AUTECHRE - NTS Sessions 1-4

Four consecutive Thursdays in April, two hours of live session broadcast directly from the NTS studios in Hackney, with original material only and immediate release. The new, all-encompassing intervention by masters Autechre carries the programmatic resoluteness of a blitzkrieg: but this isn't about ruthless bombardment, a mere exercise of power, rather it's a confident advance across terrain that the duo itself has always levelled well ahead of everyone else.

Science fiction and electronic music, through different languages, have always projected their imaginations into clearly recognisable external forms, as if wanting to give concrete shape to a future that can only be hypothesised: in their own way, and especially with the equally monolithic "elseq", Sean Booth and Rob Brown have progressively abandoned the by-now consolidated stylistic traits of ambient-techno to explore an interior science fiction, dissecting the innards of machines in search of clues to their mindset, as if simulating the undesirable annulment of human free will – a dystopian scenario that the race towards progress has turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The screening of the NTS sessions, soon to be released by Warp in an 8-CD or 12-LP box set, aims to unveil new planes on which to rest a mutable, near-infinite series of amorphous structures; sonic conformations that overlap one another in an irregular succession, with rhythm marking out a kinetic flow that razes the approach of the past to the ground, while still preserving its alphabet. The British duo thus defines new possible anagrams, adding page after page. We watch, petrified and entranced, a clash between sonic particles, nanovectors that frame a new form of microsound, with the glitch element acting as the atomic number of the periodic table. Breakcore tears, ambient-noise offal dripping as a deafening eruption of indecipherable scores shifts its cycle following unknown laws.

Setting aside the more obvious stylistic and temporal distances, we could invoke several historically pivotal moments from the glorious past, yet we'd still be left holding the bag, scattered and confused as to the meaning of a rhythmic exploration free of packaging and borders. One could invoke the frequencies emitted during the Darmstadt summer courses, drawing a post-contemporary and, in its own way, hyper-expanded association, given that Autechre reconvert the energy acquired from history by drawing on new voltages, new mutations, above all by making use of far more advanced equipment.

In some ways, this is a reinterpretation of the conceptual impulses of electronic music's Jurassic age, with the variant that the two English geniuses have by now absorbed the entirety of that past lexicon more than anyone else and are aiming straight at the beginning of a new era. A self-awareness that seeks to push past the exosphere of the possible. It's no accident that the duo doesn't settle for vague nostalgia with a side of self-indulgence; they don't fossilize their intuition along the sloppy trail of provocation for effect; and they also avoid coiling in on themselves, risking getting lost within a given horizon. Nihilism is decanted with class. The masters sidestep the scourge of the most sterile indeterminism, and from a far-off peak they spread the gospel of a sonic philosophy as inaccessible as it is unstoppable.

The intent seems to be surrendering to a creative process with no pauses, firing off messages in a continuous stream from a height rightfully attained. What's more, the true marvel occurs downstream of this all-encompassing view: beyond the isolation, the post-everything and its opposite, the pseudo/quasi-academic nonsense of every kind that will follow this work, the greatest shock comes from the eight hours spread across four parts that pass by, paradoxically, without any effort at all. The pair continually point toward an ecstatic mirage, a spatial oasis never seen before that grows ever sharper.

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The fade-in entrance seems cautious, as if trying to cushion the imminent impact of the first cries of a universe that will go on expanding by its own, superhuman force alone. From a canonical 4/4 beat, filaments and hybrid concretions sprout spontaneously, the opening offshoots of a feverish reinvention of reality that bursts forth with explosive force on the hyperkinetic "l3 ctrl", where, against a backdrop of scattered glitch clatter, solemn synth trails expand, their contrast making its code feel less alien.

The palette of sounds remains perhaps the liveliest and most emphatically "æ" of the entire residency: in "bqbqbq" keypad tones from a phone that the "future present" failed to produce chase one another in quick succession; acid lashes are pervasive, with countless deformations of binary code within a matter of seconds; and then there are dissected drones ("carefree counter dronal"), out-of-control magnetic fields ("gonk steady one"), more orderly techno layouts counterpointed by descending, minimalist-inspired patterns ("four of seven"), and finally a flickering ambient close shot through with pure, comforting tones, a path of light that conceals within it the best omens for what awaits beyond.

