Doom Metal Cover of Autechre

It’s been about 20 years since Autechre remixed Tortoise, taking the latter’s chamber post-rock and reshaping it with digital tools. In the process of producing “Adverse Camber” / “To Day Retreival” (Thrill Jockey, 1998), they located correspondence in the two groups’ mutual emphasis on rhythm, texture, and tonality, as well as on how the tools and techniques of pop music can push into challenging new territories.

The Bristol, England-based band Sonance returns the favor this month, applying its progressive doom-metal apparatus to a cover of “Eutow,” off Autechre’s 1995 album, Tri Repetae. The track was posted to Bandcamp as part of a Sonance collection titled Remix and Cover. The wafting start of “Eutow” is reproduced with guitars and bass. It’s meatier than the source material, and also slower, pleasingly so. The Sonance version is about a minute and a half longer than the original, despite forgoing much of its interior development. Gone entirely, for example, is how Autechre’s “Eutow” ups the pace mid-song. (One might draw a comparison to how Autechre’s covers of Tortoise’s “Ten-Day Interval” virtually eradicated the percussion of the original.) Sonance revels, instead, in a blissfully sludgy rendition of the underlying foundation of the Tri Repetae track, treating it like a mantra to be set on repeat and adhered to, getting all the more hypnotic as it unfolds.

Track originally posted at sonance.bandcamp.com. More from Sonance at instagram.com/sonancenoise, where a recent shot of a Make Noise 0-Coast synthesizer suggests Sonance’s next Autechre cover may sound even closer to the source material.