- It's been seven years and two albums since Autechre last toured America, and this time they've signed on for nearly 20 live gigs across Canada and the US. The Warp Records duo, god-like figures in the IDM world, passed through New York on Saturday for a sold-out show at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple, an elegant 1200-capacity concert hall in the leafy Fort Greene neighborhood. It was organized as part of the ongoing Tinnitus Music Series, which has featured an impressive selection of artists from the fields of experimental and extreme electronics, including Holly Herndon, Andy Stott and Ben Frost.
As with all of Autechre's live performances, their set began with little fanfare. The house and stage lights went out abruptly, and there were no visuals—just two men dressed in black standing in front of their machines. Maybe it's a statement against flashy lighting displays—a way of focusing on the music itself—but there was so much light bleeding in from the exits that the darkness wasn't particularly striking.
The hour-long show hovered at around 85 BPM—rarely, if ever, deviating from a half-time drum and bass pattern accented by flourishes of glitchy breaks and IDM kosmische. Its most exciting moments were the bass drops: thick slabs of low-end topped with layers of jagged, screeching wave forms—all of it threaded through spastic LFO modulations. Entropic arpeggios wiggling in the upper registers offered whispers of classic mind-fuck Autechre, and the occasional breakdown added a bit of drama to the narrative.
But the entropy was contained. The rough edges were buffed out. The madness was made more manageable. It was all relatively easy to make sense of. Yes, the performance delivered on much of what Autechre's fans were waiting for: tweaky grooves rolling along at high speeds, alchemical sound design, dissonant synths programmed by god-knows-what custom plug-in. But it lacked a memorable arc.
Instead it simmered at a medium-hot temperature until all of the sudden it was over.
Much of the joy of listening to Autechre is feeling like your brain might explode as it tries to keep up. They are wizards at sensory overload, whether it's their impossible, post-human rhythms or their ability to channel tones and textures from seemingly more advanced dimensions. Listening to some of their live recordings, such as their performance at the Warp 25th anniversary party in Krakow, you can feel the head-spinning sense of disorientation that they evoke as their set dips in and out of total chaos. That was not the mood in Brooklyn.
Autechre built their name on being confrontational. The classic example is their career-defining 1994 track "Flutter," which was written in response to British legislature that criminalized "repetitive beats" (the track never repeats a rhythmic pattern). Their use of polyrhythms, shifting time signatures and other formalist experiments was a large part of what distinguished them from their dance music contemporaries at the time; they refused to be boxed in, and rather than working within prescribed grooves they set out to dig new channels altogether. That radical attitude and grandiose theatricality was missing from their performance on Saturday, which offered a ferocious display of modern sound design but ultimately lacked in personality.