Move of Ten

It's not unusual for Autechre to go a couple of years between full-lengths. So two in the span of a couple of months-- Sean Booth and Rob Brown have never released two Autechre albums in a single year-- is a pretty big deal. Why the quick follow-up to Oversteps? From the sound of these two records, it seems possible that Booth and Brown generated a large batch of material in the two years since Quaristice and decided to split it into complementary records, each with a different focus. While Oversteps had a number of drifting, ambient pieces mixed in with rhythm-oriented tracks that at times nodded toward dubstep, Move of Ten puts its emphasis on sharp beats that mostly stay within conventional meters. With these two records following on the more variable Quaristice, an album of shorter tracks that seemed to touch on almost every sound they've ever tried, that makes three pretty different albums in a row for Autechre, which is encouraging.

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One thing I’ve always loved about Autechre has been their modest insistence on remaining tied to their dance music lineage. Not for Sean Booth and Rob Brown the temptation to lose the physical plot entirely in favour of total abstraction; even at their most oblique, during the ‘are you sure your stereo’s not on the blink?’ beatscapes of Confield or the shattered rhythms of Untilted, they retain an intrinsic sense of funk. That certainly tends to show up most obviously during their live sets, when the debt to old-school electro and hip-hop so prominent on Amber is chewed up and spat out as a series of monochrome glitch grooves. But their most recent two records have also proved something of a return to the spontaneity of old, before the algorithms and intense programming obsessions took over. Quaristice, from 2008, was fulfilling in the light of its renewed interest in human connection, with a set of tracks that spliced surprisingly accessible melodic textures back in. That said, in light of this year’s wonderful Oversteps it felt more like a series of study sketches to that record’s full colour vista. In particular ‘ilanders’ could almost have been a mid-period Drexciya cut, such is its cool aquatic grandeur.

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