Autechre - Tri Repetae++
It has been almost a decade since the genre IDM -- "Intelligent Dance Music" -- was dropped in our laps and, as a concise descriptor of musical styles, it has become so over-used that, like the term "electronica," it has become meaningless. There are so many sub-genres fighting for their own niche of listeners now that keeping track is like trying to zero in on a beat sequence in a Squarepusher record. Is what you are hearing "microsound" or is it "lowercase" or even "glitch?" Do you prefer "tech-step" to "drill 'n' bass" to "broke-beat?" And the $64,000 question: how the hell do you classify the modern Autechre sound?
Booth and Brown have said that they want to create music which would instill an urge in their audience for repeated listenings, and, in hearing to Tri Repetae again, I begin to understand both the past and the future of electronically-generated music. IDM began as a means of categorizing music which tapped its toe outside the "four on the floor" convention of House and Trance. The "intelligent" bit supposedly meant that your head could accomodate a beat structure that was neither consistent nor traditionally rhythmic. This wasn't -- necessarily -- get down, get funky and sweaty music; this was music that tweaked your noodle. Repeated listens were mandatory because of the depth of texture and the complexity of sounds which were available. The opening track, "Dael," invites the use of such words as "gurgles," "whispers," "shuffles" and "winsome" in describing the variety of its sounds. These are mechanized soundtracks, generative expressions for an age of steel and wire. The children of the computer age find thmemselves more comfortable finding human emotions -- hearing "melancholy" and "wistful dreaming" in the melodies which percolate and drift over the buzz and hiss of the lower rhythms -- in these electronic songs than they do in, say, the third movement of Mozart's "Serenade for Winds" (K. 361).
Okay, maybe that's a bit hyperbolic. But there is a parallel here. IDM is essentially chamber music of the 21st century. (And does that make Wolfgang Amadeus the grandfather of ICM -- Intelligent Chamber Music?) This isn't dance music or pop music; it is listening music. The intricacies and melodies are mathematical rather than strictly tonal; the artists are exploring the range of sonic environment through mathematical synthesis and configuration. A number of them probably have little or no formal musical training, and what interests them is creation of tone and rhythm through the application of software and algorithmic processes.
While Booth and Brown have certainly scampered off into the mathematical fringes with their later records (and I'm specifically thinking about Confield here) Tri Repetae has welded itself into the historical timeline of electronic music. Their third full album, Tri Repetae sees Autechre really finding their stride, adding a darker element to their design. There are more mechanical sounds in this record, more hisses and hums and metallic bleats to the underlying structures. "Stud" rumbles with the sound of pistons and chirps with the cheerful notification of automated systems while melodies expand and decay like oscilloscope readings and seismic line drawings. With the inclusion of the Anvil Vapre and Garbage EPs on a second disc (the "++" of the US release), you have an additional seventy minutes of crunchy, Autechre goodness. Anvil Vapre is the closest Autechre comes to flat-out dance friendly material with the floor-stomper of "Second Bad Vilbel" and the garage/drum 'n' bass pace of "Second Peng." Garbage, on the other hand, is more fractured, more a swarming fusion of pixelated shards. If you think of these two EPs as opposing extremes, then you can imagine where the body of Tri Repetae falls.
The striking permanence of Tri Repetae is that it is the critical momement where melody became an elusive ghost, a haunted echo which weaves its way through a patterned landscape of precise structures. Music is no longer about capturing the perfect chord and the quintessential jingle or even concerned with a verse-chorus-verse structure. Tri Repetae is an explosion of new technology. It is fractal, it is chaotic -- it is supremely mathematical -- and it rewards those who listen. And how long has it been since music written specifically for the general population was just about listening?
Autechre
Warp Records [1996]
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