Autechre - Chiastic Slide (2LP)

Autechre’s fourth studio album, Chiastic Slide, arrived on Warp Records in 1997 and still feels like a turning point that never stopped turning. It sits between Tri Repetae and LP5, but it isn’t a bridge so much as a hard swerve into sharper geometries and tougher rhythms. Rob Brown and Sean Booth were already deep into abstraction by then, yet this record finds a new bite. The beats don’t glide, they tilt and lurch, and the melodies hide inside the machinery like flickers on a CRT.

Cipater opens the set with a ten minute study in pressure and release. The pulse keeps fracturing, like the duo is shifting the floorboards while you’re trying to walk across the room. Then Rettic AC comes in with a kind of metallic swing, hi-hats chattering around a bassline that feels half submerged. The sound is tactile, almost industrial, but it’s not grim. There are pockets of warmth in the pads, little harmonic glows that peek out from the grind.

Cichli is the portal track for a lot of listeners, a favourite that later spun off into the Cichlisuite EP in the same year. It’s the closest thing to a hook here, but even that hook is a strange creature, elastic and slightly sour, riding an itchy percussion grid. Tewe and Hub push deeper into a clanking, hydraulic space, where the drum programming feels algorithmic yet hand‑tooled. Autechre’s interviews around this period often brush off easy genre tags, and you can hear why. The music suggests IDM, electro, industrial and dub techniques, but none of those labels quite stick.

The back half is where Chiastic Slide really earns its reputation. Calbruc and Recury turn rhythm into topography, all corrugated hits and sudden sinkholes. Recury’s mid‑tempo grind is hypnotic, with hi‑hats that spit like welding sparks, yet there’s a wistful smear of harmony underneath. Pule feels like a deconstruction of hip hop drum science, chopped into new angles. Then Nuane closes the album with a long, slow exhale over thirteen minutes, threads of melody looping like vapour trails while the beat flickers in and out of focus. It’s gorgeous, and it lands with the kind of afterglow that makes you want to flip the record and start again.

Warp’s art direction mattered for this era, and the sleeve design for Chiastic Slide fits the music’s geometry. The package looks like a piece of industrial signage lifted from a future motorway, which is perfect for a record that treats rhythm as architecture. Audiophiles who chase Autechre vinyl often point to this one as a pivotal listen, and the 2011 Warp reissue put Chiastic Slide vinyl back into circulation for anyone who missed the original 2xLP. If you’re trying to buy Autechre records online, it’s worth hunting down that pressing alongside the same‑year EPs Envane and Cichlisuite, which share a sonic palette with the album.

On release, some critics were puzzled, but the record’s standing has grown steadily. Longtime fans and writers have championed it as one of the duo’s most rewarding deep dives, and plenty of publications have revisited it as a key step in Autechre’s evolution toward the systems‑based labyrinths of the 2000s. It’s not a singles album, which might explain the delayed embrace. The pleasures here are structural. You get inside the rhythms and notice how details morph across bars, how a clipped snare opens a millimetre wider two minutes later, how a drone that seemed flat suddenly turns harmonic when a new kick arrives.

What keeps Chiastic Slide so compelling is the sense of touch. Even at its most abstract, the record sounds built by people who love drum machines and samplers for their imperfections. The programming is intricate, but you can feel the push and pull of hands at work, looping, muting, re‑sequencing, listening for the moment a pattern stops behaving and starts breathing. That human presence is why these tracks still hit on a big system, and why they feel even better on wax. Autechre albums on vinyl put a little grit back into the edges, and this one thrives on that extra grain.

If you’re crate digging in a Melbourne record store or browsing vinyl records Australia late at night, Chiastic Slide is the Autechre vinyl that rewards patience and curiosity. It’s not polite, and it’s not trying to charm you. It builds its own physics and invites you to learn how to move inside them. Thirty years on from their debut, that invitation remains one of the most generous in electronic music.