Label: Warp Format: CD,2LP
Dammit, Autechre can still confound and confuse as much as they’ve ever done. Skims of the sound of the natural world meeting the digital and electronic mesh like no-one else has quite managed to acheive, despite the legions of followers who somehow get the sound but never quite the feel just right. Perhaps it’s not just the selection of what could be a ball-bearing revolving endlessly, stochastically around the inside of a virtul metal bowl which opens the album on “VI Scose Poise”; maybe there’s more than just the way the rhythms seem to fragment, then reveal that they were just taking a different turn than might be expected. Could there be something to the notion that the machines are making the sounds by themselves, and Messrs Booth and Brown are lifting them out as collectors, rather than composers?
Fanciful and wildly inaccurate as that idea is, it’s a notion which never quite escapes credulity when listening to Confield. What might start out as a fairly linear rhythm will go astray, seemingly of its own volition. The insertion of a liquid blip here and there soon becomes wilfully lateral, as do the tumbling beats made from sucked-up detritus, fast-chiming metal or deracinated melodies. Recursive car-horn trickles like “Eidetic Casein” command queasy directions to a lapsed beat; dissolution is promised and delivered in the entropic lacerations and tachycardiac stumbling bass and trills of “Uviol”. Jazz could be an obvious invocation, but (real) jazz doesn’t sound this cybernetic. Chaos expanded inside the sequencer? Improvisation mashing up composition and happenstance through a selection of filters, black-boxed or software as seems appropriate? When the percussive entanglements of “Pen Expers” flood out spreading sonic confusion, it really does sound like the apocalypse is being staged for rhythm amid the transgression of breakbeat culture. A demonic possession by machine elves? Even the wheezing chords of something which may be keyboard or could be a tattered pipe organ can’t hold the line down too long; as the furious whorls of scattershot beats make the walls reel, the struggle to retain listening balance becomes decidedly precarious. The re-assertion of gunshot ricochet signifies some kind of titanic audio struggle; it’s like being hailed with tingly sonic bullets.
Despite all this hungry activity, Confield rarely sounds confused, though it’s often confounding. Labels as diverse as experimental techno, deranged hip-hop, psychedelic avant-gardism, drum & bass, electronica and whatever it is that the arrangements of glitches upon crackles can usefully be called flicker and fade into something more weird, more dissonant. Understanding this album ultimately requires immersion, the willing suspension of disbelief that anyone would want to make these sounds public. Confield soon becomes its own reality, a microcosmic sonic architecture that leaks into the known universe. Infectious, like worms, electronic or otherwise – released into the wild, Confield could quite probably mutate and evolve, all by itself.
-Freq1C-
