XI year old Autechre Album Released: Exai (WARP234)

you don't have to listen to it all at once

I do though

  On 8/1/2018 at 6:42 PM, hello spiral said:

Remember when it came out and people were saying it was too long? LOL

  On 8/1/2018 at 6:56 PM, jules said:

lol

  On 8/1/2018 at 7:08 PM, mushroom said:

 

  On 8/1/2018 at 6:56 PM, jules said:

lol

 

  On 8/1/2018 at 6:42 PM, hello spiral said:

Remember when it came out and people were saying it was too long? 

Story of my life.

lol

lol

Was top 5 for me until NTS Sessions came along. A top 5 release of the 2010s.

That was such a fun AE release period, great memories, sooo many listens. Except my computer blue screening a couple days after download, which was suss and required a week of specialist repair.

this album is such a beast. dense. detailed. sam & rod were definitely not short of ideas here.

i still regard this as their last actual 'album'. since then we've gotten live recordings (AE LIVE), extended jams of their tour material (ELSEQ), and the long evolving radio session jams (NTS), but we haven't gotten an actual "album", with all the WARP promotion, round of interviews, artwork, etc that that entails.

is there a difference? there is to me. there's something different about an "album" release. more work on the production, editing, mastering.

the stuff the've done since then has been cool and i've liked it but i still feel that something is missing. an extra level of polish or production, or depth to the sounds. it's hard to describe but if you put on exai now & listen to it you will immediately hear the difference. i feel like their current max-based system generates so much stuff that they are kind of letting all that output take the lead. lots of extended jams and sketches but not things that feel like finished works somehow.

  On 8/2/2018 at 7:25 AM, digit said:

this album is such a beast. dense. detailed. sam & rod were definitely not short of ideas here.

 

i still regard this as their last actual 'album'. since then we've gotten live recordings (AE LIVE), extended jams of their tour material (ELSEQ), and the long evolving radio session jams (NTS), but we haven't gotten an actual "album", with all the WARP promotion, round of interviews, artwork, etc that that entails.

 

is there a difference? there is to me. there's something different about an "album" release. more work on the production, editing, mastering.

 

the stuff the've done since then has been cool and i've liked it but i still feel that something is missing. an extra level of polish or production, or depth to the sounds. it's hard to describe but if you put on exai now & listen to it you will immediately hear the difference. i feel like their current max-based system generates so much stuff that they are kind of letting all that output take the lead. lots of extended jams and sketches but not things that feel like finished works somehow.

Exactly, man. That's pretty much how I feel about post-Exai releases as well. While I'm still very intrigued by what they're doing now I would love to see a "proper" album released eventually. Something tighter, more focused and detailed, more thought-through regarding sequencing and length. To limit oneself is the greatest production tool in my opinion.

  On 8/2/2018 at 7:25 AM, digit said:

this album is such a beast. dense. detailed. sam & rod were definitely not short of ideas here.

 

i still regard this as their last actual 'album'. since then we've gotten live recordings (AE LIVE), extended jams of their tour material (ELSEQ), and the long evolving radio session jams (NTS), but we haven't gotten an actual "album", with all the WARP promotion, round of interviews, artwork, etc that that entails.

 

is there a difference? there is to me. there's something different about an "album" release. more work on the production, editing, mastering.

 

the stuff the've done since then has been cool and i've liked it but i still feel that something is missing. an extra level of polish or production, or depth to the sounds. it's hard to describe but if you put on exai now & listen to it you will immediately hear the difference. i feel like their current max-based system generates so much stuff that they are kind of letting all that output take the lead. lots of extended jams and sketches but not things that feel like finished works somehow.

i mostly agree, but to me that is a good thing, this new direction. we've had way too much "proper" material from the boys,

with "clear" compositions and great ideas, right now i am hugely intrigued by the possibilities that lie ahead with the "live" setup.

the fact alone that the last gigs lasted half an hour longer has me pumped for the next european tour...

  On 8/2/2018 at 7:25 AM, digit said:

this album is such a beast. dense. detailed. sam & rod were definitely not short of ideas here.

 

i still regard this as their last actual 'album'. since then we've gotten live recordings (AE LIVE), extended jams of their tour material (ELSEQ), and the long evolving radio session jams (NTS), but we haven't gotten an actual "album", with all the WARP promotion, round of interviews, artwork, etc that that entails.

 

is there a difference? there is to me. there's something different about an "album" release. more work on the production, editing, mastering.

 

the stuff the've done since then has been cool and i've liked it but i still feel that something is missing. an extra level of polish or production, or depth to the sounds. it's hard to describe but if you put on exai now & listen to it you will immediately hear the difference. i feel like their current max-based system generates so much stuff that they are kind of letting all that output take the lead. lots of extended jams and sketches but not things that feel like finished works somehow.

That "lacking something" is indeed hard to pin down, yet it's evident everywhere on post Exai material. My theory is that on their older stuff, especially Confield, Untilted & Draft, Sean & Rob were grappling with this unruly monster of pure primal energy of sound they'd created, trying to mold it and keep it from escaping and running loose.

And as you mentioned, it's as if now the ideas are let to float around by their own accord more, seemingly with less emphasis on restructuring/editing.

Maybe they finally tamed the beast, or perhaps it's quite a peaceful beast now that it's roaming loose.

Of course this isn't indicative of every single track since Exai, but seems to be a general direction of their material since.

i like (and love parts of) exai but pretty much everything they did after even better. i reckon it makes for a great introductory album tho.

^ Yeah.

"Their new stuff is just loose, unedited jams" is the 2010s equivalent of "their new stuff is just pressing play on a random note generator" in the 2000s. If you look back in this thread you'll see the exact same criticisms thrown at Exai--except that I guess now everyone's realized that it's actually ridiculously detailed/deliberate?

