Arriving in a month thick with surprise album releases from A-listers like Beyonce, Drake, James Blake, and Radiohead, Autechre’s Elseq might not surpass its peers in terms of buzz or anticipation. But it has definitely got them beat in sheer volume. The five-part series—which was posted to the UK-based electronic duo’s webstore last week—adds up to more than four hours of music, out-clocking its peers by a significant margin. Taken at once, Elseq 1-5 is a mammoth hunk of listening, the IDM equivalent of a Netflix series binge. It is twice the length of Autechre’s last—and previously, lengthiest—album, 2013’s Exai.
Musically, the collection seems to advance the argument for Autechre as a sort of post-human jam band, with members Rob Brown and Sean Booth improvising at length within an opaque world of custom-designed music software. Free from the limitations of a physical format (there is currently no CD or vinyl release planned for Elseq), Autechre are free to sprawl and wander. And wander they do. Elseq 1-5 are as heady and frustrating as anything the duo have ever released. In some stretches, the music is glacial and serene (“eastre”). In others, the Brown and Booth’s violent squelches suggest machine-on-machine violence in the spirit of Survival Research Laboratories (“c7b2”). Absorbing the whole thing requires a bit of commitment. Or maybe it just takes a giant bag of weed and a lot of free time. Thankfully, Elseq is also available to purchase in installments.
Active since the late ’80s, Autechre’s early full-lengths—Amber, *Tri Repetae—*could be more clearly understood in the context of dance music, as the duo relied on similar hardware, like drum machines and analog synthesizers. Even still, their output has always embraced and amplified electronic music’s eerie otherness. “We had heard these Latin Rascals edits with these fast bits with drums that sounded weirdly robotic, taking electro into this other zone,” Booth told Thump last fall. “Half of the tracks that we do as Autechre are about recreating the actual sensations I used to get from those things—just getting post-human and next level.” As the years have passed, the duo’s music has become ever more idiosyncratic and abstract. The DNA of techno and electro are in there somewhere, but Booth and Brown have largely abandoned traditional melody and harmony in favor of raw sound design.
Elseq 1-5 is not Autechre’s first foray into download-only releases. 2008’s Quarstice was followed by a series of digital EPs that offered expanded and alternate mixes, which were often superior to that album’s edited material. Last year, the duo posted a series of nine recent live recordings of new material for sale online. An important part of Autechre’s identity has been the duo’s willingness to mess with its audience’s perceptions. A track might register as repetitive, yet never actually repeat itself. Another might repeat the same phrase for 20 minutes at a stretch. Other works have been so chaotic that it is nearly impossible to retain them in your memory.
The set’s second installment is the most extreme, with Booth and Brown delving into crunchy, headache-generating digressions in 10-minute chunks that will feel either exhausting or exhilarating. “eastre” kicks off the third grouping with nearly a quarter-hour of droning, unearthly string tones. Not all of it is engaging, but if you ever wondered what it would really mean for Autechre to take an uninhibited plunge into the weirdo void, now you have your answer.
Elseq feels like an advancement of the duo’s recent live sets, offering a similar ratio of rhythm to noise and order to chaos, but a richer palette of sounds. There aren’t a lot of melodies to be heard, but there are a number of distinctive tones and tricks—percussive thumps that sound like collapsing cardboard boxes, gritty woofer-busting bass tones. At the start of “pendulu hv moda” a reverb effect seems to move rapidly between wet and dry, spacious and tight, creating the dizzying sensation that space is expanding and contracting in time with the music. The best tracks land perfectly in the DMZ between the mechanical and musical. On “foldfree casual,” shimmering chords at first register as sentimental, but become more repetitive and emotionally vacant as they are pushed into the wings by jittery and alien rhythms.
As a live act, Autechre is pretty much without parallel. In concert, the duo’s music feels un-gridded and spontaneous in a way that few computer or drum machine-backed performers can manage. In its best stretches, Elseq seems like a document of this aspect of Booth and Brown’s process – the part that’s just two dudes taking pleasure in real-time collaborative music making. Which, in a way, might serve to deflate the futuristic vibe a little. All talk of robots and post-humanity aside, it’s hard to think of anything quite as earthly as a jam session.
