Spin (10/99, p.161) - "...an impeccable little work of techno art....this one's short, and it has some sputtering, unintelligible voices mixed in..."
Alternative Press (10/99, p.80) - 5 out of 5 - "...continue to excavate wayward but indispensable sounds from their Sheffield bunker....Autechre may have produced the label's best and most invigiorating release with EP7."
The Wire (6/99, p.71) - "...Autechre warp space and time, sucking you through an Escher maze of plastic space and mutating possibilites. EP7 eclipses the copyists and confirms the duo's status as electronic visionaries."
Autechre: Sean Booth, Rob Brown.
Autechre's evolution continued unabated with EP7. The hefty, hour-long disc both advances and complements 1998's excellent LP5 album. Sean Booth and Rob Brown stick with the successful formula of CHIASTIC SLIDE and LP5, probing the darkest reaches of digital signal processing. EP7 features some of Autechre's most sophisticated work, but its experimental edges never compromise the listening pleasure of these 11 tracks.
Splintery tones are tweaked and distorted; exquisitely glitch-addled rhythms form convoluted clusters or dissolve into configurations that threaten disarray; crumbs of speech are digitized and scattered across the soupy shallows of "Ccec" like misshapen croutons; beautiful melodies emerge from the Brownian motion of beats and buzzes. Sounds scamper, fuss, and fidget without finding respite from their disconcerted states. The electromagnetic pulsations of "Output" draw floating plates of microprocessed sound into a Pangaea-like mass. Elegant melodic arabesques are coaxed from the creak and whine of unoiled mechanics ("Zeiss Contarex") or from switch-throwing caprice ("Pir"). EP7 finds Autechre pushing the e-music envelope as gently--but insistently--as ever.
