... 6. Calbruc 7. Recury 8. POLL 9. Nuane -- Autechre :: Chiastic Slide :: LP4

'Gelk' is their catchiest melody I reckon.

d sho qub would be in my head for weeks

Every time I listen to this album it reminds that that random autechre track that keeps popping up in my head once every couple of weeks is called "Hub"

that one conjures up an image of being on a chessboard with a huge chess knight stomping towards me and then retreating.
I love medieval Autechre. Maphive6.1 fits into that schism too.

love "maphive6.1," wish they had a few more like that one

having just now listened to all of it, if we're discussing best autechre albums of the 90s, my vote would go to ep7

it's so good. along with lp5 it's my fave. Just gets overlooked because they class it as an ep

is there another artist that mines similar territory to maphive? 🤔

not exactly the same but maybe the Tim Exile album on Warp?

thanks, I'll check that out!

really unique track for them. the way is morphs to-and-from sequences that sound almost "live" and untreated (for them) makes it sound like a bit tortoise ae remix or something. I wish they'd done a whole ep in this style.

This album sounds like wrapping paper. Scotch tape being pulled and torn, non-Euclidean gift items being bundled and unbundled

And Cipater wuz robbed in this poll.

Yeah when the beat switches up in Cipater feels like the precise moment where they launched into hyperspace

Cipater was never a highlight for me, but listening back yesterday it really stood out.

Though I wouldn't have voted for it, "Tewe" should have received more votes. One of my favorite "chill" ae tracks

I woulda. Genius track even the cat likes.

Received my represses of Chiastic and LP5 today. Love them both although sadly track 1 on LP5 has a few skips (I clearly know this album well cos the uninitiated wouldn't be able to tell).

Anyway, bunged on Chiastic for the first time in a while and I'm struck how (and humour me here) but bluesy Cipater is. Like, it's got this kind of swing to it and the bass is doing what a double bass would do in a jazz-blues tune, and there's just this sort of swing band vibe to it I never really noticed before. Anyway, Tewe is starting now so I'm putting my phone down

Man, I really hope they keep reissuing these. It's nice that they're doing them in small infrequent bursts, but I kinda wish EP7 had also been included in this round

I just ordered them... hopefully LP5 is untarnished. Are you getting a replacement for yours, dog latin?

Still waiting for Confield and Draft, the two I represses I'm anticipating the most.

The ones I really want are Untilted, Oversteps, and Exai, might have to change my diet and exercise habits to ensure I live long enough to get them given the way vinyl production is going

I find it interesting how much people have come to re-evaluate the Draft through Oversteps era.

I'm not sure if it's just me but that era felt, critically and commercially, like their wilderness period when their music got a lot less accessible (fewer obvious melodies) but also the appetite for Autechre and Warp/IDM style music in general was dwindling, maybe because stuff like the more leftfield end of dubstep, minimal tech etc were filling that gap in a hipper, more club-friendly fashion (why listen to Quaristice when you've got Ricardo Villalobos and Burial?).

Confield had nonplussed me, Draft had left me cold and I had almost given up on Autechre as a going cause by the time I heard Untilted. I think it was Oversteps that made me think " Hey maybe there's something left in the tank after all" and then by Exai I was definitely back on the wagon.

I've since come back to Draft and Untilted and I really like them now, but certainly at the time they sounded like an act that had hit a creative rut to me. Anyone else feel this or is this just my subjective experience?

Yeah, I had a very similar experience with 00s Autechre. I loved Confield when it came out, but I couldn’t get into Draft or Untilted at the time because they seemed melodically/harmonically dry in comparison. Which is weird in retrospect, because there’s plenty going on harmonically on those albums; it’s just sublimated/Sublimited (and nothing on them appeals to the emotions as directly as the synths on “Pen Expers”).

Now, since I properly revisited Draft and Untilted last year, I love them unreservedly, and it seems obvious that they solved music with “Surripere” and “Augmatic Disport.”

If there's one Ae album I can't really get my head around even after countless listens it's Confield

this is me with Draft

Must have said this before but I think of Draft as "wood", all creaking and snapping, crunching and stretching. Whereas Untilted is more metallic - like being inside a big pinball machine or a futuristic Speedball-style sport stadium. Confield I just don't know. There are so many horrible sound choices on that one

Draft is most definitely wood, they said at the time a lot of the sources were recordings of pieces of wood. "Xylin Room" even gives it away in the title.
For those wanting to like the album more I recommend absolutely cranking "Surripere", it elevates to a new dimension when insanely loud.

