Audiobulb – 7th March 2026
Christopher Nosnibor
Sometimes, an album packs in so much into a limited space that unpacking it presents itself as a major task – which in turn leads to the question of whether or not the process of unpacking is integral to the appreciation of the work. This is true of much art, beyond music. Is it essential to be familiar with the concept and the story of its creation to appreciate a painting. This is not in any way to devalue or diminish the context, but equally, a work should be able to stand by itself.
Autistici’s biography is in itself a work of abstraction, which tells us little about the artist and more about their vision of art, and cursory attempts to find further detail are scuppered by a swathe of search results about autism and anticapitalism. So to focus on what we do know rather than to vanish down yet another rabbit-hole of research, Familiarity Unfolded follows Familiarity Folded and Familiarity Enfolded to conclude a collaborative trilogy, which on this instalment features Datewithdeath, Jacek Doroszenko, Ümlaut, Distant Fires Burning, and Neuro… No Neuro.
‘2.25 Degrees of Internalisation’, which opens the album is dense and droney to begin with, but soon fragments into something that’s altogether more glitchy and jangly, electronic pulsations creating an ebb and flow of fractured robotics, stutters and echoes. ‘Grusch’s Biologics’, which sees Autistici come together with Datewithdeath is spacious, abstract and ambient in the background, with smooth, sedate bass notes filling out the sound, but with the foreground littered with all kinds of drifting debris, pops and pings. It feels like navigating the tranquillity of zero gravity while swerving space junk – the contrast between the calm emptiness with unpredictable clutter.
‘Scarlar (E-dit) with Distant Fires Burning’ serves up some squelchy analogue synth-driven Krautrock, the likes of which is easy to get lost in, particularly over the course of almost six motorik minutes, before ‘My Modal Realism’, created in collaboration with Jacek Doroszenko ventures into territory which could almost be considered dance… It’s by no means a bomp-bomp-bomp club banger, but with its looped vocal sample and spaced-out synth grooves, it very much incorporates elements of both trance and trip-hop. With Neuro… No Neuro, ‘We Melt Clouds’ is clicky, clatterly, an exercise in abstraction and microtonalism, the sound of beetles tap-dancing alongside bent piano notes and clouds racing past on a buoyant breeze. It’s noting if not imaginative and wide-ranging, and the album’s final piece – the twelve-minute epic that is ‘Subliminal Selves’, with Ümlaut is a microscopic textural exploration, the sonic equivalent of scrutinising cells dividing under a microscope.
The range of electronic experiments on Familiarity Unfolded is admirable – and experiments are the real emphasis here. Done differently, this could have been a far more accessible, commercial album. But this is not what Autistici is about – and so, instead, we get a diverse range of weirdness. Cue applause for art over plays.
AA
Aural Aggravation 