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Quaristice | 
| Artist: Autechre
Label: Warp Records
Category: Music
Buy New: $15.98
Rating:  17 reviews
Sales Rank: 78106
Media: Audio CD
Discs: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 5.6 x 4.9 x 0.4
MPN: 333
UPC: 801061033323
EAN: 0801061033323
ASIN: B0012S59ZA
Release Date: March 4, 2008
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Tracks:
| • | Altibzz | | • | The PLC | | • | Io | | • | Plyphon | | • | Perlence | | • | Sonderemawe | | • | Simmm | | • | Paralel Suns | | • | Steels | | • | Tankakern | | • | Rale | | • | Fol3 | | • | Fwze | | • | 90101-5l-L | | • | BNC Castl | | • | Theswere | | • | WNSN | | • | Chenc9 | | • | Notwo | | • | Outh9X |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Autechre return with Quaristice, a vast, sprawling masterpiece that will galvanize their dedicated and sizable fanbase. With the Designers Republic back at the helm of art direction, Quaristice will be an album that impresses sonically but also visually. This warmer analog masterpiece recalls some of Autechre's most classic material. Quaristice is an enveloping blanket of Autechre's skewed sound science.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 12 more reviews...
 Quaristice is okay October 28, 2008
Bob (Divided States)
Pushes the boundaries of noise into what is sometimes music but of coarse it's all about creating interesting soundscapes, not music. Honestly, it's okay as far as it goes. Why this is "a masterpiece" I have no effing idea and don't care. I dig some Richard James and others. Heard a lot of stuff over the years and just heard this. It's okay. I offer this as a music listener with no loyalty to the maker of this album and their previous work and simply as a counter-balance to the typical glowing praise of fans. Waaaay too many raving reviews on Amazon dot com for music albums.
Autechre continue to reinvent music October 12, 2008
Alex TB
Probably the most noticeable difference between Autechre's latest LP Quaristice and their back catalog is song length. The electronic superstar duo is still cranking out experimental music, as signified by the complex rhythms, amorphous tones, and colorful aural textures, harkening back to their latter experimental albums such as LP5 and Draft 7.30. The difference is that the songs are significantly smaller, with a few notable exceptions.
These exceptions perhaps reveal a growth in soundmasters Sean Booth and Rob Brown. The first song to break five minutes is Simmm, which sounds much like a Tri Repetae b-side. An abstract but traceable pots-n-pans beat is built upon with very clean cut sounding IDM synthesizers until the latter half of the song kicks in with an assortment of sound experimentation that we would come to expect from more recent Autechre; synthetic sounds vaguely resembling water splashing, Mario going down a green pipe, or metallic pops are the norm for the duo. What makes Simmm particularly interesting is that it develops and ends within the five minute length comfortably. We can only guess, but guess reasonably that if Autechre made this song ten years ago, it would have likely continued on for an additional unnecessary five minutes. This improved awareness of time is applied with great success on some songs, such as Simmm and many of the more off the wall compositions on the album, which are not necessarily bad but do not need to be test driven or worked with for more than the two or three minutes given to them.
However, another thing that makes Quaristice a pretty bold album for Autechre are its ambient pieces, and it is difficult to say whether or not they were subject to deliberate timing decisions. The opening Altibzz is one such ambient song, and is destined to be an electronic classic. Probably the most beautiful piece the group have ever recorded, it shows an impressive amount of restraint with its soft synthesizer melodies that intermingle with one another to form brief and understated harmonies, the result being a mesmerizingly beautiful song that is full of life. The song clocks in at 2:52, and although many listeners could have probably listened to the song for five minutes more without getting tired, its brevity makes the song that much more delicious and fleeting, much like the shortest and sweetest pieces by Warp compatriots Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada.
But alternately, we have the opposite side of the spectrum with the less melodic ambient pieces. Of these, Paralel Suns is quite short and both Notwo and Outh9X are very long. The catch is that both seem to work, Paralel Suns being enjoyably brief in contrast to its massive scope, and Notwo being quite long but consistently relaxing, while Outh9X actually does have quite a bit to say and is appropriately the longest song on the album.
But Quaristice is in no way an ambient album. Autechre probably do have it in them to make an ambient album, but Quaristice ends up being fun because of all of the bases it covers, ambient just happening to be the most interesting of them. It is a versatile electronic album, hitting genres as far away from one another as RDJ reminiscent acid house (chenc9), the aforementioned ambient tracks, glitch, and more. But this is Autechre, so a good deal of the tracks are less music than they are experimental organized sound.
