Autechre – Draft 7.30

One of their best albums. I've seen people describe it as woody sounding, I don't really get that. It's very alien organic to me. Or micro organic, like the soundtrack to microbiological processes in the forest. It's also an album that I can hear many times and still pick out new details due to the amount of depth in the songs. The album art is as great as the music.

Always found the run from Confield onwards completely confounding and indecipherable back when I started getting into Ae, Oversteps was possibly their most listenable record for a while when it came out.

Cut to now, thought I'd give this and Confield a relisten before ordering the represses, just to see if I liked what I heard... What a transformation, like a fine wine these records have aged gracefully, they are funky, idiosyncratic and full of beauty.

I actually believe the evolution and quality of speakers/headphones is part of the reason why these records sound much better, if you listen to them on something rubbush, these tracks sound flat and shit, on something decent or hi-end they sound deep, spacious and phenomenal.

Just picked this up second hand on vinyl, perfect sound, in Shibuya, Tokyo for 2000 yen. Score.. now my autechre discog is fundamentally complete.
born 1983, Ive been obsessed with Autechre since I found EP7. That sound completely changed my perspective of sound.I forget.. when Draft came out and I was 20ish I guess. Still love the textures... sounding phat through this sub right now..

Too bad they didn't edit beyond version 30, I think around version 50 or 60 they might have nailed it.

Like sketches thrown together, lacks an album feel. Surripere at 11:23, "we tired of it, so just switch it off", forget about the fade out. The next track is just thrown in the listeners face.

This is their magnum opus.
Tri Repatae is their peak time master piece, but Draft stands as the total sum of their sonic technology artistic output.
Grab a vile, an ocean view, a hi fidelity sound system and go here....

This Album is similiar to "Untilted", although i found this one more satisfying. The first music "Xylin Room" has an impressive melody, it reminds me Ghosts doing crazy things, the following tracks share a similiar style with lovely glitches, i also love "Surripere","Theme of Sudden Roundabout" wich are very dark, and "Reniform plus" wich sounds morbid :). One of the best Autechre releases.

Once you get into these breaks beats and glitches your all over it! I just can't get enough! Very cool album and i think is good somebody who is just going to get into Autechre.

the inevitable "back to the classic sound" record tends to follow an extended period of creativity and experimentalism. it also tends to signal the death of an act in the sense that it means the act has given up on the creative process and has collapsed back to what they know sells, what they know is a marketable product.

that's not to say that this is a bad record, nor is it to say that autechre did not apply any of the techniques that they had previously pioneered in the post-repetae phase. this is unquestionably a post-repetae record, but it comes off as a record that could have been released immediately after tri repetae. all of the hallmarks of that era are here - the intricate yet club friendly beats, the thick harmonic layerings, the haunting ambience, the brilliant sequencing and the creative use of samples and random noises - but they have been spliced with the creativity and abstract nature of their several previous heavily experimental and partially generated records.

likely, this was created as a compromise to bridge the growing gap between two increasingly disparate groups of people that were buying autechre records and had it been released in 1997 right after repetae and not in 2003 after 6 years of brilliant creativity and abstraction i would probably declare it a masterpiece. yet, as it is, it seems oddly regressive. yes, autechre have managed to take a piece of music that is decades away from entering the consciousness of mainstream culture and have managed to make it sound outdated but that reflects more on their past work than it does on this record.

everybody who has ever liked anything that autechre have ever released should like at least parts of this record. anybody who enjoys most of what they've produced over the years should like the whole thing all the way through. yet, it's hard to pick out a demographic of longtime listeners that would find themselves really entranced by this. those who only like the early stuff will complain that it's better, but it's still too noisy; the late 90s listeners will complain that it's too structured and "poppy", although it must be understood that some relative concept of pop needs to be employed when talking about how it is that anybody could consider this record anything remotely close to pop music. it comes off almost as though it's two very different eps that are mixed and matched together; the constant jumps from abstraction to structure are punctuation, not evolution and as a result do not let the record flow, breathe or ebb in the way that the preceding records did. that's not bad, it's just different and, maybe, from my viewpoint, less enjoyable.

the people most likely to find this record mesmerizing are people that would have been likely to like chiastic slide in 1997 but were between the ages of 10 and 15 and so are unlikely to have been exposed to it. these people would be in their early 20s right now.....they are people that likely first experienced popular music through chemical brothers videos on mtv and so have grown up with a conception of semi-obscure electronic music that is likely fairly similar to the conception of semi-obscure industrial and punk music that i had at that age, they have grown up with mp3s and cell phones and all kinds of other contraptions that incessantly buzz and whir, they measure time in years BI(nternet) and years AI and couldn't even conceive of what to eat in the absence of a microwave......if you're in this demographic, look for this disc and then move backwards through the back catalog.

if you're a little older, i will admit that i can't see any reason to recommend not listening to this disc because it is absolutely an enjoyable (if perhaps slightly disengaged) piece of music from beginning to end. however, given the band's back catalog, i can't see any reason to recommend it to you either.

Although I agree that this is their finest work to date, I don't agree with the "cold, sterile" description the previous reviewer gave. This is actually quite a perfect blend of all of their phases over the years. You can hear the melodic work of LP5 in tracks like "Reniform Puls". There is an almost Tri Repetae rhythm section during the first half of "Surripere". The Confield-like rigidity of "6ie.Cr". Chiastic Slide, EP7, Gantz Graf, and even Amber are all represented prominently here. I find this to be their most rich and rewarding work. It is comfortable and familiar, yet exciting and fresh. Without a doubt, my hands-down all-time absolute favorite from Ae.

I disagree with anyone who says this album is hard to get into. OK, there may be the odd couple of seconds between some bars filled with glitch and groans before the beat comes back, but other than that, this album is completely beat-driven. The first two tracks serve as an eerie intro and on first listen, it sounds like a very dark album like Confield. However when 61e.CR drops the hip-hop/old-skool electro bloodline that Autechre carry comes though so prominently; it's almost impossible not to bop your head throughout the rest of the LP.

The vast majority of the tracks are 4/4 (which Autechre prove isn't always a bad thing,) hold bouncy melodies and basslines, making them "accessible" for even anti-breakbeat purists. Despite this, the innovation is not lost, with leads, rumbles and pads made from industrial groans, electronic percussion and sounds oscillated so fast that they sound like a single synth drone.

This album is almost a marriage between the looped breaks of their early 1990s releases and the new direction the group took circa 2000. Because of this, I would recommend anyone wishing to find out what Autechre are all about should listen to this LP before anything else.