The British duo Autechre traffic in abstract music that veers between abstract sound design and challenging club music, which is to say they record what is known as IDM, and this past week they did what they seem to do every few years, which is to unleash an ungodly amount of their music out of the blue all at once. For background: There was the four-hour-plus elseq 1-5 in 2016, and the eight-hour NTS Sessions 1–4 two years after that. And of course, way back in 2015, there were the 28 hours of music comprised by AE_LIVE. Oh, and the nearly eight-hour AE_LIVE 2016/2018 in 2018. Bringing us up to the present: In 2023 Autechre released 7 full sets, packaged as AE_LIVE 2022–, from a tour that occurred mostly the year preceding, and then this week, rather than create a new catch-all title, they simply added another dozen sets from 2023 and 2024, bringing AE_LIVE 2022– (the hyphen still open, no end in sight) to a total of 19 sets, or nearly 23 hours of music. It’s a lot. Like, a lot, even on its own, and especially in the broader context of these 2001-ish monoliths, not to mention their studio recordings and other work. As I’ve done in the past, I’m going to try to tackle — and almost certainly fail — this motherlode by doing so in plain sight, keeping a listening diary rolling in public. It’s at disquiet.com/autechre_live_2024. Now, the point of this Listening Post series is to help pick out items in the vast miasma (sorry, I’m in the midst of reading Neal Stephenson’s new novel, Polostan) of modern music. I’d suggest starting off with AE_MADRID_100424. (I can’t embed it here, but you can check it out at autechre.warp.net.)
This is excerpted from the Friday, November 8, Listening Post (0026) issue of my This Week in Sound email newsletter.