelling.

I'm not turned off by challenging music, but sometimes I felt like this album was being difficult for the sake of being challenging, not because there was a complex world inside the album that needed to be unravelled and explored (as I have always felt about their previous albums... Confield being an entire universe of shifting sound to explore and delve deeper into).

This album sounds like the drums are falling apart just to mess with you and deny you anything cohesive. It's intentionally jarring and minimalist, but you can tell there's a different "process" behind the drive of Untilted, and to my ears it sounds hollow and academic. There's no beauty in this album for me, and the sterility of the songs seems to lack that sad drive that accompanied the mechanical stutters and depths of their other work.

If this was any other artist, I'd be more inclined to praise it. But this is Autechre, and when you've (deservedly) asserted yourself as a benchmark in expiramental pioneering music, your catalogue needs to be narrowed down to pull out the highlights. Untilted is certainly not a revolutionary album, but it is good and definitely more interesting than alot of the other disorganized glitch-happy processing that passes for IDM these days. If you're a fan already, pick this up and you'll undoubtedly appreciate it.

But for the uninitiated, I'd have to encourage you to pick up LP 5, Confield, or Amber (one of the best ambient albums ever) before Untilted.