Review Summary: The capacity of human intelligence seems to limit the capabilities to expand upon any possible creative aptitudes. But Autechre aren't humans.
Sputnik suggests that writers should be as objective as possible when writing a review, so I’ll stop being a pretentious elitist this time and try to be as objective as possible - Autechre’s 6th LP, is better than anything. I’ll even go as far as to call it the peak of music. When listening to Confield one cannot help but feel that the whole Universe is threatened.
I decided not to write a track-by-track review because Sputnik seems to hate being productive and prefers shallow half-assed opinions about albums.
The album sets things off with ‘VI Scose Poise’, which sounds like a fly trapped in a jar hitting its dumb head on the transparent walls for seven minutes until it dies, this with melancholic piano playing in the background of course. It’s heartbreaking really, but it’s just a fly so no one cares. The track is emblematic for the album in a way that the fly represents conventional music and Confield is the jar. Autechre knew they were onto something groundbreaking and dropped the usual cliched formalities that kept the human race from evolving throughout history: modesty and mercy. This is an album that is so ambitious it doesn’t want, or need, to look back. It is one of those rare artistic statements that have absolutely no influences.
Let’s talk about what makes Confield stand out as the greatest album of the past decade. Surprisingly, eight out of the nine tracks are written in 4/4. It is the production technique and the way the rhythm and melodies are wrapped together that make it so complex and unique. What Sean Booth and Rob Brown did here was a reinvention of music. Let’s take ‘Pen Expers’ and ‘Lentic Catachresis’ for example, the most dense tracks on the LP. Even though for the uninitiated music listener, these pieces will sound like a mess, it is a beautiful mess that is so tightly put together it achieves something almost paradoxical, it finds harmony in chaos. I can best describe it as music made out of contrasts.
Confield demands listening to it in a different way than most music, and I’m going to get a bit metaphorical here because I find it easier to explain it this way. Imagine yourself in a chamber where the sounds of the music are materialized. All the beats and textures are reflected from the walls and the challenge is to avoid being hit by them, like the fly in the jar, but this time on ‘expert’ difficulty. At first you will fail, and then you will fail some more. No one said this was going to be easy. But as you play this game for longer you will progressively start to have a better understanding of the routes each sound is taking and be able to find the key to unlocking the beautiful harmony hidden underneath the superficial chaos.
Best tracks: All except for Eidetic Casein
