There can be only two possible outcomes of releasing an album with such a title and accompanying it with a press release referencing Jean Baudrillard’s Theory of Hyperconformism and David Harvey’s concepts of time-space compression: either you get yourself signed up on the spot with Asphodel and end up winning the Prix Arse Electronica or you disappear without a trace. Autodigest give no clues as to they really are (though my sources in the field point to Heitor Alveolos, a luminary of the Portuguese electronica scene) and their music seeks to partake of the same anonymity.
It’s not bad, full of cavernous reverb and ultra-high speed digital junk, but it’s certainly not exceptional, and dolling it up with a pile of pretentious waffle (by Baudrillard, of all people, to whom, in a feat of hyperreality only JB could comprehend, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” was probably referring) only serves to remind me how overdue a reissue of Stockhausen’s “Telemusik” is.
DW