Autechre - Confield

Ever since I found Autechre's 1994 album Amber I have been an avid fan of their music. Confield, the newest offering from Rob Brown and Sean Booth, take Autechre deeper into their world of ambience and electronic experimentation. The album's opener 'VI scose poise' begins with a beat that sounds like it is being reverberated inside a metal canister and then slides into their a wash of ambient melody. The next track, 'cfern', brings a more accustomed beat accompanied by a looping keyboard line, but the rhythm begins to trail off into more difficult areas around the two-minute mark. In short, within the nine tracks that make up the album you'll find spastic drum machine beats, distorted video game soundtracks, pings, pops, and lots of other kinds of electronic decay. The album falls short of the ambient genre the duo get labeled to quite often, but challenging expectations laid upon you is what music is all about. While the album may be hard to listen to for some, electronic music fans with a background in Warp Records will find this album easy to swallow. In my opinion, this album is made up of very intelligent, extremely well crafted music that can inspire you and challenge your notions of electronic music. This is not an album that would feel at home at Astralwerks, if you know what I mean. I give the album 3.5 manstyle points simply because I'm still waiting for Autechre to make an album better that Amber. I'm going to wear that CD out one day if they don't. [www.warprecords.com]