I do think their newer material tends to have fewer discrete layers than on Draft, Untilted, etc. though. Now the complexity is more embedded in the sound design itself. I think they said in the AAA that the boundary between sound design and sequencing was kind of gone for them. So you have tracks like c7b2 or mesh cinereal where it's hard to mentally divide things into separate layers sound, but where there's actually a ton of crazy shit going on--or c16 deep tread where there's seemingly very few layers but lot of richness and morphology in many of the sounds.

Anyways that's my longwinded way of saying that their newer works (at least elseq, I haven't listened to nts much yet tbh) very much feel like "legitimate" releases to me.

If every page in this thread represented one day from the release of Exai, Exai would be exactly one year old today.

  On 8/2/2018 at 9:36 PM, tneuvm said:

^ Yeah.

 

"Their new stuff is just loose, unedited jams" is the 2010s equivalent of "their new stuff is just pressing play on a random note generator" in the 2000s. If you look back in this thread you'll see the exact same criticisms thrown at Exai--except that I guess now everyone's realized that it's actually ridiculously detailed/deliberate?

 

I do think their newer material tends to have fewer discrete layers than on Draft, Untilted, etc. though. Now the complexity is more embedded in the sound design itself. I think they said in the AAA that the boundary between sound design and sequencing was kind of gone for them. So you have tracks like c7b2 or mesh cinereal where it's hard to mentally divide things into separate layers sound, but where there's actually a ton of crazy shit going on--or c16 deep tread where there's seemingly very few layers but lot of richness and morphology in many of the sounds.

 

Anyways that's my longwinded way of saying that their newer works (at least elseq, I haven't listened to nts much yet tbh) very much feel like "legitimate" releases to me.

That sounds pretty spot on

  On 8/2/2018 at 2:04 PM, AJW said:

 

  On 8/2/2018 at 7:25 AM, digit said:

this album is such a beast. dense. detailed. sam & rod were definitely not short of ideas here.

 

i still regard this as their last actual 'album'. since then we've gotten live recordings (AE LIVE), extended jams of their tour material (ELSEQ), and the long evolving radio session jams (NTS), but we haven't gotten an actual "album", with all the WARP promotion, round of interviews, artwork, etc that that entails.

 

is there a difference? there is to me. there's something different about an "album" release. more work on the production, editing, mastering.

 

the stuff the've done since then has been cool and i've liked it but i still feel that something is missing. an extra level of polish or production, or depth to the sounds. it's hard to describe but if you put on exai now & listen to it you will immediately hear the difference. i feel like their current max-based system generates so much stuff that they are kind of letting all that output take the lead. lots of extended jams and sketches but not things that feel like finished works somehow.

That "lacking something" is indeed hard to pin down, yet it's evident everywhere on post Exai material. My theory is that on their older stuff, especially Confield, Untilted & Draft, Sean & Rob were grappling with this unruly monster of pure primal energy of sound they'd created, trying to mold it and keep it from escaping and running loose.

And as you mentioned, it's as if now the ideas are let to float around by their own accord more, seemingly with less emphasis on restructuring/editing.

Maybe they finally tamed the beast, or perhaps it's quite a peaceful beast now that it's roaming loose.

Of course this isn't indicative of every single track since Exai, but seems to be a general direction of their material since.

I agree with you both (and also misuta Go, that it's a good thing, with you on that as well). I'd personally exclude AE_LIVE for clarity, as it's really a different beast than elseq or NTS (and is certainly very succinct/edited/structured in many ways, though obviously not entirely). I think NTS is leaning away from the very meandering nature of elseq, though obviously not entirely, it perhaps does so more in a couple tracks. NTS is also seemingly much more 'constructed' and each track feels more complete to my ears. I definitely like it a lot more. Just the nature of NTS sort of constrains things, knowing they were fitting each session into a strict 2 hour time frame, there's by definition some editing involved. 

This is the Exai thread though. Exai is pretty good, but I just don't know what they were thinking on a couple tracks. I've warmed partly to some others, and then there's some true classics in there too. This and Oversteps was sort of the beginnings of this whole era it seems, going on ten years now...

  Quote

 

but I just don't know what they were thinking on a couple tracks

I'm interested for you to name them

jatavee C

T ess xi

Both have a little bit of interesting /sound design/ lol elements but just pretty weak tracks imo. They've gotten worse to my ears since my original impressions of them, never a good thing.

I wish I hadn't asked now

:)

I warmed up some on runrepik and the one before it, used to skip them almost every time.

  On 8/3/2018 at 1:28 AM, hello spiral said:

I wish I hadn't asked now

 

+1

aux I thought we had something hunny

  On 8/3/2018 at 1:20 AM, auxien said:

T ess xi

with you on that one.

^I'm sure it's not just the two of us jader…maybe others will stand up and show themselves bravely.

  On 8/3/2018 at 2:24 AM, Stickfigger said:

I don't like the beat and vocal one

It's one of the middling tracks imo. A sometimes sort of thing. nodezsh/runrepik/deco Loc/recks on maybe could've been lumped together, a weirdo hip hop EP.

  On 8/3/2018 at 2:25 AM, Bulk VanderHooj said:

 

  On 8/3/2018 at 1:28 AM, hello spiral said:

I wish I hadn't asked now

+1

 

aux I thought we had something hunny

You don't like NTS even a little so obviously we were never meant to be. :)

touche 

jatevee c, t ess xi and deco loc ALL are really fuckin good.

worst track on exai is flep. I would skip it if it weren't just the one bum track. maybe itll click one day