Album: Chiastic Slide

By Autechre

This is quite possibly the album thats taken me the most listens to get into, whilst still retaining an air of mystery and, unusually, actually being listenable both as ambience and directly.

It's a finely balanced mix of beautiful oriental cyberpunk (if cyberpunk were to evolve out of its current 80s stereotype) melodies and harsh metallic offbeat percussion lines, which seem intent on barring you from ever making sense of the album (for at least the first 3 or 4 times).

After that you'll begin to recognise bits, unsurprisingly the first "catchy" (somehow I doubt any could truely be considered this) track is "Pule", building from a shiny tubular melody. The other highlights are "Cipater", which builds from an aggressive beat into an oriental sounding echoed melody, "Recury" which is the most "pop" in feel, but also takes several listens to reach this opinion, and "Nuane", which, in a word, is haunting. A ridiculously frenetic percussive line starts before several interconnected melodies and the DEVIL ITSELF, TALKING. I think.

Though this could be something to do with the fact that this album is clearly one of the most subconsciously immersive albums I've ever heard. It's brooding, atmospheric and tense. With only one (or two, depending on taste) let-downs on the album, the clear choice being the 5th Track "Hub", which sounds a little too much like their "Tri Repetae" stuff, and not progressive enough to fit in with this album, which feels more free than the latter.

Overall, the album evades any single judgement, so I guess the final word will have to wait until I've listened to it, at least another 10 times.