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.

I say like a breath because the climaxes don’t jump up and present themselves like bats. They surge up from the background. That’s the trick here—it’s hooky without being obvious. I love obvious hooks and so do you, unless you are so ultra-purist you might as well not exist, but here they amble into view whenever they arrive. Some of it is bleepy and some of it is landscape-like and some of it is clanking machinery; a few even come from human voices. There are gradually more of them as it goes—it builds as a set for sure. But given its remit, climaxes, while not unwelcome, are rather incidental.

The remit is in the title. Last fall, for its thirtieth anniversary, Warp Records reissued Artificial Intelligence, a historically significant compilation that codified an entire school of electronic music. It’s the source of a term, IDM—“intelligent dance music,” drummed up (or, you know, drumless-upped) to name a mailing list intended to discuss the compilation’s not-ravey aesthetic—whose problems are manifest and sharper than glass. And like so many categorial music terms, it’s useful—it wouldn’t have caught on if it weren’t—though the rise of the term “EDM” has, by attrition, essentially rendered “IDM” into a relic. (There isn’t enough space to explain the differences to the nonce in a hundred words—there just isn’t.) In any event, Autechre’s mix is a spin-off of that collection.

Autechre have been so crafty in so many ways that their work invites analysis of each aspect. The Wire ran a Primer to their remixes in the November 2014 issue; certainly, their DJ sets in toto deserve a closer look than I can give them here. But allow me to quote myself about the earliest one I know of, from a year before Artificial Intelligence—also from a Wire Primer, the one I wrote on pirate radio DJ sets in the April 2018 issue.

Autechre: IBC Pirate Radio (June 1991)

Internet Archive

Rob Brown and Sean Booth were first recruited onto the pirates in 1988. “We were initially invited to a station by these guys we met on a bus, which is so random,” Booth told the Austin Chronicle. By the time of this mid-1991 set on Manchester pirate IBC (Illegal Broadcasting Corporation), the Autechre duo ‘s tastes were beginning to settle into something tougher and more outré. Cocky and opinionated, they’re like an early listserv come to life: After Sean enthusiastically IDs Beltram’s “My Sound,” Brown deadpans, “It’s my sound.” But let history record the moment, 43 minutes in, when he interrupts a track to ask, “Was that a piano in there? We don’t like pianos in there. Sorry, get it off—get that tune off, get a new one on. Put this on.” A stylus scratches across a record; IDM begins here.

What a difference that year made—even though Autechre doesn’t stick strictly to 1992 tracks on this set, the vibe is completely different, as you’d expect from (a) fiftyish men looking back and (b) a sea change in persona, though not in attitude—no pianos on this set, to my ears. That’s what discovering a new world is about. It’s about focus—what are the parts that constitute it, and how they fit in. Besides, the “D” in IDM was operative—this isn’t ambient music, it’s far from beatless. It just doesn’t rush; it ambles.

Final note: Cheers for the mixlr interface remembering your volume level between visits; boo for it refusing to pick up where you paused it an hour ago, necessitating a refresh followed by cursor work.