Autechre Chiastic Slide

[President Squidward]

hi im just here to say this is my favorite autechre album in terms of consistency, style and sound. Lots of cool sounds in here. Recury deserves to go on forever since you just know by the first 2 seconds you're in for a fuckin A+ track. I worry it might get replaced by Tri Repetae as my favorite since I need to tune up my old 3-star rating on Rateyourmusic but for now, Chiastic Slide is a pretty underrated release and I'm happy it gets some love in here.

if youre a rym user like me I made a list for users who think its the best album:

https://rateyourmusic.com/list/PrezSquid/chiastic-slide-gang-where-you-at

[thumbass]

R e c u r y.

That says it all

[Chabraendeky]

The best thing about Chiastic Slide are the first 9 tracks.

[Freak of the week]

hub mmmm

[beerwolf]

Every time this thread gets bump I go back to listen to this album. But as Zeffolia says it's always been a 6/10 album for me.

I can guarantee you I'll spin it in the next few days and it will be the same 6/10, but I always wish for the Autechre Sonic Magic Eye to kick in and blow me away. 

After maybe 20 years of sporadically throwing fat squishy eyes into the witches cauldron and not rising above a 6/10 I think the Autechre Sonic Eye will not open for this.

Honestly (unlike Draft 7.something) I wish I could hear what those who love this album hear.

 

[thumbass]

Nuane nuane nuane nuane nuane nuane nuane nuane nuane (also cipater rettic ac tewe cichli hub calbruc recury pule)

[MisterE]

@beer badger

it's all the kind of gloomy but also sombre and slightly alien 'dark' pads and melodies in the background (appropriately smothered with reverb), which create kind of an ambience/soundscape with a moody edge. is why people like it. it's like the last album they made as actual human beings with anything resembling human emotions, before they became completely assimilated and put out albums composed solely of metallic squinks and farts that were thrown into a blender. metallic squinks are still cool, and all...

[markedone]

On 1/18/2020 at 9:55 AM, beer badger said:

Every time this thread gets bump I go back to listen to this album. But as Zeffolia says it's always been a 6/10 album for me.

I can guarantee you I'll spin it in the next few days and it will be the same 6/10, but I always wish for the Autechre Sonic Magic Eye to kick in and blow me away. 

After maybe 20 years of sporadically throwing fat squishy eyes into the witches cauldron and not rising above a 6/10 I think the Autechre Sonic Eye will not open for this.

Honestly (unlike Draft 7.something) I wish I could hear what those who love this album hear.

i love that chiastic is hard for me to define, as it often has something very crunchy and something lush in the same track.  where draft is hyper sonically advanced hip hop, and more granularly detailed, chiastic has more broad juxtapositions in texture.  also for me chiastic takes place inside the mind of some spaced out robots, theyre trying to imagine humanity and sometimes it's successfully rendered as melody but other times their machinery short circuits and gets stuck in loops, which gives it an almost tragic vibe

@MisterE yeah i think we're getting at that same slightly-gloomy but also trippy vibe that makes this album special

[Zephyr_Nova]

I'd say this is their most accessible album.  Every track combines cool futuristic sound design with huge beats and memorable melodies.  It sounds more alien than anything they'd released prior, and more human than anything they released after.  Kind of the perfect midway point of the Ae evolution. I can understand why it may be of less interest to some listeners (as the tracks speak for themselves without a lot of extra delving necessary) but I can't really understand not understanding why others love it (for the same reason).  It's a crazy immersive headphones listen too... basically the musical predecessor to ASMR, but with none of the annoying qualities.

[beerwolf]

Looking forward to playing it tomorrow. I'll try to mentally jot down why this album doesn't release the desired fire work display.

I am pretty sure there is a track lurking on the second half which is a solid gold classic, but cannot recall which one.

[donquixote]

Loved it. 

Rinsed it.

Didn't listen to it for years.

Didn't vibe with it last time I listened.

Will try again tomorrow too.

....Pretty sure it ain't no SAW85 tho (oh shit I'm in the wrong forum)

[thumbass]

What I love about Chiastic is the incredibly layered sounds, the rich textures, the weird yet accesible song structures, the melodies and the crunchy beats, the perfectly fitting cover art and I could keep going on like this for a while. This is the first Ae album that clicked with me on first listen and it's what got me into them in the first place. I'll always treasure it and it never get's boring since there are always new sounds hidden in the deep layers of the tracks that you'll have never noticed before.

