Album Review: L-Event [EP] by Autechre

The four-track, half-hour L-Event trailed the 17-track, two-hour Exai by almost eight months. Much of it is among Autechre's most direct, least complex output, yet it's no less fascinating than any of their intricate material. "Newbound" and the chunkier "M39 Diffain" creep and slash with a startling degree of sharpness. Both of them would have been among Exai's high points.

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Autechre's concision problem has been much discussed of late. Recent LPs Quaristice and Oversteps both clocked in at over an hour, and both were followed with weighty auxiliary EPs gathering up studio offcuts and alternate versions that the duo couldn't bear not to release. Their latest offering, Exai, was a knotty but often brilliant record; spread over two hours, its intimidating length was its only major flaw.

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There is a moment about halfway through L-event’s opener “tac Lacora” that throws everything else on the EP into question. The track writhes along at breakneck pace, each element so volatile that a mind-melting descent into acidic noise seems the only conceivable conclusion. Instead, a split-second of silence at the crucial moment provides the aural equivalent of a movie jump cut, and we are thrown into a radically different yet eerily familiar soundscape, like a dub version of the same piece.

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If the music of Autechre has any kind of easy entry point, it's through the series of EPs they've released over the years. Often the duo of Rob Brown and Sean Booth have used the format to extend on the knotty ideas of whatever their latest LP happened to be at the time, although the results are not always concise. The runtime for the download-only EP Quaristice.Quadrange.ep.ae is around the 150-minute mark.

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