AUTECHRE: CHIASTIC SLIDE (1997)
1) Cipater; 2) Rettic AC; 3)
Tewe; 4) Cichli; 5) Hub; 6) Calibruc; 7) Recury; 8) Pule; 9) Nuane.
If you think about it, a «chiastic slide»
cannot really be a true slide, because anything chiastic in nature would have
to revert to its original position in the end. If you slide down, you have to
slide back up by means of a counterforce. That's an odd idea, to be sure, but
what exactly does it have to do with Autechre's fourth LP? Unfortunately,
nothing. It all makes about as much sense as the track titles which, by now,
have completely lost connection with linguistic reality.
Critical opinion tends to veer towards
disappointment for this one, probably for a simple reason: Chiastic Slide offers no advances over Tri Repetae, and, in some ways, sounds like a slightly less
inspired copy of its predecessor, sometimes even seemingly retreating — parts
of it are conventionally more «ambient-melodic», so that it cannot be considered
a true sequel to «One Day In The Life Of A Curious Microchip». Worse, the long
tracks sometimes sound disturbingly repetitive — something like ʽRecuryʼ goes
on for ages without any tiny fluctuating subtleties that made the band's
earlier attention-probers full of intrigue.
Of course, it is very much up to your
imagination how forgiving you will be in the end. For instance, having
listened to some of the tracks from both albums back-to-back, I was sort of set
on imagining that Tri Repetae was
all about a perfectly balanced world of friendly elementary particles, whereas
Chiastic Slide is about perfect
patterns being broken down and severely jostled into a state of partial
disfunctionality. As evidenced most transparently on the static hiss blasts in
ʽRettic ACʼ, the crazy percussion rhythms on ʽCichliʼ, the crackles and
sparking off of dead equipment on ʽHubʼ, and the mini-explosions on ʽCalibrucʼ.
But then this scheme totally breaks down on
tracks like ʽCipaterʼ, where the cogs grind in good harmony and the faraway
melancholic synthesizers beep and bleep in solemn dirge mode, or ʽPuleʼ, where
the percussion dissipates completely and all that is left is a large cloud of
foggy chimes interlocking with each other at predictable intervals. Here the
personal concept for which you have wrecked your brain for so long explodes,
and you are left with the sad truth: Chiastic
Slide is just a random collection of «some more of our shit». Not much
better and not much worse — but with Tri
Repetae, Autechre effectively locked themselves into «The Innovator's
Trap»: every new album of theirs is expected to break new ground, and when it
doesn't, your friendly synthesizer dies from a broken heart.
In the end, I feel like joining with those
critics that gave the album a thumbs down, rather than those hardcore fans
who seek religious epiphanies in each hiss and crackle ever hissed and crackled
by Booth and Brown. None of the individual tracks honestly stand out — nor does
the entire album cling well together as a single concentrated assault on the
senses. And almost each of these tracks could be twice as short without losing
its point. And are those three minutes of pure static at the end of ʽNuaneʼ really necessary?..
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