Autechre Exai

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