This might seem like the most daunting release of 2011, the very definition of for-fans-only. After all, Autechre made their name by separating those dabbling in electronic music from the truly hardcore. Compared to the rest of Warp's early post-rave/home-listening acts, they were challenging from the start, and their releases only grew more complex and less user-friendly as the years went on. This box set collects 47 tracks from 11 years of Sean Booth and Rob Brown's hyper-productive output. If one EP of Autechre's dense sound art seems forbidding, try about a dozen of them.
And yet. Autechre's late-career complexity is in no way overstated. Albums like 2001's Confield sometimes threaten to abandon form and structure entirely for the pure delight of manipulating digital noise into an endless array of different shapes. Other records are so madly patterned, like multiple electro tracks layered into a writhing whole, that following the duo's logic can be nearly impossible. But perhaps nodding to their roots in club sounds, or having fun with the very idea of this sort of band releasing "singles," Autechre's EPs have offered some of their most accessible music, even if you have to stretch the definition of "accessible" to the breaking point. Dizzying as it may be as a whole, this box is in a weird way one of the better introductions to the duo's work.
The earliest EPs here, 1991's Cavity Job and 1994's Basscadet, aren't far off from labelmate Aphex Twin's first forays into tweaked acid. "Cavity Job" opens with a blast of dental drill noise as abrasive as Whitehouse, but quickly launches into a frantic rave tune that would have fit just fine at the era's more hardcore clubs. The four "Basscadet" mixes are where things start to get hairy-- moving from jittery techno to haunted ambient-- but the duo's pulsing funk has yet to be shattered the way it soon would be. The average set of human feet may object to the logic of these beats, but they sure are head-nodders. And as far afield from the genre as they would eventually get, Autechre's love for early hip-hop's trunk-rattling low-end and turntable gymnastics are all over these EPs. "Goz Quarter" from 1997's Envane EP plays like a playful scratch record made from scraps of digital noise. They're reminders of a time when the borders of hip-hop and what was known (for better or worse) as IDM weren't so ruthlessly policed.
So there's plenty of pleasure here, but plenty of difficulty as well. As the years went on, Autechre became masters of bright melodies that they then drowned in distortion-- their own abstract variation on "noise pop." 1999's EP7 might be their most beautiful release, but it's also one of their most disorienting, built from what seems like several hundred gigs worth of glittering little chunks of sound. From then on, Autechre's music would be about things endlessly falling apart and rebuilding themselves and falling apart again in spectacular fashion. On "Gantz Graf", one of their most convoluted beat-and-riff creations becomes subjected to so much abuse that it collapses into screaming noise, as if the track itself is pleading for relief. There's a lot more to listen to in Autechre's later music, and a lot less to hang onto. The music constantly mutates, so it's hard to get bored, but if your attention drifts, it becomes ever harder to figure out how you got from one minute to the next. It's no wonder they were embraced as much by the free improv community around the turn of the millennium. It's music that invites a listener to boggle at its moment-to-moment inventiveness or tune it out entirely.
What's really surprising, listening back to these EPs after so many changes in techno style, is how fresh they still sound. Autechre were often praised for the "alien" quality of their music, the way they processed and distorted their synth sounds and programmed beats until they became unfamiliar, and in retrospect it was the best thing they could have done to ensure their music didn't date itself. Only the Cavity Job sounds truly bound to the era of its release. And even the elements that became IDM clichés, like all those thin, tiny beats bouncing madly around the mix, are underused enough now that younger listeners might just hear them as new. So many of the duo's peers have disappeared from the 21st century musical conversation, but Autechre persist. That's partly because they're workhorses who never stopped putting out records, but mostly, it's because even their most fearsome records have a striking beauty and weird compulsive listenability that few of their contemporaries could match.
