#429 Autechre - Gantz Graf EP

A lesser-known Autechre album, recommended by a staff member on a largish music site.

At some point in high school, before I'd heard any particularly experimental electronic music, I came across the soundtrack to the movie Pi, which I would still recommend as a pretty good crash course in IDM, featuring Autechre, Aphex Twin, Orbital and Roni Size before you even make it out of the first half of the album. I didn't know quite what to make of it, but I got sucked in by Clint Mansell's muscular technoing, and the exploded rhythms of tracks like Bucephalus Bouncing Ball at least tweaked my interest, planting the seeds for a proper jaunt through the drills and glitches and drones years later. Said jaunt aside, I don't know that I know any more about Autechre than I did then, to me they sound like distilled 90's IDM, full of skitter, warp, and burst, bending loops until they break or eschewing them altogether in favor of tag team rhythm-as-melody haymakers.

And that's more or less what you have here. The first track is clearly carefully honed and definitely worth a listen, evoking space and time in swaths of noise. After that, its two longer tracks that are mostly interested in bending loops out of shape while ambient noises ebb and flow in the background. Interesting, but not especially listenable, not particularly evocative, not unlike a Pollock painting, where you admire and say "I see what you did there", but don't have a lot to work with once you get past the basic reimagining of genre that makes up its conceptual backbone. Maybe after I hear enough of these I'll have more to say about them, but right now it still just sounds like squiggles to me 2.5/5

You might like this if: you like weird techno? Check out the title track, after that I suspect if you're into this stuff you've heard plenty that sounds like Dial. and Cap.IV.