brettworks

If you’ve been following Autechre for years, on recordings and in performance, you may have realized that they’re evolving in ways you are not. You assume the comforts of steady beats, hummable melodies, verses leading to choruses, predictable instrumentation, and genre conventions while they’ve left music’s crowdsourced paths, wandering the wilds of their software, exploring. You expect a calibrated show with rehearsed moves, while AE delivers (in total darkness) precisely sixty minutes of freewheeling invention. You want a performance to celebrate past hits while AE’s goal is for it to create new knowledge. As you follow AE you realize they’re committed to pursuing something unique. They’re not playing a dance music game, electroacoustic classical game, ambient game, noise game, or nostalgic lo-fi game, perhaps because their practice is too austere to fit into any single scene. Their long-term art project is a disciplined fascination with the potentials of electronic sound. 

What this means in the context of a performance, such as the duo’s recent shows at Brooklyn Steel, is that one gets to experience a human-machine interface where the boundaries between musician and software are fluid. One can speculate on the workings of AE’s Max-based musical system, which they’ve been evolving for decades, how it’s “composed of algorithms” for instance, but more interesting is what it’s capable of generating under the guidance of its makers. In performance, the AE sound is many streams coming at you at once, which makes it perceptually pummeling, and often overwhelming. The audio is dense with layers, and each layer dense with textural contrasts, angles, and constant variation; the sum is often polyrhythmic, and eschews recognizable chords, melodies, or other through lines. (Although the set I attended ended with a beautiful single melody that emerged as the last sound standing…) Above all, AE’s music is kinetic, using the power of mighty low frequency drum and bass hits to push a venue’s sound system and compress a crowd’s rib cages. 

As I listened to the set, which had long (15-minute) stretches that could be considered sections (or not), I alternated between tracking individual parts and their totality. But AE’s audio is an onslaught: there’s so much going on at such a ferocious intensity that it becomes a kind of lactate threshold workout for the senses. (I’m reminded of Kodwo Eshu’s line in More Brilliant Than The Sun, “Language drags its flabby arse after sound…” [71]). With any music, you take in what you can: What’s happening? Where is this going? Where is the horizon? What am I feeling? You’re immersed in the sound, going with its goings, and then, like a sleight of hand, a single detail within the thrum shifts and you take notice–a sequence is actually 14 beats long, a part is disintegrating or finally revealing its form, that white noise was actually a voice sample. At one point things became Roland TB-303-1990s acid’ish for a while; later on, polyrhythmic kick drum swarms reduced into a fast 4/4 techno pulse and stayed there, a reminder of the music’s historical context. I looked around to see the reaction of (ear-plugged) people in the crowd, many of them nodding in sync, perhaps relieved: Ah yes, 4/4! It’s in such moments of noticing in the context of a long exploration of unusual, always alien-sounding sonics and form that we notice the limits of our own musical habits. An Autechre performance isn’t the place for sentimentality or revisiting old bangers. In music, we move forward by staying, for a duration, totally aware.