To anyone who's followed the musical evolution of Autechre this one comes as a bit of a surprise. 16+ years now into their sonic quest to bridge the avant-electronic traditions of mid-20th Century INA-GRM style Musique Concrete with the New York City 80's urban beat of early Electro and Hip-Hop - this 9th album from the Autechre duo of Sean Booth/Rob Brown listens as the most traditionally musical statement they've dedicated to recording since 1999's "EP7". This is of course by contrast to what came before it and with any Autechre production 'tradition' is something to be toyed with, much in the same way they have done with listener expectations on each successive release. Yet, the references to established genre-forms are there, in ways that even casual techno listeners may catch glimpses of the familiar throughout the album. In fact, it could be that "Quaristice" is the release that many people were expecting some 7 years ago, when instead, we got that extraordinary forward-thinking transmission that was "Confield".

There's melodicism to be found here and ambiance and rhythm and more recognizable 'musical' qualities than we've heard from them in awhile, rubbing right up alongside some unquantifiable AE-style sonic mentalism. Where the previous album "Untilted" was a rhythmic hyperfrenetic barrage, this one is more fluid and less angular... and more diverse. Across the aural landscape of the album there's a sense of all the tools in the Autechre toolkit having been taken out to produce their whole spectrum of varying results. Some of which we've encountered from them before, others surprisingly new. On occasion, this desire for all-inclusiveness creates a sense that the album is fractured, unfinished, trying to say it all - prototypes, rather than the usual handful of elaborately detailed finished pieces. This is especially apparent in the the smaller beatless, textural interludes that are spread throughout the album. But that perception is often shattered by the following track when the formlessness of the moment before collides with the hyperstructural shapes of that which follows. As a consequence, in the course of the 70+minute listen, "Quaristice" is by degrees sonically architectural, chaotic, dynamic, textural, spacially ambiant, suggestively melodic and of course that Autechre constant; rhythmic.

Considering Booth/Brown's longstanding, adventurous, near-auteur status in the contemporary popular electronic music landscape, this is a curious and unexpected step forward. It listens like a mix of the kind of pure ever-advancing mutation of their past decade of works, but also as a summation of their previous incarnations. A reinvention of the sort where an artist revisits their previous efforts and molds similar ideas into some totally new shapes using their more progressive skills and more articulate, developed vocabulary. As ever, "Quaristice" finds Autechre moving forward, this time through, bringing more of their sonic past along in tow. And for those not satisfied by the 70+ minute duration of this longplayer, there's the mail order only "Special Edition" with a second disc of elaborate (Versions) as well as the download-only companion collection of tracks from the "Quaristice" sessions titled "Quadrange.ep.ae" - altogether making for a sum total of nearly 5 hours of material. Certainly, amidst all of that, even the most critical listener will find Autechre delivering on rewards for the challenging investment of time and perception their music asks.