[BobDobalina]

20 hours ago, thumbass said:

Nuane nuane nuane nuane nuane nuane nuane nuane nuane (also cipater rettic ac tewe cichli hub calbruc recury pule)

The first half is fucking mental, then the 2nd half always reminds me of what the trillion-years heat death of the universe into nothing but a bath of radiation would sound like.

58 minutes ago, beer badger said:

Looking forward to playing it tomorrow. I'll try to mentally jot down why this album doesn't release the desired fire work display.

I am pretty sure there is a track lurking on the second half which is a solid gold classic, but cannot recall which one.

I think you're thinking Nvane dude

[danshoebridge]

Still my all-time favourite album. Must have heard it hundreds of times and not bored of it yet.

[thumbass]

41 minutes ago, BobDobalina said:

The first half is fucking mental, then the 2nd half always reminds me of what the trillion-years heat death of the universe into nothing but a bath of radiation would sound like.

I think you're thinking Nvane dude

Am I the only one that thinks goz quarter is the highest highlight on nvane?

[auxien]

32 minutes ago, thumbass said:

Am I the only one that thinks goz quarter is the highest highlight on nvane?

yes

it is good but every track on there is better than the previous so obv Draun is supreme. that’s just the way it is, sorry.

[thumbass]

1 hour ago, auxien said:

no

Draun is good but every track on here is better than the one after so obv Goz is supreme. that's just the way it is, sorry.

 

[EXTRASUPER81]

17 hours ago, auxien said:

yes

it is good but every track on there is better than the previous so obv Draun is supreme. that’s just the way it is, sorry.

Respectfully dis a gree.

Laughing Quarter is top 5 all time Autechre bangers.

[auxien]

Laughing is pretty great, not gonna argue against that. Draun always hits me harder tho, touches on some d e e p e m o t i o n s for me.

pagebreak edit: anyway Chiastic is really good too of course. i get a bit bored with Hub tho, and gotta be in the right mood for Recury and Nuane

[President Squidward]

ive always seen Cichli as another version of Gescom's amazing Key Nell 4 a year prior

also even when autechre morphs into a crazier, complex sound in the next two decades I can still sense the melody and humanity in a bunch of songs after (6ie.cr, Pen Expers, a lot of LP5, portions of Untilted, Altibzz, Move of Ten, BLADELORES GOAT Ae song)

[Freak of the week]

On 1/22/2020 at 10:14 PM, auxien said:

yes

it is good but the quality of every track is a sine function of the track's order number, starts from zero on Goz, reaches maximum on Latent, becomes zero again on Laughing, and reaches minimum on Draun, so obv Latent is supreme. that’s just the way it is, sorry.

ftfy

[Rotwang]

On 1/18/2020 at 3:55 PM, beer badger said:

Honestly (unlike Draft 7.something) I wish I could hear what those who love this album hear.

I'll give it a shot. Personally the album means a lot to me because of its strong associations with a particularly formative period of my youth, but trying to put that aside and listen objectively I think there are several reasons why it's a pivotal album for R&S:

• In terms of the song structures and the variety between tracks, and even within some of the tracks, it feels much less bound by genre constraints than their previous albums. Compared to e.g. the straight ambient of Amber (which I also love, don't get me wrong), Chiastic Slide really feels like they're doing their own thing.
• The sound design is incredible. The sounds on the earlier albums sound like synthesizers, but the timbres on Chiastic Slide sound like something else - some mechanical, some alien, some abstract, but all in some way real. I don't know much about production but I suspect that this album is the point when they started relying less on hardware and started seriously exploring the possibilities of software.
• As good as the sound design is, much of the album would still hold up without it. For example Pule with its deceptively simply melody but baffling time signature, or the jarring-in-a-good-way transition into the pentatonic second half of Cipater, or the intricate rhythms of Tewe. Those tracks could be played on traditional instruments and they'd still sound both good and original, and there isn't much electronic music about which that can be said IMO.

Of course none of that would count for much if the music didn't resonate emotionally, which for me it does massively, but if it doesn't for you then I don't suppose there's much I can say to change that. Hopefully the above gives some new perspective though.

Now I just need someone to make me understand what people like about Draft.

[Spamlet]

Never been especially into this album as a whole (I think it's that too many of the beats are kinda loud and repetitive to my ears) but Rettic AC, Tewe, and Nuane are tha bomb

[Chabraendeky]

First time listen to Chiastic Slide on vinyl, an album I thoght I know by heart since 1998, and already noticing details in the beat sequence of Cipater I never heard before. Constant mindblowing in progress.