It’s almost become complacent to expect great things from Autechre, but here they are delivering once again, with an album that clocks in at a more than weighty two hours – but still manages to be inventive at the end of it. ‘Exai’ manages that balancing act by moving between ambient thoughts and much more active passages, some of which might put the listener in mind of late 1980s house chord sequences. There are some truly odd sounds, too, which could only be achieved by the duo – and these include ‘irlite’, where the music alights on a surreal chord, the thick harmonies of ‘bladelores’, the percussion heavy ‘Flep’, with its corrugated beats, and ‘Tess xi’, which is the track most obviously dealing in early rave currency. All this and more, with Autechre retaining the ability to come up with sounds you could swear you’ve never heard before – and all the more rewarding on headphones, of course. Their fans might be able to point to more challenging and even more inventive albums, but Autechre are still in a field of their own.
