"Odi et amo," reads a famous epigram by the Latin poet Catullus. "quare id faciam fortasse requiris? nescio sed fieri sentio et excrucior." Translating, with some artistic license, as, "I hate and love [Autechre]. Perhaps you're asking why I do that? I don't know, but I feel it happening, and am racked." Of course, Catullus didn't have Autechre in mind when he wrote this poem, but I had this poem in mind when I heard Peel Session 2. Generally, I love Rob Brown and Sean Booth, the English duo that comprises Autechre. But at the moment I hate them and am exhausted, because I have to describe their sound.

Nearly every comparison the critics use to describe Autechre seems terribly desperate, from architecture to computer source code to virtual landscapes. But this is not by any fault of the critic. The difficulty of Autechre's music is surpassed only by the difficulty of describing it. Nonetheless, the attempt must be made, so critics invariably use any number of the following words: blips, bleeps, farts, echoes, sparkle, skitter, clanks, pulses, drone, chopped, synapses, and on and on. These words may as well be Latin. But rest assured, I'm no different: plenty of them undoubtedly will appear below.

And so the inevitable attempt, however futile, begins. This four-song, 27-minute EP, which was originally broadcast on September 9, 1999, opens with "Gelk." (It should be noted that the song titles were chosen by John Peel because the audio masters delivered to Radio 1 contained none.) The track begins calmly with a trotting beat, analog hiss, and an occasional bass pulse that raises static as if the music were played through blown speakers. Foreign synths chime in, and a piano descends into the sonic plane just as the keyboards turn intergalactic, flickering out of earshot in perpetual reverberation. But nothing too surprising.

Then "Gelk" turns ominous. Deep synths set the dark tone, but the thickened beat, no longer clean now but crackling and popping, sends the song into the dungeon. Given the gurgling and indecipherable whispering, there must a deformed creature down here, maybe Sloth or the Gimp. The song soon strips down to one single sound, which most nearly resembles someone plucking the low strings of a grand piano. A more standard beat ends the interlude, as does what might as well be considered electronic steel drums, and soon the track is washed over by distant crashes, like Godzilla and King Kong playing soccer with a Zildjian delivery truck. When it finally ends, you realize you've almost run the full gamut of emotion.

The next three tracks, unfortunately, aren't quite as varied or complex. Before you can even digest "Gelk," the raucous "Blifil" breaks in with a more furious and uneven beat, thick drones, and muffled, chopped vocals. But the song barely progresses from there; the only other significant addition is droplets of digital water. Still, by the end of the track, one does sense that, over the course of seven minutes, Autechre have taken you from an underground dig to an extraterrestrial voyage.

The clacks that open "Gaekwad" consistently stutter and fizzle out like a spinning coin coming to rest. Other sounds reminiscent of creaking doors and radiators fill in the background noise. More steel drum-like notes and ghostly ambient whines keep the ear trailing along, and eventually, trebled beats skip in to carry the tune. When mellow synths, orchestral stutters, and high-pitched pings achieve melody over the skittering beat, Peel Session 2 achieves its most Aphex-like moment. But the cackling and wheezing that soon interrupt make this the only obvious and direct comparison on the EP.

Then there's the aptly-titled "19 Headaches." Some might say it's avant-IDM, but isn't IDM avant enough? I say it's Brown and Booth doing their best Phish impression-- digital jamming, if you will. The same skittering sounds are here, in addition to a synth straight out of "3-2-1 Contact." Sounds chirp into the foreground like pikas popping their heads out of a rock bed. Like these small, darting mammals, "19 Headaches" is at first interesting, then uncompelling, and finally, annoying.

This effort could almost be called lo-fi drill-n-bass, if there were such a thing. Perhaps their grittiest work to date, the EP is always worn raw by fuzz, static, or hiss-- a sharp contrast to the clarity of efforts such as Tri Repetae++, which rests on the opposite end of Autechre's oeuvre. Still, although Peel Session 2 is uneven and oftentimes bears similarity to their less-popular work (Chiastic Slide and EP7, for instance), we should nonetheless consider ourselves fortunate that, unlike Latin, this music has yet to bastardized out of existence.

-Ryan Kearney