Album: Autechre

With a line-up that includes Public Enemy, Aphex Twin, Cannibal Ox, Jim O'Rourke, A Guy Called Gerald, The Fall and the reunited remnants of Beefheart's Magic Band (minus the Captain himself, of course), this weekend's Autechre-curated All Tomorrow's Parties bash at Camber Sands looks one of the more diversely entertaining events of the festival season. Would that the same could be said of the duo's seventh album, yet another series of exercises in electronic abstraction, whose main purpose seems to be to defy the expectations of both aesthetics and Terpsichorean utility. In other words: it ain't pretty, and you can't dance to it. The opener, "Xylin Room", is typical, an itchy electronic stutter whose jittery rhythm keeps tripping over itself, like a dog straining at its leash: it's interesting – but not especially so, and not for long. Things continue in like manner for an hour, with partly eroded ticks and glitches colliding to form fragmentary, disjointed beats of convulsive, inconstant tempi, overlaid with ambient tints and swells of synthesiser and sundry other smears of electronic sound, resembling a radio whose dial is being spun between stations without alighting on any specific signal. Occasionally, a scudding electro pulse or, in "V-Proc", a bona fide breakbeat offers brief but welcome stability, but it's never enough to impose a structure on Autechre's digital bricolage. The result is music that's more agreeable as theory than praxis.