Latest update: [2024.12.03] Brussels

The duo Autechre added just over 20 hours of music to its catalog on November 4, with the simultaneous release of a dozen live recordings, made over the course of a little under a year, between late August 2023, in Melbourne, and early May 2024, in Lyon. 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. Autechre — aka Rob Brown and Sean Booth — maintain a Bandcamp page, but these digital-only sets, like their 7 predecessors back from 2022, appear to only be on their Warp Records page, autechre.warp.net.

AE_MELBOURNE_ 250823 — [2024.11.13] There’s less than a year between the final of the first batch of seven AE_2022- sets, and when this new collection of a dozen begins. That gap occurs between November 4, 2022, when Autechre played Turin, Italy, and August 25, 2023, the date of the Melbourne, Australia, concert that opens the new live bundle. There is only one other concert on record between those two. That show took place a week prior to Melbourne, on August 18, outside Tokyo in the city of Chiba at a venue called Makuhari Messe, which is where I saw Richie Hawtin play back just before Christmas in 2008 (perchance the last time I was in Japan). Chiba, as I mention in my write-up of that Hawtin event, is, famously, the location identified in the title of the first chapter of William Gibson’s genre-defining cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer. That would be “Chiba City Blues,” which opens even more famously: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” Were Autechre to ever upload that Japan 2023 set, I wonder if they would go with the universally understood “Tokyo” or the under-the-radar “Chiba” in the title. I’m guessing Chiba. These memories and prognostications were bouncing around in my brain as I listened to the Melbourne set, which leans more into a cyberpunk aesthetic than the hip-hop one that is a dominant flavor in other recent sets. It’s all rattled data, redacted waveforms, and alerts galore. It sounds like a fantasia of transit signals, with no small amount of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice anthropomorphic voodoo that they’re so fond of. If the hip-hop touches are the elements I keep going back to in the new dozen, this set is my favorite of the non-hip-hop ones. At least it is for now. (As with the sounds in these sets, all such guidance is fluid.) And just one more thing: the techno bagatelle that gets going at 54:40 has to be one of the sweetest things Autechre has ever recorded, hands down. That’s just before the end, because they stopped right at 36 seconds after the hour, following a simulated computer meltdown that is a different sort of sweet entirely.

AE_SYDNEY_270823 —

AE_VENICE_261023 —

AE_DUBLIN_291023 —

AE_BRUSSELS_040424 — [2024.12.03] Woozy reverberations, the sounds of 1960s and 1970s sci fi melodramas when a character is experiencing a psychic shift — and then a thudding, wet beat. It’s not exactly sparse, but the first seven minutes of the Brussels release are less chaotic, less frenzied, less busy than are the other sets I’ve spent time with. So much so that I had to pause at that point because for all the simplicity of it, I couldn’t really concentrate on anything else, which at that moment I needed to. I’ll get back to it.

AE_PARIS_ 060424 — [2024.11.04] I started here, day of release, with the Paris set recorded at Le Trianon on April 6, 2024 (French musician Aho Ssan opened), for no reason in particular, just in the vague spirit of entering at random into the depths, rather than going about it all chronologically. That approach feels like more of an Autechre manner of doing things. In a weird way, some of this material, early in the set, sounds like what Janet Jackson might play for a long time before finally coming out on stage: theatrical pounding that suggests a large machine slowly, awkwardly coming into being. The audience’s part of the social contract is to submit to the machine, faulty as it may be. … [2024.11.05] The evening is percussion-heavy, emphasis on the deep end. I used to feast on the glitchier moments of Autechre, and on those earlier records I still do, but these days the glitch aspects I enjoy the most are the larger-scale ones, not instant fissures in individual sounds, or seeming transmission errors that momentarily alter, ever so slightly, the whole, but instead the measurable offsets that make the heaviest of beats fall at … just … the wrong … mo– … ment, which adds up to a lot of very much right moments. There are great vocal tinctures in here, too, some choral(ish), others split-second snippets from hip-hop.

AE_RENNES_070424 —

AE_BARCELONA_090424 —

AE_MADRID_100424 — [2024.11.08] Pneumatic beats are my jam. I love when the sound is all gated white noise, held tight to a firm stop, like nothing so much as highly pressurized gas being put to taut rhythmic use. This set, from a couple days before Lisbon, is thick with such pounding, and with the turntablism and complementary hip-hop vocal snippets heard on some of the other recent sets. About 16 minutes in, I found myself wondering if this might be the group’s most accessible music … ever? Of course, in regard to the word “accessible,” I have to allow that it sounded at that moment like Vinny Golia playing flute over drums, and by “drums” I mean that wunderkind on the corner with two sticks and an upturned plastic bucket — and all of that being filtered through an AI trying to simulate the experience of first contact with alien intelligence. But otherwise accessible.

AE_LISBON_120424 B — [2024.11.05] Back in 2022, for a pair of October same-day events in London, they released both sets commercially, but for this April 12, 2024, event at Culturgest in Lisbon, they only released the second of the two sets. I’ve only just dipped briefly into this set.

