Autechre Exai

06. velkoS

http://img181.imageshack.us/img181/4066/doyouknowexaiel0.jpg

recks on effect

*retags a buncha phoenecia tracks as the new autechre album, posts on slsk*

heh

*retags a buncha bieber tracks as the new autechre album, posts on slsk*

*retags a buncha plumbing noises from recent toilet explosion, posts on slsk*

big anticipation over at WATMM.. 100+ page thread. one person has a promo copy, and everybody asking questions regarding the sounds/style/content etc. kinda rad that it hasn't leaked, but it's only been a week since promo copies went out.

I've had a promo for a couple weeks, it's dope

that all? c'mon, you tease us - a pithy line or two about style/content wouldn't be amiss

It's better than the last two: dark, chaotic, jumbled. Every song is kind of its own universe

I know that wont make anybody happy as a description, but there it is. I've been a fan for ages and its my fave since Confield.

AE speak their own language at this point

YJY XU was a fave

I wasn't being a dick initially, I just didn't have time to say more

dear god that watmm thread. anyway you are completely failing to manage my expectations here raymond, i'm starting to get too excited.

maybe I'm too trusting but I really think Autechre could totally nail a two hour album. after all this is the biggest gap in their discography, length wise isn't it?

Move of ten was 2010, so just over two years? I don't see it as big gap personally.

i guess you're right, Untilted -> Quaristice was about 3 years as well. but the Quadrange EP was even longer than this.

Leaked. Its on slsk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Q4F-kvWY7A

i guess you're right, Untilted -> Quaristice was about 3 years as well. but the Quadrange EP was even longer than this.

― frogbs, Monday, 21 January 2013 14:31 (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

They just press a button and the machines do it all for them, anyway. The amount of time they spend between albums is neither here nor there.

Scratch that.

exai = XI = 11. 11th lp. (just thought of that, might be old news)

ilm pre-covers lp anyone?

old, news. yes. props to cheeseburger.

what's that on the cover btw? a monkey? bloke in gasmask?

http://media.warp.net/images/h59px_WARPCD234_Packshot_480.jpg

damn. i think it is a monkey

ah cool, sounds like they've gone back to a more ambitious composing-style, gonna devour this when it comes out

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?

Barely anything to choose between them for most of their length tbh. the later ones seem to be busier but also more dissonant towards the end, if you like nice things then the first four (krakow/brussels/utrecht/dublin) have a short but harmonious chime section which the later ones seem to dispense with. dublin is the longest...

First 4 (krakow/brussels/utrecht/dublin) are up on youtube (unofficially, I suspect) as well, if you want to preview them ...

all of them are reviewable on the ae_live website...

The player stops every 60 seconds, though, doesn't it? It does for me, at least!

if you keep the cursor active, seeking left/right, you can listen indefinitely.. just keep marking a new point on the line, you can determine (roughly) where in the track you are by the total time on the right side, after it loads a bit

some hot shit going on in nagano from 50:00

although for all I know, they are going to release a 4 hour EP in a couple of months

― silverfish, Tuesday, February 19, 2013 2:02 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

lol nice

Going back and reading some of the old reviews of this is pretty entertaining, on most of 'em the writers just seem annoyed that they have to digest & spit out a piece on a 2-hour Ae album, nearly all of them have some variation of "they suck at editing"

Listening back now, I really think this is maybe their best one?

It's in the Confield/Draft/Untilted echelon (yeah piss off) but I'd have it 4thbehibd them on account of slightly lower average quality. 4 longest trax on a single album wd be maybe their best tho

autechre definitely the most divisive act to receive airplay @ casa imago/tt (mirror image equiv prob weezer)

& i give weezer a CHANCE

but yeah

CD 1

eastre
mesh cinereaL

CD 2

latentcall
elyc6 0nset

^_________^

no no I'm talkin Exai

I reviewed it at the time and yeah I kind of 'moaned' (not really) about the length. I don't think it's my favourite but these days I'm finding it increasingly difficult to have subjective opinions about each step on the Ae journey - they just seem to happen. I've listened to Elseq easily the same amount as Exai but despite it being a lot longer, I guess I find the long tracks easier to sit through in one go for some reason

Exai left me with a lingering impression of aural fatigue that I've never got from any of their other releases, whether that was length or mastering or the sounds they used, or just me, idk.

^^

There's a really awesome 75 minute album hiding in the many tracks of Exai and L-event (for my tastes), and yeah when I play that version of it I feel it's their best or close to it. Certain bits on it I really find grating or out of place

I really feel it should have opened with spl9

had a nightmare here, sorry

Well Confield usually makes me want to puke so the aural fatigue of Exai isn't so bad

Would guess it's a matter of the sounds used rather than the mastering, so many deep "whap-THUNK" noises on this one, and I always want to play it loud. I guess a few more ambient bits would've helped a lot.

i'm listening to this a lot and it's good. the end.

i dug out Oversteps yesterday and it's such a treat. I always think I'm about 4 albums behind on truly appreciating Ae releases.

well I know how you're spending all of 2026

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