Milk Factory (.ORG)

Autistici gives over his first full-length to the object – to its ruses and to its allure. It’s something evident in both the album and the photographs that accompany it. Shots of metallic wires and their sharp calm; woodboards and their comforting simplicity; even a granular wall, wrinkled like an aged face, betrays a mystery that cannot be exhumed. Never in any of this is there a subject to be found.

In the album, too, pieces aren’t driven by a compositional (subjective) sense. Autistici is concerned with tracing the line of sound itself, with letting it develop, fleshing it out by (re)approaching it time and again from weirdly skewed studio perspectives. Autistici ensures that the featured objects or source sounds are indeed of a spectral nature. The edges of each are smoothed down or frayed, and polished until they gleam in a way that makes them all sound strangely similar. “Wire Cage For Tiny Birds” features prickly whirlpools and a glassy shimmer that suggests rain falling in a moonlit sky, but then, in a stealthy manner, Autistici eclipses that presence with clouds of sweet cosmic static. It is these juxtapositions which manage to plant a sense of quietly astonishing incident within these works. There is a bracing astringency and definite economy of approach to the compositions, yet the fluid subtlety of construction either affords them a certain dramatic momentum or the ability to brim with richness.

Only on occasion does he seem to get lost in the labyrinth of his own project, the digital twists and cut-ups getting somewhat away from him. Otherwise these glitchscapes achieve a radiance of appearance, refracting sound sources into a mercurial flood, allusively suggesting form and structure, and maintaining just enough textural warmth and serendipitous, fleeting beauty to sustain the listener along the way.