AE_KREMS_270424 — [2024.11.06] This one has a lot in common with the opening of the Paris set, all warbling Outer Limits echoes. The drums kick in after a minute and a half, which depending on your listening circumstances may be long enough that you forgot drums were even on the menu. This percussion is more self-evidently funky than Paris, less janky Transformer, more Robocop swagger. And the hip-hop samples are more attenuated, less glitch-clipped, finding common ground with the more choral-like vocals from Paris. Having these two sets together in the same batch is a bit of a gift, in that they provide some helpful parallels, and thus a relief from the overwhelming abstraction and variation that Autechre often traffics in. As the 20-minute mark arrives, there is some fantastic turntablism, which combined with the drones can sound more like classic DJ Krush than like Autechre. The groove is fantastic, and a good reminder that IDM doesn’t implicitly negate its central initial; it is — or at least can elect to be — dance music. The duo’s Rob Brown commented in this regard in a recent interview with metalmagazine.eu: “We were too young for the clubs [i.e., still in school], so it was more about the headspace, walking to school with our Walkmans.”

AE_LYON_070524 — [2024.11.05] On my second day of listening, with these eight-plus gigabytes of audio files locked and loaded and available on my various devices, I began here, with the final of the dozen new sets, recorded at Le Transbordeur, as part of the Nuits Sonores 2024 festival. (That measure of gigabytes includes the earlier 7 sets, by the way.) And then I paused it, at about 23 minutes in, and went back to Paris a month earlier. The Lyon night’s flashbulb snare hits, and robotic bass line, and eventual slurpy breakbeats, was all a little too upbeat — upbeat by goth industrial standards, mind you — for my mood. I’ll return to this gig in due time. The main takeaway is just how different Autechre nights out can be. You have no idea what to expect when you purchase your ticket. Could be rusty dystopian shuffles, could be bright pachinko jams.

OTHER_NOTES — [2024.11.05] City_Lights: There were four additional shows after Lyon in 2024 (in Oslo, Stockholm, Riga, and Copenhagen), and three more between 2023 and 2024 not included in this batch (in Tokyo; Kraków; Den Haag, Netherlands), and there’s an upcoming concert planned in Autechre’s home base of Manchester, England, on February 22, 2025, at New Century. Perhaps that means a new full-length record is coming next year. … [2024.11.06] Cover_Up: Here’s an incentive to regularly tidying up the metadata affixed to your audio files. You sometimes glimpse something quite lovely. Here, for example, the slowly progress of the cover images across volumes 1 through 19 (left to right — and yes, I rotated it 90º to fit) of the live Autechre releases:

… [2024.11.06] Wide_Load: “Nowadays you got … things like Bandcamp Friday, … just fucking millions of artists every week. I don’t know how you’re supposed to keep track of it,” says — unironically — Sean Booth, the guy who just released 12 full-length sets in one day. … [2024.11.08] Bad_Data: This issue is inexplicable. Of the 19 live Autechre sets, 17 are identified as being part of the album (titled AE_2022-, and really not so much an album as a growing collection over the course of three years, but whatevever) while 2 are read by audio players (see below for the view from Plexamp) as being part of a separate album, AE_LIVE_LONDON_071022_A (2023), which doesn’t exist. AE_LIVE_LONDON_071022_A is the title of one of the two tracks associated with this “album.” So bizarre. (And not uncommon, yeah. And it’s 2024, and we’re still dealing with this sort of hassle. And I double checked the data in both AudioRanger and mp3tag.)

… [2024.11.08] Pay_Pal: I thought I’d mentioned this earlier, but apparently I had done so on social media only. One nice touch, for Autechre fans, is if you bought the previous AE_2022- seven-track “bundle” from Warp, when you buy the dozen new tracks, you get a commensurate discount. …

[2024.11.12] Screen_Time: These screenshots are, apparently, from videos posted by Sean Booth of the software that he and Rob Brown use in the production and performance of Autechre’s music. The duo do their work in the software named Max, often called Max/MSP, which is the visual coding environment seen here. Booth posted the videos originally on his Mastodon account (post.lurk.org/@sean_ae), and someone uploaded them to YouTube (video one, video two).

… [2024.11.12] Greek_to_Me: A funny thing happened on the way to today’s update. I listened to one of the Autechre sets, and the whole time I was thinking, “Hey, this is way more abstract. This is more like the first seven sets released last year, than like the others from the dozen released this year.” And, of course, it turned out I was listening to one of the first seven sets, the one recorded in Athens in 2022, AE_ATHENS_050722. I kept notes as I listened, but they don’t apply to the above dissection, so I’ll put them here: Wind noise and plinking synths, the latter muffled by the former, then thunky percussion, moving all around the stereo spectrum. Within minutes, it has escalated, and this has happened so quickly that you may not notice it until after it’s happened. The bursts of percussion make it feel like you’ve been stuck inside a pinball machine played by a true wizard, or in this case, a pair of wizards. And things just go bonkers from there. It feels, in its first half hour, less grounded than some of the other sets, which may speak to it increasing the overall variety, but also it feels more frivolous. And then something happens, which is that the seeming looseness has gotten more fierce, and suddenly you’re another half hour in and the terrain is more treacherous. I need to go back to this. It is less inviting, to me, than the others, so far, but it’s also the one I feel the greatest desire to make sense of.

This listening diary began on 2024.11.04 and the most recent update was 2024.11.06. Some factual details about the various dates are sourced from aepages.org, a community-run wiki.