BC022: Autechre, Artificial Intelligence—1992 Contextual Mix (December 2022)

On the can-you-top-this DJ trajectory of the venerable British duo.

Autechre, Artificial Intelligence—1992 Contextual Mix (December 30, 2022)

Autechre’s newest streaming mega-mix feels like a long breath exhaled. That fits both the reissue that inspired it and the duo’s previous long-long-long online sets. The earlier ones could often feel like inhabiting a 3-D mock-up of a city, dense and overwhelming and overcrowded by design, not to mention temporary. You didn’t expect to go back and experience them in toto; they were like in-person affairs, where you absorbed as much as you could and were left with the memories. That’s not to minimize those sets—as if their dozen-hour lengths could allow one to minimize them—but to explain how different this one is. Their twelve-hour mixes can feel like can-you-top-this gambits—a worthwhile one, well worth the time. This one stops at five and a half hours, one senses, because that’s where it ran out, not because they were completing a dare.