Autechre - LP5

I bought this on vinyl when it came out, its the only Autechre record I own and i just played it for the first time in years after seeing them live in Bristol last night. This is a really great record. Rae and the last two tracks especially are gorgeously emotive and stylistically unhampered by genre limits. As a hardware producer myself, its staggering that they programmed this shit at the very dawn of computer audio and software manipulation. Like Photek and Foul Play, this is B-boy music pushed to the limits of technical dexterity and beyond.This and the Bola LP bookended the 90s intelligent/IDM movement in the UK for me. Autechre's sound now is way wilder, more rhythmical and improvisational, approaching free jazz levels of spontanaety and creative fearlessness. Last night's show was sick. Ironically, given the journalistic cliches they have always attracted, there's far more genuine human feel and risk in their music than in the average chart pop record that's been pro tooled to death. I cleave more to the Detroit and Den Haag branches of the electro tree which is why I don't own more Autechre, but if you're coming to this in 2016 wanting to get yourself a dozen or so essential 90s albums from UK techno (because fuck IDM, frankly, all this music is techno) - give this one a careful listen and i think you'll be adding it to your list.Autechre ... huge respect to you both for the path you've forged in this music. I may not be your #1 fan but I'm fucking glad you're out there representing and doing what you do. Long may it continue!

Is It Washable?

After all these years... LP5 is still my fave Ae album. (Incunabula is 2nd) They definitely reached heights and achievements before this one, and after... but this album just has a special kind of magic that rarely occurs in an artist's career. Mechanical, yet emotive. A perfect harmony.

Listened to this again tonight. This album is still tight, amazing! Fragments of motor-city here, a glimpse of IDM (sic) there, but really sounding more like Autechre than anything else. Given what was to come this is a very melodic album, and although not as accessible as the pre-chiastic slide era will probably give more as time goes on. If you can't afford the vinyl (I can't), the CD is fine. In fact, I reckon CD is how this album is supposed to be heard. Peace out.

One of the less interesting Autechre albums for me, lacks coherence and dynamic, still its a enjoyable release, my favourite tracks are "Corc", "Caliper Remote","Arch Carrier" and "Drane2" wich is my top track of this Album. the jewel case is sadly ugly.

i've just listened this album for the first time, and, i must say, i'm out of words. it's genius. i mean it.

LP5 is still an approachable album for IDM fans, and while it doesn't sound a thing like Aphex Twin, it still falls in that category of music. There is a lot of creativity, identifiable rhythm and melodies but it also contains segments of very beat/sample laden music. The song structure is more conventional with things like climaxes and introductions.

This is the last good Autechre album. I bought this right when it came out when Autechre was brand new to me. At the time, LP5 was in that perfect spot of being just beyond what I liked, sort of like when you've almost acquired the taste for a new food. You don't precisely "enjoy" it yet, but you know that you eventually will.Anyway. This album deftly straddles the line separating experimental and enjoyable. Looking back a dozen years later, you might expect to find dated sounds, but no, that is not the case. This was truly groundbreaking for Ae. I believe that the wildness and absurdity they would pursue over the next decade is foreshadowed here, but it is solidly grounded in enough accessibility and melody to make it a worthwhile listen.Someone once said LP5 is a story concerning the fall, rise, and second fall of an alien empire. "acroyear2" is a busy, panicky track. It represents the first fall of the empire as a result of a violent invasion. "777" sees the empire assessing the damage. Next, witness the cold, stark beauty of "rae" when it switches from a driving, forceful track to the slower, grinding tempo at about 3:10. Absolutely magnificent. The alien empire has fallen into its deepest rut yet. Confusion takes hold under the brief, infant-like "melve." The reality of destruction and a long recovery are realized with the downtrodden but propulsive "vose in," a track which self-destructs.But "fold4,wrap5" represents the fascinating signs of an off-kilter recovery. The mood lightens, but only in fits and starts. Hardware acquisition and construction continue in the oddly-named "under BOAC." Finally the empire sees a light at the end of the tunnel. (Admittedly a very long tunnel as this track is rather uninspired.)At last we come to "corc," my favourite track here. The recovery is complete and the empire basking in the warm glow of their home star. Now, a well-deserved rest. "corc" boasts a unique, loping rhythm and bright, sunny melody. I dare say that this is possibly amongst my top ten favourite IDM tracks. I love the stereo separation in the drums around 3:30. The track beautifully winds down. The empire does a bit of mining and base fortification on "caliper remote," but something is happening. The sky is changing; I'm worried. Danger lurks on the horizon -- is all glory truly fleeting?Oh shit, here they come again! It's all-out war as the "arch carrier" units storm the empire's base. This track is yet another gem. Similar in atmosphere to the opening track, it's a bit more laid-back in rhythm but the mood is just as foreboding and desperate. Dig the neat little turn of melody at 4:03. Superb. The assault continues for a while and ultimately we're left with the bleak "drane2," which documents in epic form the smoldering ruins of a once-great society. This time I think it's for good. The melody plays an alien version of "taps" while the skittering, twitching rhythm tells of the empire's sad end.All in all, it's a very good album. (I don't know if it's great, because there are some lower-interest sections.) EP7 came next, which to me sort of sounded like outtakes for LP5. It also has some very good moments, although it doesn't seem to tell as much of a story. Again, this album really stands as the dividing line between inspired Autechre and the geek-off academic drivel that followed. It is a very important IDM album in that regard.

