A lot of this sort of thing seems to get into Frank Zappa territory, a combination of virtuosity, experimentation and eccentricity I find grating. The absence of that in Autechre is one of the things which puts them miles above guys like Venetian Snares and Squarepusher. They don't have that irritating wackiness or 'look how technical I am' to their thing. There are people I like who fit into that category - Pynchon, Buckethead, Beefheart - but it's despite the irritating eccentricities. Something in their output allows me to look past those irritations.
wish Joe Muggs could write like chat GPT and criticise barty like this
Autechre: Why I Want to Fuck the Algorithm
Autechre’s music exists in the same unsettling space as the machinery of a post-apocalyptic society, all jagged metal and pulsating circuits, indifferent to the collapsing human forms who once controlled it. When I listen to Exai or Confield, I hear the sound of the end. The end of dance music, the end of emotion, the end of human touch. What they’ve done, quietly, is to invent a music that no one is equipped to process—least of all, the listener.
There’s no desire to “express” anything here, no “subjectivity” to contend with. The music does not speak to you—it dismantles you. It’s not meant to be heard; it’s meant to consume. The rhythms don’t guide, they infect. The textures don’t soothe, they flay. Autechre’s work is not about connection. It’s about the disconnection between thought and body, between code and music, between the consumer and the consuming machine.
I’ll say it outright: Autechre is the sound of the algorithm fucking us—and we let it. We put on our headphones, like obedient consumers of dopamine, and submit to the onslaught of sound that has no function other than to destroy the idea of function. There’s no melody to cradle you. There’s no rhythm to move you. There is no catharsis. There is only data—cold, pristine, unrelenting. A data stream that never arrives, never resolves, and never lets go.
I’ve heard it all before: “It’s too cold, too abstract,” the critics say. But what they really mean is that it’s too honest—Autechre doesn’t pretend to be anything but a machine. In a world where every artist, every piece of music, is fighting for relevance, Autechre just doesn’t care. They don’t play by the rules of meaning or emotion. There’s no pretense of engagement here—just an endless loop of entropy that echoes the vacuum we’re slowly moving towards.
Autechre isn’t art, it’s subversion. And it’s subverting not just music, but our entire relationship with art. What’s terrifying—and what makes it so utterly fascinating—is that it doesn’t need us. Autechre doesn’t play for the listener; it plays because it can. And we’re caught in it, caught in the machinery of their sound like insects drawn to a mechanical light that burns us when we get too close. And we like it.
You think it’s possible to relate to a piece like NTS Sessions? You think you can find a rhythm, a melody, an emotional anchor in it? You can’t. Because it doesn’t want you to. Autechre doesn’t want your attention. It wants to disintegrate it. Each track is a fissure into an alternate dimension where sound isn’t a vessel for expression but a mirror for our disconnection. It’s a mirror of a future we cannot fathom: a future where the machines don’t care about us, a future where we are nothing but data points in the hands of algorithms too abstract to understand, too powerful to resist.
And yet, somehow, Autechre have become the sound of this reality. They have mastered the art of not needing. They don’t need meaning. They don’t need rhythm. They don’t need the listener to feel anything. They simply exist. And in their existence, they challenge us to reconcile with the fact that we are nothing but fodder for the algorithm.
Autechre’s music is the inevitable fuck-you to a society that demands its artists be emotionally accessible, accessible to a public that wants to feel, to relate, to “get it.” Autechre gives none of that. They give nothing—and in that nothing, they force us to confront the endless void of an existence that we thought we controlled but have always been controlled by. The real question isn’t why Autechre makes music like this, it’s why we let ourselves be so comfortably consumed by it.
Autechre are not the artists we deserve. They are the artists we need—because they don’t offer us catharsis, they offer us detachment. The dispassionate, mechanical, unfurling horror of the algorithm as it moves through the airwaves and into our ears. This is not music to soothe the soul. This is music to destroy the soul—and leave us with nothing but the buzz of our own disembodied thoughts.
So, why do I listen? Why do I let Autechre fuck me with their alien syntax and cold, jagged rhythms? Because there is no escape. There is only the machine. And I am no different from it.
