Reviews
Sometimes, an album packs in so much into a limited space that unpacking it presents itself as a major task – which in turn leads to the question of whether or not the process of unpacking is integral to the appreciation of the work. This is true of much art, beyond music. Is it essential to be familiar with the concept and the story of its creation to appreciate a painting. This is not in any way to devalue or diminish the context, but equally, a work should be able to stand by itself.
Autistici’s biography is in itself a work of abstraction, which tells us little about the artist and more about their vision of art, and cursory attempts to find further detail are scuppered by a swathe of search results about autism and anticapitalism. So to focus on what we do know rather than to vanish down yet another rabbit-hole of research, Familiarity Unfolded follows Familiarity Folded and Familiarity Enfolded to conclude a collaborative trilogy, which on this instalment features Datewithdeath, Jacek Doroszenko, Ümlaut, Distant Fires Burning, and Neuro… No Neuro.
‘2.25 Degrees of Internalisation’, which opens the album is dense and droney to begin with, but soon fragments into something that’s altogether more glitchy and jangly, electronic pulsations creating an ebb and flow of fractured robotics, stutters and echoes. ‘Grusch’s Biologics’, which sees Autistici come together with Datewithdeath is spacious, abstract and ambient in the background, with smooth, sedate bass notes filling out the sound, but with the foreground littered with all kinds of drifting debris, pops and pings. It feels like navigating the tranquillity of zero gravity while swerving space junk – the contrast between the calm emptiness with unpredictable clutter.
‘Scarlar (E-dit) with Distant Fires Burning’ serves up some squelchy analogue synth-driven Krautrock, the likes of which is easy to get lost in, particularly over the course of almost six motorik minutes, before ‘My Modal Realism’, created in collaboration with Jacek Doroszenko ventures into territory which could almost be considered dance… It’s by no means a bomp-bomp-bomp club banger, but with its looped vocal sample and spaced-out synth grooves, it very much incorporates elements of both trance and trip-hop. With Neuro… No Neuro, ‘We Melt Clouds’ is clicky, clatterly, an exercise in abstraction and microtonalism, the sound of beetles tap-dancing alongside bent piano notes and clouds racing past on a buoyant breeze. It’s noting if not imaginative and wide-ranging, and the album’s final piece – the twelve-minute epic that is ‘Subliminal Selves’, with Ümlaut is a microscopic textural exploration, the sonic equivalent of scrutinising cells dividing under a microscope.
The range of electronic experiments on Familiarity Unfolded is admirable – and experiments are the real emphasis here. Done differently, this could have been a far more accessible, commercial album. But this is not what Autistici is about – and so, instead, we get a diverse range of weirdness. Cue applause for art over plays.
Finalising this series, Familiarity Unfolded sees the artist once again collaborating to create. It results in the expansion of sounds and ideas crisscrossing propulsive rhythms, albeit broken and at times fragmented, injecting the sonic palette with a fiery, fevered array of electronic sounds that paint a genuinely original set of circumstances. Feeling like a twisted set of languages, there is much substance to be found and grappled with here, and any hint of boredom is quickly dispersed and dealt with. With the exception of Scalar (E-dit) – Autistici & Distant Fires Burning, which conversely adopts a more traditional dancefloor structure.
It’s hard to define any of the pieces that would undermine their radical, impulsive sense of self. Instead, I’ll let the music speak for itself. File under, atmosphere, rigorous, networks, craft, electronics, hidden depths of melody.
Autistici will release their new album, “Familiarity Unfolded,” on March 7th as an LP and download via Audiobulb. This release concludes a three-part series dedicated to online collaborations with international acts from various fields of mostly electronic-focused sound art. Following “Familiarity Folded” and “Familiarity Enfolded,” this third installment continues the concept of collaborative writing and recontextualization.
Existing sounds and compositional patterns are taken up, often deconstructed into their components, and reassembled in a new form. This process gives rise to pieces in which, as the label aptly puts it, individual styles and collective dynamics are closely interwoven. The album is conceived, as they further explain, as a dialogue between origin and transformation, a sonic movement between personal expression and collaborative creation. Contributing artists include Datewithdeath, Jacek Doroszenko, Ümlaut, Distant Fires Burning, and Neuro… No Neuro, each bringing their own perspectives to the pieces and expanding the spectrum of the recordings. For years, Autistici has been known for multifaceted, richly detailed soundscapes that blend ambient, electronic sound exploration, and modern classical influences. The album features artwork by Jeff Düngfelder, the creative force behind the Ümlaut project, who also works as a visual artist.
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