The second, astonishing session surpasses what you might imagine as the meeting point between a miracle and your most anxiety-inducing, labyrinthine nightmare: a maze of which one can only sketch a rough map, lost in the unstable balance of each track-world, an algebraic expression as complex as it is irrefutable, both within itself and in relation to its neighbors. A tour de force with no break in continuity, offering no way out until the very end, with a long-lived coda that scatters its inputs into a sonic hyperspace that absorbs their explosive energy, turning them into echoes that hang suspended for an instant before finally dissolving into darkness. The archaic yet futuristic allure of this exacting electronic theorem needs no further, easily superfluous words.

The third chapter springs from the illusion of a "classic" ambient-techno set – albeit shot through with the distortions and grime typical of the Warp school – digging a time tunnel that seems to swim back upstream all the way to "Incunabula": a revolutionary achievement at the time, one that looks faded today only because of the dizzying avant-garde drive of its very own creators. An illusion, as noted, confirmed as such by the relapse into controlled chaos that resurfaces starting from the long segment "tt1pd", a rumbling trance steeped in mutant noise that evokes the glitch alchemy of Finnish pioneers Pan Sonic.

It moves effortlessly from a shadowy promenade through synthetic tones, as if wrapped under a layer of felt that softens their edges ("g 1 e 1"), to the most liquid instrumental hip-hop you're ever likely to find in intelligent dance music ("fLh"), from impenetrable underwater crevices ("shimripl air") to a headlong re-entry into the machine's endogenous system, in a hallucinated interweaving of sharp clangs and clumps of microsound, sustained solely by a scattered grumble of low frequencies ("nineFly"). Totally closed in on itself, by contrast, is the solipsistic mantra of "acid mwan idle", almost a space for meditation when set against the all-out dominance of digital upheaval that these eight hours try, however provisionally, to harness.

Overall, NTS 03 feels far less like an uninterrupted flow of sonic data than it genuinely does like a stylistic compendium of the last twenty years of electronic music, from its most experimental currents to the schizoid hi-tech sound currently on the rise.

Played unpredictably right to the very end, the residency heads toward its close with a slow, measured step. The fourth session alternates defragmentation and upward flights, darkness and light, shadows and ultraviolet rays, chaos and order, in a breathtaking sequence. All the irregularity lies in the opening "frane casual": an episode that brings the two mastiffs back to the quirky constructs of Delay's "Whistleblower", in a shapeless, unbalanced succession; in perfect antithesis, meanwhile, comes the central illumination of "column thirteen", through which the two pick the thread back up, feeding a climax of greater ease, as if wanting to show us new worlds, new destinations once again, with a soft, lysergic trip split between Cluster, the more emphatic side of Orbital and the synth music of young Steve Hauschildt.

While "mirrage" has almost the mood and movements of a dark-ambient exploration, in its fervid 24 minutes "shimripl casual" seems to sketch out a new "Création du Monde" made of digital fibers amid spasms, swarming textures, and flows of artificial energy that gradually shape a reality that's possible, yet just as inhospitable to living organisms.

And then "all end", not a melancholy "everything ends", but "the end of everything". That cosmos which has gone on proliferating across eight hours spread over a month, with its expectations and developments impossible to imagine, is finally poured into a primordial broth with no distinct shapes. Within this boundless vision of "everything" a drone stands out which, seemingly gathering together every pitch of a pipe organ, becomes a colorless mass moving in a quiet, constant ellipse.

Running nearly sixty minutes, the majestic epilogue and finish line of the journey reaches its putative fulfillment, drawing a line that tends toward infinity, fully embracing the mystery of its own existence with an intensity that isn't even sought after, but that flows spontaneously through the folds of a sonic galaxy that glimmers in the distance but to which, for one long moment, we were granted access.

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Even once carefully dissected, Autechre's "NTS Sessions" confront us with the outermost limits of human understanding. Here we state, with the utmost honesty, that we cannot fully grasp the entirety of eight hours that don't merely glimpse the future of electronic music, but carve it out right away in clear, indelible letters, so that perhaps, one day, we'll no longer see them as dense, unsolvable riddles but as irrefutable answers to questions that, right now, we don't even know how to ask.

If, as we believe, this whole argument ends up sounding paradoxical – or even delirious – it's because today more than ever, setting aside any sterile, a priori idolatry, listening to Autechre resembles a mystical experience, one that as such cannot meet other forms of language, nor the semantics collateral to it. An overwhelming, supreme work, essentially and necessarily unique within the electronic universe explored so far.

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01/05/2018