Exai
If anyone\'s capable of making two hours of chainlinked processors and meticulous programming sound compelling and downright human, it\'s Autechre: two of the last producers standing from IDM\'s glory days. Hip-hop heads at heart, Rob Brown and Sean Booth channel their B-boy roots by heading back to the future, a place overrun with laser-guided loops, bold drum breaks, and surface tension samples that are about as subtle as a medicine ball to the face. Yet *Exai* is strangely musical, referencing everything from warehouse-rave head rushes (\"Jatevee C\") to tortured ambient techno (\"Bladelores\") in its pursuit of postmodern bliss points. You may need a few breathers over the course of these two gear-shifting LPs, but that\'s to be expected with music this expressive and extreme. It\'s no small feat, considering Autechre unveiled its first album—the much more docile *Incunabula*—two decades ago. If anything, the duo is only getting *more* insane with age.
Double LP Exai is Autechre's eleventh record, and the Manchester duo's longest by a margin of about 40 minutes. As ever, it shows Rob Brown and Sean Booth to be top-notch sonic magpies and brilliant technicians, but it fully justifies their reputation for being poor editors.
Dense, subtle, maddening: there should always room in one’s collection for records as smart as this.
Eleven albums deep into a career that reached new heights of expressiveness with 2010's emotionally-charged Oversteps LP, Exai finds Booth and Brown bringing their A-game once more - this time in the form of a near-flawless two-hour set that aims as much for the body as it does the heart or the head. In terms of pure sonics, Exai is monstrous - definitively Autechre's most balanced and dynamic sounding album thus far; a fiendishly satisfying blend of earth-shaking bass, lush synthesis and bullish hardware-driven beats that flaunts the duo's love for old-school hip-hop more openly than anything they've put out in the last decade.
ClashMusic: Read an album review of 'Exai' by electronic music duo Autechre, Rob Brown and Sean Booth, on Warp Records.