Autechre
Confield
[Warp]
Rating: 8.8
Autechre albums, like Stanley Kubrick films, are the substance of critics'
nightmares. For all of his artistry, Kubrick occasionally dropped bombs like
Barry Lyndon, a film that bored audiences at its debut and never gained
relevance with time. All directors can claim their share of failures, but
Kubrick's affinity for intellectual understatement often masked the initial
appeal of his work, making it difficult for audiences to separate the wheat
from the chaff when his movies first came out.
Only the passage of time distinguished the strokes of cinematic brilliance
from their clumsy, hollow counterparts; but reviewers, bound to deadlines,
never got to enjoy the benefit of hindsight. Instead, they resorted to blind
guesses, issued sharply divided reviews, and crossed their fingers in hopes
that, when the smoke eventually cleared, the future would prove them right.
So imagine my anxiety when I discovered I had only a week to come to terms with
Autechre's new long-player, Confield. The group's oeuvre includes
equal measures of visionary genius and uninspired tripe. While LP5 and
Tri Repetae++ remind us that Rob Brown and Sean Booth have access to a
talent matched by only a handful of contemporary electronic producers,
Amber and Chiastic Slide suggest that this access is
inconsistent, fleeting and out of their control.
To further complicate things, Confield catches the pair in the most
abstract, difficult period of their nine-year recording career. I've had the
album for just over a week now, and must confess I'm still not certain I have
a firm grasp on it. But I've given the songs enough effort and attention
(headphones and speakers, stoned and sober, and several times without pause
from beginning to end) to draw a few early conclusions. And it pleases me to
announce that they're resoundingly favorable.
Confield picks up where its predecessor, the four-track Peel Session
2 EP, left off-- splicing the ambient, non-musical styles of artists like
Kit Clayton and Phthalocyanine into Autechre's more structured syntheses.
Booth and Brown exercise a meticulous economy of melody on this disc, so much
so that many of the tracks cease to resemble proper songs.
They have instead assembled an album of ordered soundscapes-- nine methodically
arranged pieces that rely largely on repetition of textural, dissonant and
atonal sounds to construct a variety of aural climates. Think EP7
without the hooks. Think early Tetsu Inoue, with twice the depth and a
penchant for foundry sounds. Now welcome to Confield, where the local
time is the tomorrow.
My first listen to this album required a great deal of toil and patience--
desperately listening for rhythms, trends, bits of melodic resolution and a
general sense of cohesion. I made the mistake of launching straight into
"Bine," the sixth track, which discouraged me because it had none of those
things. In retrospect, I should have started where Autechre wanted me to:
with "VI Scose Poise," the album's opener.
Though one of Confield's least satisfying pieces, the first track offers
a roadmap for the material that follows. Booth and Brown employ techniques in
this song that recur more subtly in later tracks, and the opener becomes a
means by which to understand some of the disc's more challenging material.
The song is, in a sense, a metaphor for the record at large: patterns emerge
from the discord; cacophonous droning wells up in tense knots, then dissipates
with the appearance of three-note melodic bursts; the sonic hellstorm relents
in scattered moments of clarity, but never recesses for long. Just as the
melodies begin to acquire complexity, the song comes to an abrupt close,
dropping the listener once again onto foreign soil.
"Cfern," which follows, comes out swinging with a disjointed barrage of
elastic snares. Languid synth pads churn out a stagnant stew of dissonant
notes, in which the clicks become burps and the cuts become bubbles. "Pen
Expers," next on the playlist, ups the tempo with a spastic drill-n-bass joint
whose vacuum-navigated drums and reversed string hits evoke imagery of
liposuction.
Confield carries on like this until the final note-- each song
establishes a personality distinct from the rest, cautiously balancing
musicality with chaos. The latter half of the disc actually surpasses the
former. The subtle funk of "Parhelic Triangle," the record's apogee,
reminisces of "Acroyear2" from LP5. A brooding, troglodytic bassline
chugs through a spectral landscape of chimes, bells and railroad crossings,
while the violent sounds of a threshing machine keep the pace. "Lentic
Catachresis" closes the show with a blistering exercise in drum programming.
Booth and Brown wind the beats progressively tighter, capping the album with
a thick lid of percussive sound.
Many long-time Autechre enthusiasts will feel alienated by the pair's latest
release. It's not Tri Repetae++, but it's unlikely that Booth and Brown
will ever revisit the trademark sound that brought them fame. For those
willing to take these times in stride, Confield promises elegant
production, accessibility in moderation, and one of the most enveloping,
thought-provoking listening experiences to come forth from leftfield this
year. You just have to reach for it.
-Malcolm Seymour III