Autechre
It is one of those curious coincidences which create the impression that perhaps there is a master plan. On the night you came to Chicago in the sing-along version of The Sound of Music, Messrs. Sean Booth and Rob Brown (whom perhaps you know conjointly by the name Autechre) came from England with their decidedly unsingable version of the sound of music.
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Increasingly, the field of cognitive science is settling on the notion that, like machines, we obey a predetermined set of imperatives hardwired into us by genetics. But we’re suggestible creatures. Do you recall the day, two or three summers ago, when we picnicked on the banks of the Danube? We were enjoying some marvelous cured ham on black bread when from the river emerged a man dressed in a gabardine suit and silk tie, with a blueberry pie in one hand and a bowling trophy in the other. Do you recall what he said to us as we sat there, aghast? “Please,” he said in a cold, clear voice, “kill me.”
Yet the gentlemen of whom I spoke earlier aspire to a method and manner of communication which might best be described as mechanistic. Their field is electronic music, or more precisely, intelligent dance music, also known as IDM, or simply Intelligent. The world of music produced with electronic devices is unusually fractious, even within the ever-narrowing categorizations of popular music as a whole. We have reached a rather absurd point where there are almost as many subgenres as there are artists. One might think that such specificity is desirable since surely no two artists are really so alike. Sweet Liesl, if only it were so. Much electronic music sounds like a demonstration of the machines used to produce it, and one artist is as often as not indistinguishable from the one to his left or the one to his right
As ever, dear Liesl, I await your reply.