Huh. Didn't know Xylin was a wood varnish

I thought it was a corruption of xylem which are the tiny tubes running through wood to carry water

Xylon is Greek for wood - see e.g. xylophone.

Dog Latin - yeah, in that era my interest was fading a little, too.

If I’m honest, 1998-2002 is the first peak AE time for me. ‘98 is when I got on board. It was glorious. W we not back to the earlier stuff and spent time with it but (yes, I know I’m alone in this feeling) it felt too generic, too … I don’t know. Accomplished but unexciting? Put LP5 up against the earlier material and it’s night and day to me.

2003-2010 was a stretch of following along but not being sure how much I was earnestly enjoying myself. They became mood ring music in the way Black Dice/Eric Copeland are too often - every listen a different impression, frustrating, hard to know where I stood with these guys, often an shifting target. A lot of times a release would have a track or two that really worked for me. This is a period I intend to re-evaluate soon.

2013 is when things started to really, really work for me again - Exai clicked! Elseq totally clicked. The live stuff too (though I haven’t heard it all, there’s too much). NTS is great. SIGN/PLUS not so much but I’ll revisit this winter.

“Went back to the earlier stuff”

One thing we can all probably agree on: what a wild, *open* catalogue these guys have. Taken together, they kinda do anything and everything.

Raymond, that's exactly my experience. Bought LP5 c1998 after having bought as much Aphex back catalogue as I could.
At first I wondered if it was a joke! Or maybe not a joke - Aphex had always had a sense of humour, of tongue in cheek, so to hear this same kind of music played out in such a po-faced way, especially since tracks like Fold4,Wrap5 and Drane2 seemed to be using similar techniques as Aphex had on Come To Daddy and Windowlicker, it really made me wonder whether Ae were to be taken seriously.
But LP5 and soon after EP7 grew on me and became firm faves. Felt the same way about the earlier stuff, and it's only in recent years I've really got to appreciate Incunabula for what it is. Confield threw me: It was just one level of abstraction too far and I remember a lot of hardened fans online complaining about it. I tried and tried with it but I still to this day find even the most popular tracks quite painful to listen to.

Quite similar for me too, I had borrowed and listened to Tri Rep quite a bit and liked their vibe, but when I heard LP5 I bought it after 2 tracks. Went back, Incunabula was a shrug, Amber transcendent, Tri Rep now seemed bland, Chiastic impenetrable but charismatic, all the EPs superb. EP7 came out, complete obsession, Confield was like the face of god to behold. I never really calmed down after that but it tailed off gradually until Exai planted the flag again.

I really think, especially for fans of 90s Autechre, that peeps should revisit SIGN/PLUS. I firmly believe they are some of their best albums and I'm very surprised others on here don't rate them so highly.

I tried giving NTS1 a listen last night while playing video games, but I'm still not sure I fully get it. These tracks are too long and trundling to really elicit concentrated deep listening, but if they're on in the background I guess they provide a sort of monotonous grey groove? I don't hate it, but it really feels like an endurance test a lot of the time. Really I'd be able to pick maybe three or four essential tracks from the whole thing and be happy with that

Hmmm.

You know, it think somehow just I’ve come to want longer AE tracks, collected, where each track is its own planet.

(Or they’ve trained me to want this.)

When each track is long enough it’s easier to roll with the fact that 4-5 tracks are reasonably different from one another.

And then the swing back to LPs that attempt to sustain a mood (sorta) with 3-8 minute tracks don’t quite cut it.

I dunno, I feel like they’ve created new forms for their work in the last 20 years (god Confield is 20 now). NTS feels like a development of cap.IV, the 8 minute multipart tracks on (massively underrated) Untilted, and so on. A lot of Quaristice played with long tracks which were themselves parts of a larger mutating thing across the Versions and EP releases, culminating in that long Perlence subrange thing which took it as far as it could go, an hour long timecrawled single beat falling to bits, and then on NTS they found the balance (for me).

I think Confield/Ganz Graf/Draft 7.30 is always going to feel like peak autechre to me, maybe it's just because that's when I started buying those albums on release, but that was when I really really got into them.

Ganz Graf, now there's one I forget exists from time to time. Even more than Confield (which I thought came out afterwards but apparently not), that one really felt like Ae pushing things to the outer limits at the time. It was definitely helped by the video, which seemed like the future at the time but now looks strangely dated.

