Review Summary: From man to machine.
Melancholy. From this vaguely used term, try and think of any artist who can transmit such powerful feeling through their artistic output. I bet names like Joy Division, Radiohead, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Nick Cave and Jeff Buckley came to mind instantaneously. In fact, these were and/or are artists who used the mos depressive components of the emotional spectrum to create some of their finest and most unforgettable work. But hey, melancholy is a relative thing: there are different types of approaching methods. For instance, Bob Dylan has always been an artist driven by huge sadness, but there was a warm and receptive vibe inherent to his melancholic ways. In my personal opinion, melancholy has always been best portrayed at its rawest and most obscure and lifeless form, and it's such representation that happens on the freezing sonic meltdown that is Autechre's third record, "Tri Repetae".
Autechre are a electronic music duo consisting of long-time friends Sean Booth and Robert Brownhave. The duo's characteristic sound is one of such omnipresent attention to precision and detail that one single Autechre song can be so psychologically dense that the listener's brain feels like it has been meticulously scattered in half. Sean and Rob artistically portray and consequently assume themselves as emotionless characters who wander through the depths of electronic music's dark corners and apply methodologies so uncanny and robotic that can enhance and emphasize the genre's already mechanical characteristics. Through mesmerizing soundscapes and through punishing and progressively more bold digital textures, Autechre are one of those bands who can definitely set the listener up for an intensified emotional, psychological and even physical state of ache.
And though releases like the dense "Amber" or the lugubrious "LP5" are amazing examples of this, none is more significant or representative of such maddening process than "Tri Repetae". "Dael" opens the shadow realm's floodgates in the most adequate and fitting way possible. A subdued but equally hypnotizing drum beat enters the fold as unsettling synthesizers immediately shriek at the listener's ears like the mentioned person was abruptly entering a wrecking machine factory, like being hit by a sonic cyber-hurricane out of nowhere and is here to stay for the 7 minutes that follow. The duo's precision and variety are never more evident than on tracks like "Clipper" and "Eutow", which showcase Sean and Rob's mos accessible and melodic side while remaining poignant, complex and enigmatic. "What about the groove?", you could possibly ask, only to be met with the earth-shaking response that is the apocalyptical and phantasmagorical funk in "Rotar", a song to make your bones break, your body weaken and your spirit levitate through every single frightening and euphoria-inducing bass note.
If there's any thesis "Tri Repetae" stands for in behalf of Autechre's output, it's that machines can also get pretty emotional sometimes. For each brutal beatdown to be found on the band's third record, there is also a moment of pure aesthetic bliss, of diamonds snapping and turning into gold, wonders progressively unfolding along with each listen given to "Tri Repetae". Examples of such are the juxtaposition between warming and watery synths and abrasive glitch noises to be found on "Stud", or the muscal personification of ambiental hypnotism that is the dreary and whimpery whisper of sadness that is "Overand". Even the coldest characters, mechanical and rational as they've always been, have raw feelings (and to a degree, almost pure feelings at that), ready to be slightly revealed but never, ever to be fully exposed to the headlights.
"Tri Repetae" is the soundtrack to isolation surgery in a cylinder box in which your ankles turn to cynder blocks and your heart is replaced by a wretched stone. Autechre's third record is an ode to calculism and meticulousness that ensures the psychological roots of all feelings. Few are the times melancholy truly sounds as bitter as it does when mutated, over-modulated and transformed by Autechre and their tools that paint every tear with a shed of impending doom. "Tri Repetae" can at its very core be perceived as a 75-minute long stay in a hospice or even in a parallel universe on which everything is mechanical and where only traces of romanticism, love, hope and happiness remain, frail and unshackled like this wrecked place's habitants are. It's "Rsdio" that terminates the authentic tour-de-force on a vaguely calm note that simultaneously manages to sound so hipnotic and bionic after an entire thread of songs that already took the listener's life away with them to never return it. On an act of transcending suction, the song brings a strange feeling of belonging to the table: the subject and once human being feels progressively more consumed by the machinery to the point of conversion into an equally rational, mechanical, pragmatic, hard-headed, cold-blooded, characterless, feelingless creature with no traces of humanity left in it. The mechanization process has been delivered, the threat has been set and the curse is irreversible: He who was a soulful friend becomes humanity's mortal and most threatening enemy.
From man to the machine.
