Exai

Pitchfork 5.9/10 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.

The Line of Best Fit 7/10 Dense, subtle, maddening: there should always room in one’s collection for records as smart as this.

The Skinny 5/5 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.

Clash 8/10 ClashMusic: Read an album review of 'Exai' by electronic music duo Autechre, Rob Brown and Sean Booth, on Warp Records.

Slant 4/5 'Exai' melds nearly every impulse Autechre has had in the last 15 years. Read our review.