Re: autechre US tour

From Eric Sorenson
Sent Wed, Sep 30th 2015, 23:15


On Wed, 30 Sep 2015, Chris Taylor wrote:

> Has anyone caught Autechre on their current US tour? Any reports?
>

Yeah, saw 'em here in Portland last week.

The opener (the impossible-to-google Cygnus) was awesome. Live hardware set that was electro-rooted with some great 
development and movement. http://cygnusat.bandcamp.com/

Autechre played in the dark. Each with their laptop, screens dimmed down to almost nothing.

Nothing I recognized, but I haven't really been able to ID individual tracks since Quaristice. The sound at Holocene was 
pretty good but many in the crowd would not shut up their dumb mouths long enough to hear the quiet passages. Things 
would go sort of noodly noisey space and then drop into incredibly fast and 'hard' beats, full spectrum clattering 
glitchy things at 190bpm. Midrange "melodies" like they figured out how to suck sound backwards through the speakers. 
Pause. Repeat with a variation on timbre/tonality or maybe a hint of an acid squiggle done so fast it was gone before 
you're sure that's what happened.

60 minutes of this and then they unplugged their laptops and slunk off. Rob Hall did some nice Warp-ish DJ stuff but it 
was a worknight and I had to go pretty quickly.

Was it good? Yeah, it's a treat for the ears. Feels like there is a bit of disdain, or at least indifference, for the 
audience and what they're hoping to get out of a live show, which I don't think is new. I was hoping for some kind of 
the 4/4 stuff that surfaced a couple of years back, and I had to resist the urge to shout out "Basscadet!!" like an 
idm-dork "Free bird!!" .. but as always, we get the thing Autechre want to do, not what we want them to.


  - Eric Sorenson - N45.569, W122.763 - http://twitter.com/ahpook -