Draft 7.30

I got it last night. After 7 years it finally clicked as a whole album. I think I gave up on it on release cause I could only get into Surripere and P.:Ntl and I never really when back to it until now.

Can't believe it's taken so long

damn, 7 years already. i am getting old. still remember when it leaked on soulseek and the action that ensued on the WATMM room there.

draft 7.30 really opened up for me, when i listened to it on headphones in the dark on acid. it was mindbending how every sound had a perfect place.

Wood block samples FTW.

sonically, ae's best album. no fucking question.

though it's not quite as groovy as i want it to be.

  On 3/6/2010 at 11:54 PM, blos said:

Wood block samples FTW.

ever noticed when the sample-kid from windows movie maker turns the X and O blocks in the playground it sounds a bit like Pro Radii?

  On 3/6/2010 at 7:24 PM, HWNDarkside said:

I got it last night. After 7 years it finally clicked as a whole album. I think I gave up on it on release cause I could only get into Surripere and P.:Ntl and I never really when back to it until now.

 

Can't believe it's taken so long

What's next? Untilted?

Has become my fave album of theirs in recent times. Xylin room is excellent a is surripere.

Draft 7.30 has always been my favourite Ae album, even if Pro Radii is my favourite song.

there's a 1 or two songs, i've mentioned before, that ruin it for me, because their beats are totally not rhythmic and therefor grating

tonight, when my buddy and I were getting drunk as fuck, I started playing him Draft 7.30 and made him listen to it the whole way through. I finally got someone else into Autechre! :emotawesomepm9: give me (LP)five, everyone!

i would find this album sonically their best except for the couple tracks that use straight up skratch record hip hop drum samples.. those samples are just way too dry, flat, static and trebly for my taste, have always just annoyed the piss out of me. . maybe i'd prefer them on vinyl lol

definitely some of their best work on this album though!

  On 3/6/2010 at 11:54 PM, blos said:

Wood block samples FTW.

yes!

this album is the pinnacle of their short-lived "musique acousmatique/"organic" sounds go(es) funky/hip hop"-phase to me over confield where it was introduced (at least on certain tracks). for the first since a long time a clear tendency in their musical approach seemed to stabilize (imho the only 2 albums that sounded as close to each other before that were incunabula and amber) and it was oh so much to my delight. i think that's the reason when untilted came out and took a complete turn in terms of sound design (as in lack thereof in favour for arrangement) i didn't welcome it with open arms at first (i still think it suffers a bit from the mix) and even had doubts its leak was real for a while...

but anyway, back to draft: one thing pretty much impeccaple about it is the production: i think it has a very unique "tight" feel, intimate somtimes verging on claustrophobic. those "little", fragile melodies scattered throughout support that effect like in xylin room and p.:ntil, two of my favourites.

but the cake takes without question "IV VV IV VV VIII"... i'm not good/creative in describing aural impressions in images/words so i won't bother trying this time, all i can say is that this is probably THE autechre track with the most narrative/cinematic appeal to me. i'd never want to write a list of my favourite autechre-albums as i think they pretty much all convey very different emotions and none could take another's place depending on my current mood... but if HAD to boil it down to maybe 3 tops this would be among them, fo sho.

controversial: i actually think surripere is one of the "weaker" tracks

  On 3/7/2010 at 12:47 AM, Mesh Gear Fox said:

draft 7.30 feels as if every sound was crafted to perfection in a laboratory. it always makes me think of watching objects morphing and jittering around in a white room (like the loading program in the matrix), each song has its own shape and behaves in a different way.

i totally get that laboratory/watching objects thing... only to me it's a messy desk with scientific experimental stuffs that come alive and interact with each other over night when noones watching ... i guess that desk image stuck thanks to the woody sounds setting the stage

draft 7.30 is probably the most inspiring Autechre release for me personally.

Definitely. I think it's unbeatable. It's diverse but unified, extremely techy at times but also extremely spare at times, it's got colourful moments and grey moments, it's got VL AL 5 (always a strong point), and no one but Autechre could have made it... Extreme brilliance from start to finish.

  On 3/7/2010 at 2:55 AM, theSun said:

sonically, ae's best album. no fucking question.

 

though it's not quite as groovy as i want it to be.

Um........ Xylin Room?? 6IE:CR???? V-Prock????????

of course there are groovy parts, or else it would just suck. just sayin' there's a lot of breakdowns that are clearly not groovy

  On 3/7/2010 at 4:25 AM, yek said:

there's a 1 or two songs, i've mentioned before, that ruin it for me, because their beats are totally not rhythmic and therefor grating

There's only one track that lacks a coherent beat and it's Tapr. every other track has a very consistent beat, even though some of them are in strange time sigs (IV VV IV VV VIII I'm lookin at you)

a few things: that out of tune bass at the end of 61e.CR gets me every time. love it.

this album gets better every time i listen to it.

does anyone have the promo cassette? i'd love to pick up a copy of it one day, but i never can find it on ebay, and i'm not sure if it's gonna be crazy expensive...it was promo only, right? part of me imagines/remembers it being sold on bleep or warp for a while... none of the sites i've looked at have any quantity produced info on the cassette. just curious.

  On 3/7/2010 at 3:17 AM, xox said:

  On 3/6/2010 at 7:24 PM, HWNDarkside said:

I got it last night. After 7 years it finally clicked as a whole album. I think I gave up on it on release cause I could only get into Surripere and P.:Ntl and I never really when back to it until now.

 

Can't believe it's taken so long

 

What's next? Untilted?

Untilted only took me a few weeks to get. It's only now that I see the progression from Draft to Untilted.

Fair play to Autechre for making me think so much about their music

  On 3/7/2010 at 5:50 PM, auxien said:

 

does anyone have the promo cassette? i'd love to pick up a copy of it one day, but i never can find it on ebay, and i'm not sure if it's gonna be crazy expensive...it was promo only, right? part of me imagines/remembers it being sold on bleep or warp for a while... none of the sites i've looked at have any quantity produced info on the cassette. just curious.

yes.

Yeah it was promo only. You can still get it really cheaply when it pops up on Ebay, no one seems to care terribly much. The contents are exactly the same as the released album, also.

I really found Draft super easy to get into because the ideas were fairly clear from the get go. IMO when people talk about a retrospective release, this is the one. And I don't meant that in a negative way at all. Up until this point in their career every album had been a completely different direction. After cichilisuite you never really had anything quite like it again. Draft references a lot of their previous works but reworks them.. The references seem pretty obvious to me. cichlisuite (opening track with it's dry, rapid percussion), chiastic slide (VL AL 5, thick rhytmic textures+strings), gescom (all the hip hop references).. EP7, LP5..

My favorite ae album!

I have promo cassette!

Interesting thread. From time to time I just wander into a record store, go over to techno/dance/ambient (whatever the hell label they put on it at the time) section and pick a new(ish) entirely 'cos it's got cover art that really grabs me. That is how I bought Draft 7:30 and it was the first Autechre I bought! I had heard of them but never heard them before. Boy oh boy did I get a shock! I tried _really_ hard to get it but just didn't. I lent it out to a couple of IDM loving mates and they were like, 'Whats your problem, it's great!' . Any how, some months later (but thats 6 years ago) I was pulling an all nighter fault finding / fixing our TV set and put Draft on just 'cos I hadn't listened to it since I bought it and at 3am I'm game for a laugh. It clicked, right there! Now I can enjoy it _even_ without sleep depravation!