Autechre Exai

yeah, pretty psyched as well!

those of you Acroyear2 fans are gonna shit for this record. it's super-complex, beat driven, but not at all in a boring way. i'mloving it so far on first listen.

have u got a promo dl?

got it today *bragging*

aww congrats <3

In other things people have probably already worked out, if you treat the 11x11 grid of the front cover as a series of 11-bit binary numbers, they add up to the release date as YYMMD (13034). Or the release date spells out something which the front cover also adds up to.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AougnYAALBAvdHI0MTNBNm1ZbldiN29ISHFBUWp4WVE

Why 13034, and why that particular configuration from all the ones that add up to 13034? No idea. Looking forward to someone cleverer running with this idea.

woah

https://soundcloud.com/failme/failcast-issue-019-mayan

track from the new album @ 1'5" (one hour, five minutes in. approx.)

dog latin, are there traces of the oversteps/move of ten production qualities on the new one? do the tracks have that big/spacious/crisp sort of definition going on? is it lush?

& does it sound like Amber? because that's probably the only reason i'd listen to it.

On first listen I'd say it's a bit of a cross between LP5 and Untilted. It's very rhythmic, lots of hiphop influenced beats, startling sound design (ghost noises looming out from aural blind spots in a 'did I really just hear that?' way) - sort of reminds me of tracks like Acroyear2 and UnderBOAC off LP5 (which i'm very happy about) and yeah, it's got Oversteps' stateliness in there too, but then it's very long and I haven't quite digested the whole thing.

goddddd... !

spoilers!

can't wait to hear 'Flep'

'1 1 is' clearly indicates a new and fresh direction

I wonder if Autechre themselves could even identify track w/ title at this stage.

this sounds incredible

We need a best-of, with remixes and art book, all the bells and whistles

Boy, I'd love to hear this.

There's a track that's total Stereolab dots/loops: " T ess xi"

Ugh.

How bout a review of "bladelores" ?

Like the funky drummer break slowed down about 10 times until it's just this humungous unrelenting thwack echoing into a bottomless chasm. Dirty, gritty little acid squiggles weave around the beat and after a while these great plumes of almost trancey/housey chords start breaking through like the sun coming up on a sodden morning. It's actually a really beautiful piece of music in the same way that Cichli or Garbagemx36 start out quite ugly and malformed but slowly form into a cohesive something or other. Of course as soon as you think everything's going to go full on chorale bliss, Ae pull it all back under and it's back into the boggy marsh, before repeating the whole trick again except this time we're treated to an extended outro of washy church-like organ chords.

Why do I suspect that reading dog latin's description might be more enjoyable than listening to the actual track!

Isn't that how it always is?

thanks dog latin! the wait is too long.

still nothing on slsk — a few ppl have some tracks but they're never online long enough to download them

they're fakes

nobody bump this til it leaks, the hope is killing every time u click ;_;

:C

the fakes are just mp3s of silence.. the Oversteps anticipation/debacle was complicated by (convincing) fake "leaks," like the mis-labeled Altered Carbon album and the (well done) WATMM faeks. a lot of people were fooled. and then the actual album came out, and people thought it was fake.

how is it possible that so many people with promos could be so fucking stuck up and uptight on such a massive scale?

yeah I was actually fooled by one of the Oversteps fakes.

if you had a promo, would you really put it up on soulseek??

no. to be honest I was just making that post in the hopes that someone would see it and feel guilty. haha.

This is the first review I've come across.

http://www.failme.net/2013/02/polyrhythm-nation.html

annoyed this release is still a month off... they gotta give us a little somethin, or SOMETHING. tide us over

sheet music here: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3514/4011063078_ebb3af554d_o.jpg

Memories of their full frontal assault that was their 'Oversteps' tour

damnit the first time i missed them live since 97.

Spectre of hip hop through blasted circuits... Track 2 they give us a wee melody... That review was straight out of the "new Autechre album review" generator!

How are their two most recent albums holding up? (Quaristice and Oversteps). Naturally there's a hell of a lot of buzz in the weeks (months!) leading up to a new Autechre release. Just wondered whether all that hype was justified now that the dust has settled on those two albums.

I still maintain Oversteps is among the best of their work. This one is very good, but perhaps the first time I've felt like I'm not running to keep up with them. More a continuation and refinement of their sound - which is arguably a first for Autechre.

Both flawed but worthy - Quaristice too patchy (but part of a sprawling set of album, deluxe disc and digital EPs totalling 4+ hours); Oversteps quite subdued in the complexity department; neither very melodic. Apparently Exai is much more complex, coherent and melodic so COME ON WARP RELEASE THE DAMN THING ALREADY.

Oversteps quite subdued in the complexity department; neither very melodic.

You think? I saw it as a return to form really. I did enjoy Quaristice but it felt like a bit of an undertaking whereas Oversteps felt much more accessible, but still very interesting and just the right amount of melodicism to keep my attention.

Neither of those hit me like Untilted.

I've gone back to Quaristice lately. It's better than I remembered. A bit patchy for sure, but the good stuff is really good.

quaristice is great; eg. this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WJr3baPOtU

the sound of computers farting

that is great indeed, i have an album by them, i think it is the one before quaristice and it was kind of challenging so i didn't follow them after that.

ah, the confield/draft7.30/untilted holy trinity

i am still listening to the quaristice remixes. the last pile of them. (haven't yet been too into the album itself.) and move of ten.

The trouble with long albums is I often tend to start them from the beginning, losing interest or getting fatigued by the last third. But there's some absolutely lovely stuff towards the end of Exai. Don't do what I did and sleep on it.

that's true for Autechre especially, their music is so demanding and counterintuitive that it gets exhausting after an hour or so, no matter how brilliant it is. this one I find works really well if you treat disc 1 and disc 2 as their own separate albums.

defo.

someone here a while back mentioned they didn't see the point of Autechre on vinyl. and while I totally get that, the intuitiveness of just listening to an individual side at a time rather than taking it all in as a lump can help. i remember rob brown saying something about them thinking about one of their albums as sides of vinyl, can't remember which one - maybe Exai - but it was after their "the digital file is the canonical product" phase

Exai was sequenced as 4 vinyl eps iirc

yeah, I've come to think of Exai as a series of 4 eps (or 5 with L-event) and I tend to just listen to one of the EPs at a time

Listening to the entirety of Exai is weirdly more exhausting than listening to the entirety of NTS for some reason.

Speaking of which, I tried to listen to all.of Quaristice in kne go about a year ago and u didn't manage it.
Can't really work out what makes rhat album a slog. The tunes aren't exactly long and they often switch ip considerably in their runtimes

someone here a while back mentioned they didn't see the point of Autechre on vinyl.

As the band once stated in the liner notes for Tri-Rep, their music is "incomplete without surface noise"

I almost don't consider Elseq an official album release due to it lacking a vinyl pressing.

Wow, this is the thread through which I stumbled upon ilx. Has it really been 11 years?

I wish they'd release Elseq on vinyl. I know what you mean, feels like a bootleg and it's the one I forget exists sometimes