Autechre Exai

thanks all <3

no mention of this?:

https://bleep.com/release/49321-oberman-knocks-dilankex-ep-inc-autechre-remix

http://www.factmag.com/2013/11/21/autechre-remix-oberman-knocks-dliankex-for-new-12/

it's fuckin nice.. haven't heard the original track, but the remix starts out dry, tactile, not unlike "tac lacora," but more spare, getting more packed and elastic as it progresses, w/tendrils of melody gradually forming. hearing traces of quaristice (fractured, jagged wafts of reverberating sounds) and untilted (spidery, "iera"-like skitter) in here. honed, ear-rubbing brain chisel, 17 minutes worth.

tom ravenscroft played the whole thing on his show on friday (6music).

I've been playing Oversteps a lot recently. A lot of easy, rich, satisfying textures on that one, like Tri Rep-era simple pleasures. Dug out Confield last week and it didn't do much for me beyond track 1. Haven't listened to Exai for months. But they're all still there and I know I'll get something out of them at some point. Chiastic Slide got loads of play at the start of the year.

Got a lot of time for Exai and I don't think it suffers from being a double album. The whole thing is pretty solid.

Slightly obsessed with the noise barrage that is 'spl9'. Just when you think it can't get any heavier, it changes direction again for a final 90 secs of extreme noise terror. I love it. God knows what any of my family thought if they heard me listening to it. One for the headphones methinks.

Oversteps is a billowy beaut, especially in the context of Exai, which feels brittle and contained (direct) in comparison.

Spl9 is a stormer, y'ain't wrong.

YJY UX is a top tenner... percussion all fleshy and water-logged, melodies comprised of neon vapor clouds w/pixel-y cascades of matter. reminds me of the luminescent, nutrient-rich water in TRON, and the sort of synaesthetic sensations you get from drinking it. shit's hella tactile.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQ84hKQPTAA

SYptixed from the new Bleep10 compilation

emo for ostracized autobots

exai still hitting the spot. disk 2, with its hard, dark kicks and the brittle-ass trashcan snare of nodezsh. runrepik is kinda skippable/goofball

appreciating this album heavily rn for some reason

very groovy. dope beats. totally epic. off the hook, bros. whats that weird smell oh well.

This record is a masterpiece really. I'd say their crowning achievement but by no means an instant classic. more like a tapestry which will hopefully be disinterred in years to come and held up as an example of sheer human achievement.

it really warmed up Oversteps for me, listening to that more nowadays.. still finding Exai a bit unwieldy, sorta big and knotty with a few weak tracks. I suppose that's how all their albums are. the flow of disk 2 feels pretty inconsistent, though it's got its fantastic parts. still sounds alien as ever, pretty much like nobody else. Draft 7.3 is still shaping up as a favorite.

can't get with runrepik, or T ess xi.

t ess xi is one of their prettiest tracks though!!

the beat kinda fucks it for me, and there's an icy sort of mini-stab that occurs with the rhythm that further fucks the beat for me. the background ambiance sure is nice, though. a similar track might be qplay, on oversteps. again, very pretty vapors/pads, but i find more interesting spaces in it. there's a lot of negative space to the beat. t ess xi feels locked up/rigid in comparison.

oversteps felt like an instant classic for me. won me back over to them again after having lost my faith somewhat. It's sort of a thing now among ae fans that you get into the one you heard before their latest one. In that respect I'm really starting to appreciate the draft/untilted era a lot more than I did before.

oversteps felt like a *big* change to me, after falling for a couple fakes (the Altered: Carbon album, mainly), it finally leaked it, and it sounded very fresh (and massive) compared to their previous work. i kinda tired of the noodly-ness of tracks like see on see, and the repetitiousness of the Treale beat, but returning to it, it's quite enveloping. On the whole, a classic for sure.

irlite (get 0) recalls Oversteps, with its excess of 'musical' notes, and that synthetic reverb. i definitely crave more tracks like that -- the dreamy, neon gaseous notes-suspended-in-air quality of Oversteps, with looser percussion.

too many notes

i think what's happening is that i'm listening to this album like it's progressive rock or something and suddenly it's working for me.

disc 2 is definitely hairier but i feel like it has the most striking stuff, spl9 cloudline and yxy ux or w/e

successful and/or fresh stuff i mean

shh don't say prog LJ will come and do a track by track comparison with "tales from topographic oceans"

no love for Quaristice? man does that record sound amazing here in 2015.

