Exai reviews

  On 2/13/2013 at 9:33 AM, ambermonk said:

 

  On 2/13/2013 at 12:14 AM, AJW said:

screw "professional journalism"

 

there are plenty of other places on the net, like here on watmm or amazon. I love reading these more down to earth, subjective and often overly fantastical user reviews. Tend to be much more colourful, fun to read and full of great observations.

 

Yup. Feedback is best delivered from the bottom up, not from the top on down.

 

I believe this is called being a power bottom

Won't read anything here. Will first listen to it, tomorrow, then check back to WATMM.

  On 2/13/2013 at 12:45 AM, Awepittance said:

at least it wasn't a fictional conversation from a book the reviewer was really into at the time.

Wittgenstein, Fukuda, Mozart: A temporary platinum tress? Good book!

  On 2/13/2013 at 11:46 AM, nem30 said:

 

  On 2/12/2013 at 11:03 PM, toosharp said:

The Wire review of Exai...

 

Thanks for posting this one (I actually quite appreciated the references back to their early interest in hip hop, etc, and would just have appreciated a longer review to allow for more 'Exai' material at the end...)

 

Anyway, like many above I totally disagree with the negative opinion of Confield: I'm definitely ON the bandwagon with that one. (And Farmers Manual too!) Given the reference to Bayle's obscure Erosphere, I get the impression that certain factions of the Wire magazine club want to preserve the cache of the truly avant stuff for themselves, and that any such aspirations from a Warp Records artist will be dismissed as 'geeky avant tendencies'... Ho hum.

 

Just out of interest, does the original review name the critic?

 

 

The review was written by Matthew Ingram.

  On 2/13/2013 at 6:40 PM, kieselguhr kid said:

this one is quite good:

 

 

 

http://www.theskinny.co.uk/latest/304012-autechre_exai

Feelin it.

Exai certainly feels like a reconnect with the foundations of their music. like a snaeke eating its own tail.

This review aint to bad

http://www.urb.com/2013/02/14/autechre-exai/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=autechre-exai

The trend continues of these reviews spending less than 1/5 of their total word count on the album itself.

I think every good review has to start with context (especially considering this album in the larger context of the discography). But they shouldn't spend 50% of the piece on that.

Interesting that both this review:

http://www.urb.com/2013/02/14/autechre-exai/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=autechre-exai

And this one:

http://thewhaleshipglobe.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/review-autechre-exai-warp234.html

Talk about a 'live' / 'performed' feel to the new album... Do any of the gear experts on here know if that is an accurate reflection of the tech used for Exai as opposed to some of the earlier albums?

Here's one of the best reviews yet: http://www.musicreviewdatabase.co.uk/2013/02/autechre-exai.html

  Quote

As expected, Autechre take little time to shift from their previously established sound with the opening track Fleure (and noted, you're more than likely to pronounce these names a lot differently to how I will)

That's a strange thing to say in a written review!

One of the more legit reviews: http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/q9j9

  On 2/15/2013 at 8:33 PM, adjohns said:

One of the more legit reviews: http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/q9j9

That's one of the better ones I've read so far.

I'd like to start a metareview site that reviews reviewers. Differences in personal taste are totally fine of course, so this would be based on specific critera: like how much they actually discuss the work in question, how much they project their own nonsense as objectivity (like the wire reviewer's digressive and subjective rambling about mid 90's electronica), how knowledgeable they appear about the field (remember the RollingStone review of drukqs that seemed to credit the Beatles with musique concrete?), whether or not they stoop to personal attacks when they don't like an artist (like some early pitchfork reviews calling musicians names).

Bonus points for using the word pretentious correctly, because there's nothing more pretentious than using it incorrectly (usually because it sounds like a really important word I can use to describe things I don't like).

Another italian one, half good: http://www.ondarock.it/recensioni/2013_autechre_exai.htm (the google translation in english gives ilarious results) btw i'm really enjoying Exai and its discussions on this forum!

and another one

http://experimedia.tumblr.com/post/43158136729/autechreexai

  On 2/15/2013 at 12:34 PM, nem30 said:

Interesting that both this review:

 

http://www.urb.com/2013/02/14/autechre-exai/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=autechre-exai

 

And this one:

 

http://thewhaleshipglobe.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/review-autechre-exai-warp234.html

 

Talk about a 'live' / 'performed' feel to the new album... Do any of the gear experts on here know if that is an accurate reflection of the tech used for Exai as opposed to some of the earlier albums?

i'm by no means a gear expert at all...

but i can tell you that i can get very close to the sound of some tracks on the album just with the Machinedrum UW & Analog Four, live and without any processing. Working with these boxes you can do rather complex sounding jams just by intuitively messing with knobs... add some special sounding MaxMSP effects stuff, and you're there...

Rob & Sean doing extended jams on Elektron gear, multitrack recording, and then a lot of patience & attention to detail when editing/mixing/post-processing is how i think at least ca. half of the album is done...

of course there are a lot of sounds on there which do not sound like the Elektron machines at all.. no idea wat gear that is and no idea whether they did some meticulous DAW construction work.... i doubt that for instance the jazz solo melodies in irlite are played with a keyboard or manually step sequenced.... i would guess it's some melody-generator MAX patch sending MIDI notes... but that's just an esoteric idea... no way to find out, innit.

i think AE are really great at picking the right stuff from their recorded jam material and crafting very good actual tracks from that...

but, on this album, i think they are deliberately playing with the notion of sounding like actual mediocre jamming...

here is fact mag's review:

http://www.factmag.com/2013/02/18/autechre-exai-fact-review/

even though he didn't love it i think it's one of the better reviews I've read. I more or less agree with it

well written review but I found that after the lovely description of gantz graf, I disagreed with him more and more as it went on.

It's not a dark album (imo). It's psychedelic

he doesn't mention how they've made a huge leap forward with the lovely spacious-yet-chewy sound design

their music has long featured "rhythms that heave and fart". Since when is that a demerit?

he loves bladelores (it's not bad but kinda....meh, compared to others?)

it's all good tho

it's ginuwine.

I agree that Bladelores and Cloudline

  Quote

 

fail to justify their length

i think he is spot on with that review, and i like how he points out its gloominess. I mean can AE use a different harmonic scale than the default AE minor something one for once? Its kind of like Tool using D minor all the time... i guess if you live in a world of D minor you don't even notice how sadface it is all the time.

the most cliché AE melody on Exai has to be on 1 1 is... the feels of this track is what i'm talking about... not that it's necessarily a bad thing, it is what it is...

  On 2/18/2013 at 1:06 PM, kieselguhr kid said:

here is fact mag's review:

 

 

 

http://www.factmag.com/2013/02/18/autechre-exai-fact-review/

"This is a dark record" - my thoughts as well.

The rhythms "fart" their way into existence? What is with that expression?

This FACT mag review brought to you by a thirteen year-old boy.

Is this the vocabulary and expressive power we should now expect from professional journalists?