Longtime fans of Autechre will probably be ecstatic about Quaristice. It harkens to early Autechre music - more experimental, more chaotic, and less dance friendly than the last 4 albums or so. I've been an Autechre fan for ages, bought nearly every album they ever released. But I started to pine for their earlier sounds - when they were trailblazing the experimental electronic scene that later became known as IDM. Quaristice is the album I've been longing for! If this sounds like you, you must listen to it!If you haven't listened to Autechre before, you may be intrigued, or maybe confused, by their music. The duo, Rob Brown and Sean Booth, make electronica music, but not like Moby, Hot Chip or Postal Service who create very pop-oriented music with electronic instruments. Autechre music is more alien, more subconscious. It is pure mechanical noises: synths, glitches, cut ups, and intricate sequencing. You won't find a traditional pop song structure anywhere on the album, no matter how hard you look. Some call it IDM, some call it experimental and some call it noise, but fans of machine music know that Autechre have created some of the best and most innovative electronica albums to date.Overall, Quaristice sounds less clinical than many of Autechre's more recent releases. The sounds evolve more organically and the sequences have more random elements to them. I LOVE it! The synths sound like an Evolver (Dave Smith Instruments) with its quirky sounds and step sequencers. If not an Evolver, I would still hazard a guess that the music was inspired by some new piece of hardware. It's just a guess, but this album sounds so much like a return to hardware for the band. Either that, or possibly some serious cut-ups and processing - like the Matmos albums based on surgery intruments.Autechre break new ground with the use of human vocal elements in "IO", something they rarely incorporate. The human vocal is nicely balanced by one of the most recognizable machine voices ever: a Speak-n-Spell (or perhaps a Speak-n-Math). The vocal also isn't very comprehensible since it's filtered through what sounds a bit like a megaphone and a distortion petal. It's graininess is perfectly complemented by the digital voice of the TI toy. A few songs into the album, it begins to remind me of certain Coil music: the experiemental synth based stuff like Elph vs. Glitch or Music To Play In The Dark or similar... My impression keeps changing with each song, because they all sound so different. Even the tempos vary in each song, from ambient washes to triplets at 120 bpm. However, the closest thing to a dance track in the collection is the schizophrenic hip hop beats of "90101" that sound like Timbaland productions on 45 rpm. It wasn't until Track 17 "WNSN" that I started to hear the Autechre that we have come to know since 2000. And by "Notwo", track 19, the music gets so minimal that it's downright zen. A beautiful way to fade out the album, "Notwo" and "Outh9X", the last two tracks, are pure atmospheric bliss, very similar to the planetary music of murcof. This is an unexpected pleasure of Quaristice - the music varies so much. No two songs are alike and it seems display a range of influences and a range of skills.Autechre are going to gain a lot of new fans with this album at the same time that they renew most of their existing fan base.