Autechre neither make casual music, nor do they make music casually: The English duo of Rob Brown and Sean Booth have released 11 albums under the name in the last 20 years, along with a chain of EPs that have generally been as integral to their evolution as the long-players. All of those albums easily pass the one-hour hurdle; 2008's excellent Quaristice comprised 20 relatively brief tracks cut from hours of extended jamming, but it still clocked in just shy of 74 minutes. In 2010, the two enthusiasts offered a webcast of an exhilarating 12-hour DJ set, pogoing from hip-hop and indie rock to industrial and electronica. (One short and emblematic sequence incorporated Eno and Byrne, RZA, Coil, and Boards of Canada.) A certain charm of Autechre has always been that they love music and they love making music; even at their most clinical, this zeal has remained an inherent premise.
In the last decade, the Manchester duo rewrote their own rules, leaning on the risks of their early works until, by their eighth LP Untilted, it was clear that their intention was no longer simply making bodies move, though that was sometimes a by-product. If Autechre's earliest records were typically classified as intelligent dance music, their later efforts might best be dubbed intelligence-enabled dance music-- with eclectic touchstones absorbed and dissolved, they did whatever they wanted. "I think there's always this competitive freshness that we're trying to achieve," Brown told an interviewer around the time of Quaristice's release. "That's all there is in terms of statement or communication."
But for all their influence, energy and innovation, Autechre have never been very good editors. Their EPs are the length of most bands' albums, while their albums run about as long as short feature films. If you hear an interesting sound or idea from Autechre, you're bound to hear it again and again before a track's end. Despite their creative restlessness, Brown and Booth have never been very good at moving on their music itself. These qualities dovetail to the detriment of Exai, the band's eleventh record-- and, by a margin of about 40 minutes, its longest. Though it's often interesting, Exai is insufferably exhausting, a record imprisoned by the obsessions of those who made it.
Five years ago, in an interview with Pitchfork, Brown said that the possibilities of technology had made music production intimidatingly infinite. A key to productivity, he implied, was setting limits and aims. "You've got to be realistic," he said. "You can sit in front of a computer and have a blank slate and be completely overwhelmed by the possibilities and not get anywhere." Whereas 2010's wonderfully muted and warm Oversteps found a path and followed it, Exai is a behemoth devoid of focus, an album on which the tough decisions about direction and, later, elimination have not been made. There are bass-heavy beaters that suggest the pair's earlier works, and amorphous drone numbers that don't; there are glitchy sprints that chirp, and menacing slogs that haunt. Just one of its 17 tracks doesn't break the four-minute mark, and many slingshot between various sounds and schemes, meaning that the transitions within the album and the songs themselves are weak, if not nonexistent. Pieces shift into bridges that lead nowhere ("T ess xi"), suddenly mix their metaphors and mechanics (the end of "recks on") and wallow in aesthetic indecision (tone-setting opener "FLeure").
There's nothing actually wrong with the sounds on Exai: Though they don't turn many new tricks, Autechre have once again proven to be top-notch sonic magpies and brilliant technicians. "Irlite (get 0)" makes a synthesizer sound like a church organ overrun by the ghosts in the graveyard, while "T ess xi" employs fluorescent soul keyboards as its basic building block. "deco Loc" turns someone's voice inside out, creating beautiful textures and themes from a sound salvaged and forcibly repurposed. The drums splashed over the surface of "Runrepik" suggest sun-warped crunk singles. Its chaser, "spl9", is an industrial crucible where the ruptures of power electronics and the force of dubstep are heated until they ricochet off one another. Brown and Booth are familiar with each other's habits, and wary of them, too. "T ess xi" showcases a sort of rhythmic volleyball between the pair, where several seemingly simple beats tease one another, shifting so as to avoid anything so obvious as a groove. Likewise, "vekoS" ends when its subaquatic beat surrenders slowly to a tide of overwhelming static. On an album of erratic shifts and very few segues, it's a moment of impossible tension.
Arguing that an album offers too much music seems passé at best, entirely irrelevant at worst. Aren't records just old-fashioned methods of assembling information, arbitrary holding tanks for material that could be released in online formats that don't adhere to time limitations or sequencing expectations? Possibly, and perhaps Autechre is once again ahead of a curve that we barely recognize. But that doesn't solve Exai's fundamental problem: Some of its songs deserve to be cut into halves, while others should have been chopped wholesale. With those snips, Exai would be a really good Autechre album that summarizes the various successes of their career in an hour or so. As is, it's as much a frustrating obstacle course as it is a grueling marathon.