It is likely that Quaristice will confuse listeners new to electronic music just as much as Autechre's previous albums. However, it is still significantly more likely to draw new fans or change the minds of anyone who had their doubts about Autechre, due in part to the band's new understanding of time management, which is a problem which they have always wrestled with. And because Autechre are still finding new and effective ways to express themselves through electronic music, and are still producing the occasional brilliant cornerstone song to the genre like Altibzz, it has become difficult to deny that they are the future of music, for better or worse.
Quaristice September 30, 2008
R. Lukas
A solid Autechre album. The multiple tracks initially felt choppy, but the album has grown on me with time. This record brings to mind a number of sounds (French pop music, etc) that I would not normally associte with the band, but work well in this context.
 Palace of sounds July 12, 2008
Walt E. Beyeler
Lots of textures and moods in this collection of soundscapes. Wonderful balance of glitches and swoops, percussive and fluid tones, resonant vistas and claustrophobic drive-bys. Reminiscent of Aphex Twin at his best.
A "radio edit" of a fantastic album July 10, 2008
The Pitiful Anonymous (the Acres of Skin)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
For any fan of Ae's first 8 albums, it's easy to take shots at "Quaristice". The songs are much more simplistic in nearly every way; there are fewer layers, the production feels much less complete, aurally and texturally. Song structures are much less calculated and organized feeling, adopting instead, as other reviewers mentioned, a free-form, possibly improvisational, chaotic style, as if the dense, syncopated chaos usually found on Ae's records was left in its original raw form.
Out of the 20 tracks on "Quaristice", oddly enough it's the shortest tracks that feel the most complete, fitting easily into the same category as previous Ae interludes such as "Rettic AC" and "Caliper Remote". The longer tracks (in this case, that means only about 3 - 4 minutes) nearly all feel like they would have done better with Ae's more typical 6 - 9 minute track length. As the title of my review indicates, when listening to the album as a whole, it feels like one is being treated to mere samples or 'radio edits' of the songs, which sometimes haphazardly bleed into each with awkward fade-outs, further indicating that there was more that could have been included.
Now, for the good news: Very few of Quaristice's 20 songs could be called filler, and there is remarkable diversity here. Rather than cutting tracks and releasing a single disk of longer versions of the remaining songs, I believe they should have extended this album to double album length, giving all of the tracks more space to evolve. The more free-form approach used here does have its advantages, as Ae indisputably covers new ground here, with a variety of beatless ambient songs, including beautiful opener "Altibzz", as well as experments such as the deeply strange "Steels" and "Fol3", which border on arrhythmic sound collage.
Of the songs that stray closer to what one might expect from Ae at this point, "Perlence" and "Simmm" stand out as two of their most beautiful songs ever. Perlence's marvelous groove resonates in what could only be described as Ae's biggest echo chamber ever, while Simmm's beautiful melody breaks down into soft, warm synth washes before fading back into clarity in a sort of musical epiphany at the end, accompanied by a simple 4/4 rhythm. "Simmm" is also one of the album's longest tracks at 5 minutes, and does indeed feel complete.
Unfortunately, the second half of the album is generally much less memorable, and contains much less diversity as well. Pieces like "Rale" and "Fwze" run together, sounding much like past Ae efforts with several layers removed, including the subtle melodies that have always pushed their songs into the category of "brilliant". On past albums, I wouldn't have trusted that any track that at first seemed weak would still seem that way after a couple more listens, as the intense subtlety of previous releases quite often rewarded repeated listening. With these songs, however, I doubt my mind will readily change, as it is precisely the lack of such subtlety that I am objecting to here. These songs most of all could have benefited from extension.
The second half of the album still contains gems such as the gorgeously alien "WNSN" and the 7 minute ambient closer "Outh9x".
Really, there's no question any Autechre fan should pick up "Quaristice". There's really a lot of great stuff on it, and it's quite listenable, especially in the first half, but one definitely gets the feeling that the album could have been a masterwork comparable to past works if the songs had been fleshed out a little more. The alternate versions found on the bonus disk of the special edition and on the digital download only "Quadrange" EPs partially remedy this problem, and are worth checking out, although they didn't do alternate versions of many tracks which I felt needed it most.
I think this would be a bad album to introduce someone to Autechre with, because: A) It's very different from any other Ae album and B) It's quite difficult music, featuring quite a few tracks with no melody what-so-ever (which has been true on other Ae albums as well) and also quite a few tracks with little discernable structure / chaotic structure (which, in my opinion, has not been true on any other Ae release).
Recommended for Autechre fans. 4 stars.
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