Autechre, "Quaristice"

It sounds like Autechre, as you'd expect.

I'm tempted to leave it at that, not only because that basically sums it all up, but because it's apparent that Autechre have stopped trying to make original and compelling music, so why shouldn't I minimize my effort in writing about it?

Autechre are becoming the Rolling Stones of electronica, in which each new album is more or less a retread of the one previous, but is automatically praised as their best since "LP5"/"Some Girls". I do hear elements of the warm, analogue bleep-fest that was "Incunabula" on this record, but otherwise virtually any of these songs could have appeared on any one of the past six Autechre releases.

Not only that, but 15-20 track albums that run 60-75 minutes are typically snoozefests. Having that many tracks breaks up the flow of the album more times than one's attention span can normally tolerate, and then dragging the length past the hour mark makes it feel as though the repeated jumpstarts will never, ever end. If Autechre really wanted to play around with a bunch of short songs, they should have taken this album's content (and admittedly, there are plenty of interesting ideas here) and shaped a ten-track, forty minute album of sweet ambient interludes and electro-tinged beats. This isn't 1994, and they don't have to stick to the double-album format anymore. Twisting "new ideas in[to] slightly newer contexts" is a micro-evolution process that I simply don't have the patience for anymore.