VA: Autonomous Addicts
The Designed Disorder

The Designed Disorder was established as a vehicle for issuing electronic IDM-related material by primarily US artists. Certainly Autonomous Addicts, its premiere 'netlabel' release, includes a good number of upper-tier names like Twerk, Lusine, Richard Devine, Logreybeam, Hologram, Tipper, and Deru among others.

Unspooling haunted melodies over a prickly base of crunchy static, Deru conducts a master class in downtempo grime and glitch with the opener “Blackboard.” Lusine drapes elegant chords over skipping breaks in “Breed” while snuffling, pinched noises flail over a lumbering steamroller pulse of pinball beats and strangulated chatter in Eight Frozen Modules' “Table Faith.” Some opt for a heavier sound (the slow-motion crunch of edIT's “Crashes”), others lighter (jittery synthetic cellos oscillating over distended beats in Anon's “String Theory, and RD's hazy, pebble-strewn “Chumgen”). Slightly more ambitiously, Tipper conflates micro-funk, bruising breaks, and electro-acid in only five minutes in “Tweak Sauce.” Logreybeam's “For Sophie” assails melancholy melodies with punchy snare accents while Richard Devine's “Per-Cer” similarly merges glistening melodies with steamroller crunch. His “808303” is, not surprisingly, an acid track (from 1994 no less) created with a Roland 808 and TB303 that's deservedly sequenced as a not-so-hidden track, given its anomalous character in this context. Autonomous Addicts offers no earth-shattering manifestos, polemics, or revelations, just sixty-six minutes and thirteen tracks of Merck- and Schematic-styled machine music served straight up.

August 2005