Back when we did the autechre poll, quaristice (along with the followup ep) is the autechre era that ended up moving way up in my internal autechre ranking. I

Albums that have aged well for me: Untilted, Draft 7:30

Quaristice is one that has actually become more unenjoyable since its release.

In the poll I talked about late period Ae as a jazz band, and in that context a lot of their music, and the improvisational nature of it made a ton of sense to me. Instead of simply improvising notes or progressions they improvise texture, timbre and song structure itself I feel.

Exai is indeed a masterpiece, and coupled with L-Event, Ae seem to be totally hitting a new level of production right now and are totally flying under the radar. I love that every six months or so this thread keeps getting revived by people who are rediscovering it and realizing its mastery.

Instead of simply improvising notes or progressions they improvise texture, timbre and song structure itself I feel.

The Trees, off of Untilted, is where this idea sort of registered w/me.. As the track progresses, the beat sort of diffuses (around the 3' mark), and that decrepit melody emerges through the smoldering debris. It's almost as if a negative image of the beat emerges, if you can picture smoke in the air, as it's displaced by diff. shaped pockets of air (percussion).. like the surrounding smoke becomes the beat. that's sort of how i imagine the track. but it's also like a terribly corrupted xerox of the originally intact track that keeps deteriorating. not sure how much of this is improvised, and i read that creating the album was a painstaking process, with a lot of determined programming.

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no improvisation no jazz no smoke

i wouldn't say jazz personally, i guess in the broadest sense, there is definitely an improvisational element, or the sound of improvisation. maybe fusion? on a structural level what i hear is still pretty groove-based. groove a. groove a -> groove b. etc. structurally it's very simple. kind of jam band-esque tbh. i mean the sound design and digital synthesis elements are very evocative, world-creating, avant-garde, imaginative, capable, etc., but the structural forms that are being used remind me of .. the grateful dead. no. fusion-era miles to be more charitable since the hit rate is high imo. mostly it's very successful and but sometimes it's just kind of dull and plodding, the melodic language derived from electro / techno can sound amazing or rote like they are repeating a line they did 15 years ago and the groove can sound alive and breathing/evolving or kind of listless and half-awake, etc.

that is just how i feel

Confield always felt like their 'jazz' album to me, for some reason ...

One thing I love about Exai is that you can hear elements of all their work post LP5 throughout the record. Almost feels like some sort of anthology.

Anyone ever felt their music is incredibly synaesthetic? There is something beautifully sculptural and visually abstract about their music. Every song reveals some sort of evolving visual structure in my head a la their video for Gantz Graf.

Confield is probably the last album of theirs that I eagerly return to in full. This is the last Autechre song I can't get enough of:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyOGNhdhlAY

When I saw matmos live in 07 or 08, it brought to mind fusion-era miles for some reason.

SPL9
and
CLOUDLINE
and
RECKS ON
people.
WHAT MORE DO YOU NEED?

YJY UX?

but the structural forms that are being used remind me of .. the grateful dead

Never knowingly heard the grateful dead and I'm not gonna start now, dubious comparisons or no.

he's only talking about the architectonics -- i.e. instead of ABACABA it's ABCDEFG &c

ABX5¥ヮ◕

idk ae's style is pretty straightforward and relatable to me! i've never heard all these imagistic things that ppl talk about so much as a considerate sense of play both with and against form and an ear for cool timbres.

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― Albanic Kanun Autark (nakhchivan), Friday, April 3, 2015 5:35 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

can I just

no

"not even wrong" etc

On tour

Hmmm that mystery date (not sure why it's a mystery) ...

09/25 – SEATTLE / WA THE SHOWBOX

?

Live in brixton in nov, allegedly, although nothing on their or the warp website about it. Sold out anyway (allegedly) :(, and 10pm-6am (allegedly), not to speak for all hard-working middle aged ae fans out there but that is way past my bedtime these days :(

(oversteps was £3 in fopp the other day. which is the kind of thing that makes me think of buying a spare copy just to give away)