Autechre – Confield

I'm not sure I agree with people who suggest to start with earlier Autechre rather than this release. It depends what you're looking for, of course. I discovered Autechre because I was searching for boundary-pushing electronic music. This delivered in spades. It certainly took a few listens for me to be familiar enough to really feel the emotion of many tracks, but I've since had more orgasmic listening experiences with this album than most others in my collection. It's not for everyone, but if you have an interest in this sort of music, you will find little else that comes close, excepting subsequent Autechre releases such as Draft 7.30 and Untilted.

After getting into this I excitedly checked out Autechre's back catalog, and in contrast with popular opinion if find the older stuff to be much less organic, less original, less engaging, less interesting. To my ear, this is Autechre at their best. It's music that plays by its own rules, and that's just how it should be.

ok so it won't be playing at the school disco, unless perhaps every child is born with a computerchip riveted onto their cerebral cortex... but this album is simply incredible, in every sense of the word. This is the sound of the dream/nightmare kraftwerk had before they woke to write their music. This is Deep-Blue humming to itself whilst thinking what move to play. and yet it is not inorganic. This is also the sound of the earths heart; seismic tremmors, pulses, shifting rhythms -subsiduary patterns envelop the first, glitches become the form and the form a glitch, a mass of fighting snakes, the dance of a beehive. - This is ice flows creeping slowly across earless wastelands. electric cables in a desert storm, wailing a lost lament... Spirits of stone and ice singing, and sometimes the rough wildness of the forest fire, and, distantly, the fierce drumming of a pagan listening, playing to the chaotic devine order.

Confield: Autechre and broken beat music at the highest level.

You have never heard anything like this before. It's like letting a computer loose to make beats. The idea that a computer has no emotion. Just twisted genius. There's angry music, but I've never heard anything so cold and dark before. It really is nasty and has no soul, but at the same time there's a warped beauty about Confield. (Notably on Cfern.)

No hooks or structure to the majority of the tracks. Percussion that can seem totally random, although each track does actually keep to its time signature. Formless and very minimal melody, just swirling, growling moans and digital glitches. For these reasons, most listeners can't grasp the concept of this LP.

It's been said that Confield is an album to respect but not enjoy. I think anyone who is open enough will love it. It leads you everywhere and nowhere at the same time. An album I personally could never get bored of listening to.

I consider myself a pretty experienced Autechre listener, but I just can't get into this one. I've listened to most of the tracks lots of times, and they don't impress me -- the exceptions being track 3 (which is really quite dramatic once you "get" it), and maybe 7.

I think Autechre even admitted in an interview that they got too caught up in experimenting with their generative software tools for Confield. Most of the tracks feel claustrophobic, paranoid, and obscured, like some from EP7 and many from Draft 7.30. I know this is a lot of people's favorite, but I think you need a masochistic edge to really enjoy this.

If you are new to autechre's music this is a hard album to begin with. yous should start with any older album instead. it's very good record, autechre's key to the hallof fame of the hallof fame. weird. lots of bpm changing in a lot of tracks, complicated arrangements, ultra minimal melodies. not for rookies.

Autechre's sound keeps growing like a field of mushrooms.
This album manages to be suprising and familiar all in the
same instant. Sounds like a thousand ideas wrestling for
attention.If Autechre continue to develop their music at
their current pace then reality is in serious danger of
imploding in front of our ears.