Riven with Fractures

Two wonderful quotes from John Doran at The Quietus about Squarepusher's latest.

The first is about genre:

Autechre pre-cognitively side-stepped this whole affair with the release of Confield in 2001, by retreating so far from, or advancing so far past, genre conventions that their deep influences and source material can now only be glimpsed as if from the inside of a multi-faceted gem, riven with fractures – all temporal, spatial information prismatically disrupted way past the threshold of rational categorisation.

... and the second is about IDM:

The idea that the second IDM stops being formally groundbreaking and era-defining it loses its worth – no matter how enjoyable or exciting it is – is itself a philosophical idea that should be interrogated. Like, using one's intellectual heft to help formalise the end of one stage in a cultural model but not to bother worrying about what comes next is, at best a job half done, and at worst a self-aggrandising act of vandalism, ceding too much space to the most conservative voices at work today generally (and allowing too much space for people who have strong opinions on trance remixes of Burial to take centre stage). It was the thrill of jouissance that first attracted me to this kind of music some three decades or so ago but that was simply the successful beach head of an overwhelming invasion. To suggest it was solely the newness in itself that gave this music worth is, to be frank, disappointing and narrow-shouldered.