Autechre, formed in 1991, has enjoyed a long career of critical success and wide alternative audiences. Yorkshire, England duo Sean Booth and Rob Brown, influenced by the dark, abstract proto-jazz of Coil, the primal, Dadaist terror of Cabaret Voltaire and the plastic-snapping crisp percussion of European club music, amassed an impressive amount of gear before they even graduated from high school. Rather than creating music that dripped with emotive affectation, opted to create sharply digitally textured collages of rhythmic, hyper-processed sound that ebbs and flows with a distinct pulse.
Their latest, Oversteps, is a more album-centric effort than 2008’s Quaristice. This time around, Autechre sounds like a more analog, jazzier Gridlock, mixing overdriven bass fuzz hits with skittering drum machine patches. Square wave blips and saw wave bass lines thud and collide with MIDI General Instrument-sounding intervals in a kind of foreign parroting. Oversteps, crafted of artfully-sliced Odyssian passages of moods, push the edges of electronic rock like the thin walls of a slowly blown-out latex balloon, hearkening to early 2000’s digitally-sourced electronica, around the time when we were figuring out what Google was and Napster was still a good idea. (Some of us were there, man.)
Enjoy a Warp-provided album sampler below. Pick it up from Warpmart if you like what you hear. (The packaging is beautiful.)
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