"This is the last good Autechre album."And this is arguably as far as anyone should read. At least without being alarmed. Now, I wonder, am I supposed to click on "helpful" because this review revealed its bias in the very first sentence?

LP5 is basically, to me, an Autechre Pop Album. Autechre display commercial sensibility on this release by their choice of song structures. I think that LP5 is home to some of the best production these guys have done, and also some finer melody work. Although i prefer Autechre in some other modes (Envane, Untilted, Amber), LP5 is definitely the one that converted me. Great starting place for beginners

I believe at this point in Autechre's career they were having trouble deciding where they wanted to go with their music. Would they continue to go on with the noisey, machine beats.. or would they go back to their roots and make more ambient driven music. Well obviously they chose the macchine beats later one, but this album strikes me as confusion with them. They seemed to work with what they did on Chiastic Slide, but at the same time, there was no advancement in the madness (which becomes more and more complex with each album after this). This album should be known as their fork in the road with one sign saying "ambient" and the other one saying "noise"

That's my favorite album of Autechre,it has interesting melodies and the percussion sounds are amazing.It's a reference for a lot of the IDM that we can hear actually and shurely it is on the genre classics. It is the culmination of his previous works that has good melodies, but percussions wasn't sofisticated enough, however, and personally, i lost interest in them after LP5, since i feel that they give more importance to experimentation than music feeling or sensibility. Anyways i can understand that people like his latest works (even i have some of them), is just that i'm a melody lover.

A pretty damn good CD. At this point in Autechre's career they were becoming more and more experimental and less ambient. As hard as it was to follow up an album like Chiastic Slide, Autechre did it well. Most of these songs are pretty easy to listen and get into. Not nearly as difficult as later albums. This album also contains the masterpiece track called Rae. Awesome stuff. If you dig this release, then you should check out its sister-autechre album, EP7

For me this album has the more straightforward melodic elements of Tri Repetae and the mangled beats and shards of sound they went on to produce on Confield and Draft 7.30. Definitely my favourite Ae record and possibly the only one I enjoy listening to all the way through. Can't recommend it highly enough!

Don't know where people get comments like "The best electronic album ever made" for this album, it’s far from it. The synth-lines are elementary at best and the beats are overly erratic. If I wanted a Squarepusher album guess what I’d go out and buy. So mixing two bad elements do not make the best album ever. I will admit there are some good points to this album. Rae, Vose In, Fold4,Wrap5, and Drane2 all have good structure. But where did Autechre go? Listen to Gescom’s This and That 12”s on the SKAM record label (Which includes excellent remixes by Autechre around the same time they recorded LP5) and see the evolution from great artists to what they are now, terrible wannabes.

"Listen to Gescom’s This and That 12”s on the SKAM record label (Which includes excellent remixes by Autechre around the same time they recorded LP5) and see the evolution from great artists to what they are now, terrible wannabes."there's so many things wrong with that statement I don't even know where to begin.

Fair enough, I can see that for many this is not an easy listen. At the time it came out it was such a leap forward in style that it did leave some people behind, especially fans of the earlier work who enjoyed the more ambient textures. One thing is for sure, something definately came together on this album, gone are the open soundscapes of Amber, gone are the mechanical rhythms of Tri Repetae. Enter a new more organic sound, living rhythms that evolve and each sound is tangible, can almost be seen and felt. In places it's wickedly complex but never confused, the elements fuse to form beautiful sonic structures. Highlight for me is "Rae" - A masterpiece of rhythm, with a haunting melody full of emotion. Sheer Genius.0(--)0

This, for me, is the turning point in Ae's career; where the music started to be pushed further and further to its limit. The melodies are hidden a bit on this album, but after repeated listens, new things start to peek through; I've listened to it maybe 100 times and I still haven't heard the whole thing. There are definitely some strange ones here; Drane2, for example, starts off with a collage of white noise and machine scrapings; it then breaks into what sounds like balls bouncing on the neck of a guitar repeatedly; later on, the rhythm develops itself, and it climaxes in an amazing collage of sound and melody ( after which it finishes at about 11 minutes and stays silent for about 9 minutes before busting into a hidden track). But songs like "Acroyear2", "Vose In" and "Rae" are definitely worth the price of admission; the melodies are a bit obscure, but once you find them, you'll never want to let them go.

This was a turning point for me, where i stopped listening to Autechre and started hearing them. Thats not to say stuff like Amber, Chiastic Slide et al is not worth checking out (they are!) but the experiemental seems to have married structure on this release. To this day Arch Carrier (track 10) is still the most intensely mind bogglingly amazing track. This is definiately for forward thinking techno, and every listen brings some new thought and emotion... but whats with the pure black casing, the artwork is always so good for AE releases...

A lot of people say this is Autechre's best record, but obviously not the person who left that previous comment. LP5 marks for me the point where Ae started to absolutely go off their rockers, and because of this it sounds sort of hollow and fragile at times. On ep7 they got a bit braver, and on Confield they have total confidence and create a very dense, haunting atmosphere. All three records are in fact extremely boring if you listen to music for entertainment only. These records are all exercises in pushing the boundaries of music and require an intelligent and patient listener to be appreciated. And "acroyear2" and "Arch Carrier" are just plain good songs, dammit.