Would you want to see Picasso reduced to producing stamps?  Gaudi to designing a beach hut?  Whoever it was who did the maze in Hampton Court to pottering about in the garden?  That was my first impression when I heard that the new Autechre album Quaristice had twenty tracks, at an average of just over three minutes each, as opposed to the likes of Draft 7.30 and Untilted (which number among my favourites) with eight or nine at an average of eight plus.  What a waste, I thought. But then again…say you really really wanted a stamp?  Or a wooden shack on Whitstable Bay, or a well-trimmed hedge?  Maybe you would want Pablo, or Antoni, or, um, the fella with the big shears.   You’ll be left with something pretty special, that is for sure. 

This new approach gives Autechre the space to take a simple idea, rethink and recreate it in their own inimitable way.  And this being Autechre, the more you examine what they have created, the more you find.  Like a Mandelbrot.  Or like that bit at the end of Hawking’s A Brief History Of Time, when he gets a bit vague and says, oh yeah, there are loads of theories that explain all of this crazy stuff, but they require you to accept that there are, like, looooads of dimensions and that the reasons we only perceive five is that the others are really tiny and all wrapped up in a leeeetle leeeetle ball, tiny little spirals of unfathomable fuck-knows-what.  I paraphrase, slightly. 

So here we have the subdued classicism of “Altibzz”.  The Germanic techno of “The Plc”.  The crisp minimalism of “Tankakern”.  The hip-hop of “Rale”.  The windy atmospheres of “Palalel Suns”.  The squelchy acid of “90101-51-1”.  Pristine, perfect things all.  And the more I listen to all of this, the more I find, and not just in a musical sense.  For the first time since around Amber, I’m detecting flashes of emotion glancing off the metallic walls, a strange, reflective sadness.  Are Autechre seeing their lives flash before them, this diaspora of musical memories rushing by?  It seems there is still a trace of humanity in these awesome musical machines, and it has taken the creation of a suite of miniature masterpieces to unlock it.

Quaristice is available digitally RIGHT NOW from Warp.  Physical release due early March.