2003-04-14
... ? Guardian Unlimited | Arts reviews | Autechre: Draft 7.30This twitching-and-glitching is a lesson on what your ears take for granted. Life without repetitive beats, basslines and tunes may feel like a musical version of purifying yourself with hessian underpants, but Sean Booth and Rob Brown insist that once your brain starts spinning at the same speed as the CD, all will be revealed. And it is, if you give it a right good listening to - an unfashionable demand for a CD to make. Buried in this splintered, maths-driven world, down there with the metal insects, are shards of musical convention that keep a humanity alive: offcuts from grooves, traces of symphonic strings, limping breakbeats, a weird oriental tune. What sounds like computer confusion becomes quite a beautiful picture of the chaos of your brain. Autechre show an admirable resistance to all those letters they get explaining how they should make their stuff work on the dancefloor.
