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Mar 4, 2013The album could have been pared down a bit, yet it's a drop in a bucket for Booth and Brown. Prior to this, their discography clocked in at 18 hours or so. What's another two hours?
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Feb 27, 2013The two hours of Exai is something else. This is Autechre operating at their highest level since 1998’s LP5.
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Mar 11, 2013A tangled and glorious mess of aggressive glitches and clipped synths and stuttering beats and hints, shadows, and fragments of tunefulness.
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Mar 4, 2013As a body of music Exai lividly pulses, possessed by a half-life of disturbing magnitude.
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Mar 5, 2013It's one of those hard to grasp music forms--listen to it on headphones and the acuity of it improves, listen to it on speakers and another side is revealed.
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Feb 28, 2013Maybe a bit more editing could have given it more coherence. At the same time, there are no duff tracks, and a lot of fascinating moments.
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Mar 5, 2013They may no longer be cutting edge (who is these days?), but Autechre's intricately psychedelic pieces are still chock-full of detail, intrigue, wit, intensity and poise.
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Feb 27, 2013Booth and Brown are old hands these days, their territory firmly staked out. It’s gratifying to see, if only briefly, that they haven’t lost the element of surprise.
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Mar 26, 2013Listening to the record as a whole is sort of like meandering through an exhibit of miniature, spasming wire sculptures.
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MagnetMar 15, 2013Autechre's are notions are studied as they are transportive and on Exai, the duo fairly dares us not to lose ourselves. [No. 96, p.53]
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Mar 8, 2013Not always easy, but definitely worth it.
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MojoMar 7, 2013150 minutes of challenging, organic electronica. [Apr 2013, p.95]
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Mar 1, 2013Exai shows they still occupy a special position in the current generation of forward-thinkers, producing music that couldn’t have been made at any other time other than now, unostentatiously trailblazing a path for others to follow in.
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Feb 28, 2013This much material is exhausting to make your way through, the stretches between moments of genius way too long.
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Feb 27, 2013Some 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.
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Mar 7, 2013While it still remains potentially unwieldy and awkward for a casual listener, it brings an order of chaos to a chaotic sound, representing the best of all Autechre’s work in a cohesive distillation. For devotees who are willing to gaze into the digital abyss, Exai holds unfathomable depths.
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Q MagazineMar 11, 2013Clocking in at a shade over tow hours, there's room for fans of all vintages to find something of value. [Apr 2013, p.94]
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Jun 4, 2013Longtime fans will be pleased to hear that not all of Exai is a mature, intellectual exploration of the possibilities of electronic music.
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Mar 7, 2013For those of us in between, it's like that aforementioned jigsaw puzzle: confounding, occasionally satisfying, and forever keeping you guessing as to what image its shapes are trying to form.
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Mar 4, 2013Exai represents a career-spanning work, one that encapsulates almost every phase of their evolving aesthetic, and whether you're a fan of their early work or their recent output, it stands as a remarkable synthesis that coheres only through the deftness of its sonic architects.
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Mar 5, 2013Exai operates within a comfort zone--one that’s dazzling, but given the sheer length of this thing, also far from easy to stomach as a whole.
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Feb 27, 2013Fans certainly won't be bowled over by the innovation on offer, but as a refinement of their sound it is the ne plus ultra Autechre album, honed and executed to perfection with only a few drifty moments that suggest it could have been cut down to a single LP.
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The WireFeb 28, 2013With Exai they've created a work which reveals renewed faith in their own identity and which should act as compass in years to come. [Mar 2013, p.57]
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UncutMar 1, 2013This two-hour epic very occasionally rests on its laurels by using sounds from past palettes, but is characteristically rich and adventurous. [Apr 2013, p.67]
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Under The RadarMar 22, 2013It's a challenging record. [Mar-Apr 2013, p.97]
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Mar 5, 2013As always, it's a lot to take in; even after a dozen listens, the album's too oblique to really register in the memory. That slipperiness does nothing to diminish the moments when things really stick, though.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 32 out of 36
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Mixed: 2 out of 36
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Negative: 2 out of 36
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Sep 27, 2013
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Oct 18, 2016
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Jul 16, 2013