8. Autechre
Great record from a great band. I read somewhere that Quaristice was based more on systems they used for their live set at the time and the results are more spontaneous and less edited. I don’t know if that’s correct or if that was someone else’s assessment but each idea feels really fresh and exciting. Usually people like an artists earlier work but I really love their most recent records the most. This is a group where anything they do, I love, but they’re one of the few groups where I really like their newer stuff as opposed to their earlier stuff. I think that they’ve set themselves up to really do anything they want. And you kind of feel that in the way that they work now, particularly with these last five. They got a lot of flak for the previous record, before elseq 1-5, the Exai record. Everyone was saying "Oh it’s too long, it needs to be edited!" so the next record they do is five records, four and a half hours. It was such a fuck you. They’re operating on such a different terrain, it’s exciting. But I like this record in particular because it has a feeling to it which I haven’t heard in their other stuff. It did feel more live – it didn’t feel as polished, not that their stuff necessarily feels polished, but their version of it. It felt more spontaneous, and it’s just a great, great record.
