Chiastic Slide

We Say...

Review by Philip Sherburne

Where Tri Repetae offered its own kind of chaos — metal insect chatter and clouds of mercury dust — it hewed, generally speaking, to a traditional division of beats and melodies. As alien as it could sound, the structure was familiar; the closing "Rsdio" might even have come from Depeche Mode. By 1998's LP5, Autechre had established the oily, fractured funk that would carry them into the following decade's all-out sonic free-for-alls. Falling in between those two albums, Chiastic Slide is something of an oddball. When released in 1997, many critics found it perplexingly diffuse; "in comparison," wrote Aidin Vaziri, "the jagged compositions of Aphex Twin sound as if Elton John wrote them."

Looking back, however — especially in comparison to 2008's bewildering Quaristice — Chiastic Slide sounds a lot more conventional. In fact, it sounds a lot like hip-hop. Autechre's roots as B-boying, electro-funk aficionados are well-documented, and with Gescom, they even availed themselves of breakbeats. Chiastic Slide may sound like it's coated in some kind of corrosive powder, but beneath its dissolving, hissing exoskeleton lurks a classic, boom-bap sense of the groove. Of course, there's little hip-hop that covers similar sonic terrain: "Recury" is all clanking machinery and hissing steampipes; "Nuane" features sandpaper beats, broken-radio explosions and a closing three minutes of beatless, electro-magnetic meltdown. "Cichli" is the album's highlight, marrying the sparkling melodies of their early productions to a kind of skittering beat science that's as elegant as it is confounding.