I can definitely hear a direct link between Ganz Graf and the NTS Sessions. I might be in the minority when I say I prefer Autechre when they're not being overtly claustro and itchy, which might explain why I like LP5 and the most recent two from last year the most.

Gantz with a t

https://gantzmythsources.libs.uga.edu/
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3xoAEAAAQBAJ

a coincidence? i think not...

huh

my feeling these days is that elseq is the long-form masterpiece

Elseq is the overlooked middle child between Exai and NTS. I should revisit it

I'm not sure if it's just me but that era felt, critically and commercially, like their wilderness period when their music got a lot less accessible (fewer obvious melodies) but also the appetite for Autechre and Warp/IDM style music in general was dwindling, maybe because stuff like the more leftfield end of dubstep, minimal tech etc were filling that gap in a hipper, more club-friendly fashion (why listen to Quaristice when you've got Ricardo Villalobos and Burial?).

... I've since come back to Draft and Untilted and I really like them now, but certainly at the time they sounded like an act that had hit a creative rut to me. Anyone else feel this or is this just my subjective experience?

This definitely resonates with me. When Confield came out, it was a bit of a shocker for me in terms of its heady experimentalism and dearth of accessibility. Yet despite this, there were a few tracks that really got me going - same with Draft, if not more so, but it felt as if "Autechre was dying or dead" or some such melodramatic nonsense. When Untilted dropped I was about done with the band - that album seemed to me them taking the piss, ditching all manner of melody and accessibility (outside of the opening track) nearing self parody. Indeed, I got into dubstep and the atmospheric experimentalism of that scene in addition to techno (Koze and Isolee were my gateway drugs there) around the same time (2005-2007). Just felt like experimental electronic music or "IDM" was out of ideas at that point - and dubstep a la Burial was the real "IDM", a club friendly, emotive, atmospheric vibe expressed with texture and abstract sounds in a new way.

Didn't take long for me to really reassess the "Mechanical Trilogy" of Confield through Untilted, and by 2010 I was really enjoying all of latter. My own tastes had evolved too, to appreciate less melodic, more textural, experimental and rhythmic music too. Wasn't too long that it became hard for me to listen to pre Chiastic era Ae. Amber and Quaristice are my least favorite Ae records now. Instead of them "falling off" I now feel like they've merely evolved and grown, simultaneously getting less and more accessible by simply ... being about as prolific as any musician or band on the planet

Elseq is the overlooked middle child between Exai and NTS. I should revisit it

Yes. Latentcall is a top 5 Ae track. Easily one of the most amazing, epic and uptempo tracks they've ever laid to tape. Shame it's digital only

Funny about Amber. It used to be one of my faves when I was getting into them, and I preferred it to Tri Rep and Chiastic. I don't know if it's cos I listened to it so much back int he day, but since buying up the first three reissues, it's the one I play the least. Incunabula has shot up in my estimation: I just wasn't into it when I was younger

Listening to Untilted right now, have always thought of as the weak link in their '00s catalogue but it's sounding pretty great on earphones. I need to go back to Elseq as well.

Funny, Untilted felt to me like they reached what they’d been heading for. I listened to it a lot and loved the drama of each track unfolding like a miniature story, e.g. Augmatic Disport and Pro Radii. Fermium is slithery and beautiful too, but being fascinated by rhythm I didn’t understand folks lamenting the loss of melodies, it seemed beside the point.
Anyone else remember the “mad day out” video for Fermium?

Amber is a pretty special album. I'm not sure where it slots in with the rest of their catalogue. It doesn't really fit in with anything else either. Like the end of "Silverside"...where the hell did that come from?

tbh it was Chiastic Slide that really made this group click for me. Tri Rep has some parts I enjoy very much but as a whole it's too...dry? Rigid? So much tick-tick-tick-clank-tick-tick-glorp-clunk. Too "industrial" as in "pulling a double shift at the metal door hinge factory and trying to come up with patterns in the machines". I actually think it's one of their uh...less good albums? I mean all 14 or whatever of their LPs are great but I think it would rank near the bottom. Once I got into Chiastic and started hearing those rhythms swing around I was like...yeah, that's what it's all about, I get it now.

of the "mechanical trilogy" the only one I really struggled with is Draft. the other two, as difficult as they are, are sonically thrilling. the sound design on Confield is still unlike anything else and Untilted is such a jam. Draft may be too strange even for me.