Sean Booth and Rob Brown make the kind of music that people unfamiliar with Warp readily associate with the label. Stereotypically unpredictable, their multimonikered output defies easy classification and describing them seems both impossible and a totally facile task.
Now up to album 10, Oversteps finds them doing exactly what they’ve always done – making “dance music for the brain”. As pretentious as that sounds (and you want to read the press release), it’s a rather pertinent description. Woefully unhelpful track titles such as os veix3, pt2ph8, r ess and krYlon can only hint at the mental assault course Oversteps takes the modern listener on. Grinding noise meets serene washes of synth, time signatures are all over the place – already writing just these words, you realise there’s no way (or point) to describing it.
So, it’s probably a step forward for them. There’s a smattering of the hip-hop from 1993’s Incunabula here, and a lot of the latent melody of the following year’s Amber. A computer geek – probably an Autechre fan themselves – could tell you the sonic or technological advances at work. Maybe it’s just enough to say Autechre still sound good.
