I went to see Autechre live a few weeks ago. It was great, but also the sort of experience that comes with a set of expectations that are hard to shake off. I had assumed firstly that the crowd would consist mostly of middle aged men wearing North Face rain jackets. This was true, but, as the event happened on the same day that a big storm broke, it was also true that everyone attending was wearing a rain jacket, regardless of age or propensity towards mountaineering apparel repurposed as streetwear. It was certainly heavily male skewing, but somewhat varied in age range. The other two expectations I had that was that the entire show would take place in pitch black darkness, and that the music itself would be quite gnarly. I had been reading lots of posts on the /autechre subreddit about this latest leg of the tour series (“Set F”), saying how the duo had been exploring a sound that was more assaultive than before—“the screams of a robot Holocaust blended in with lush almost ethereal top end”, as one user puts it—and also seeing the same very unfunny post in which someone would share a entirely black image in the dimensions of a vertically orientated mobile phone photo with the caption “shot I got at the Autechre live show.” I had also clicked about on a few tour recordings from previous cities on YouTube, to try to get a vague sense of what standing in darkness listening to Autechre live for ninety minutes might sound like, or what the overriding feeling would be that would come out of the experience. Pain? Boredom? Revelation? Or just a resounding sense that perhaps I hadn’t quite got it, and then never being able to confirm whether that was the result of some personal deficiency or because there was, in fact, nothing to get? These expectations (dark, noisy) were also both true and not true. The luminosity of the venue’s fire exit signs meant it wasn’t anywhere near as blackout dark as I had been expecting, and the music, for the first 40 or so minutes at least, was pretty danceable.

I only started listening to Autechre in 2018, around about the time they did that eight hour NTS thing. Going in to that broadcast, I had the sense then that they were “important,” and coming out of it I felt reassured that this reputation was well earned. But despite this, I haven’t really stuck with them all that much since, and, while I listen to bits and pieces from time to time, I’ve never dived properly into their full back catalogue in earnest, or really read much into what they are all about. I have one of their records, Confield, on vinyl, but I rarely play it as it always sort of slightly harshes the dining room vibe. So, going in to this live show, I wasn’t exactly a fanatic. Curious, susceptible even, but with no real investment beyond the desire to have an evening of note. Coming out, I was pretty mesmerised, taken by the experience on both a sensorial and cerebral level—if it can be said that those are two different things. I was affected by the sounds on a pure nervous system, hairs-on-end level, but had my imagination activated by them too.

When it started, after a bit of anticipation, I was slightly disappointed by how not-dark it was. I could see the people ahead of me, and I had assumed the darkness was supposed to a) reduce the audience’s inhibitions and any awareness of being perceived, and b) invoke a state of concentration and force a room without phones. Prior to the show, MA told me it had a third outcome too: diminished visual perception could heighten the remaining senses, increasing the potency of the surrounding middle aged man farts. Without that totalising darkness, I felt the show might not work as well as intended, so, for large parts of it, I closed my eyes. I often do this at gigs. I’m short, and, even if I wasn’t and I could see over those in front of me, at a lot of the shows I’m going to there’s not that much to look at anyway. Someone avoiding eye contact and strumming a guitar. A man playing the batteries. Some blokes twiddling knobs. Might as well see what is going on in the back of my eyelids instead. But I’ve also found that doing this can be a sort of trick on the senses, instigating a kind of interplay between the ears and the mind wherein the ear receptors pick up sounds, send them down the listening-processing tunnels and into the brainspace, seeing what the imagination has to say in response.

At the Autechre show, my brain was throwing up all kinds of entertaining imagined images, albeit quite clichéd stuff. The set started with a more recognisably clubby rhythm, dancey breaks, drum loops that completed and paid off, forming recognisable sequence shapes rather the kind of unpredictable rhythmic formulations that throw off someone trying to anticipate incoming notes in order to dance. With this I remember seeing in the mind’s eye lots of alien imagery: flying saucers, laser beams, and alien invaders of the grey coloured Roswell kind. I was also seeing fireworks of vibrant colours, groovy strobes, smoke formations, and other sort of typical “rave” imagery, most of which I’ve picked up from archival video rather than direct experience. And, for some reason also, whenever my eyes are closed and I’m listening to music somewhere, the brain often calls upon visions of large marauding sea ships, something I rarely ever otherwise think about or show any interest in.

There is this concept—coined by the Canadian electroacoustic music composer Francis Dhomont—called “cinema for the ears.” As I understand it, Dhomont used it to describe his own style of music, which is a form of musique concrète in which the compositions draw upon and sample from real world sounds. As they listen to the music, he encourages the listener to “visualize their own personal virtual environment or mood from the sounds they are hearing, irrespective of the tools and gestures used to create those sounds.” I don’t think this was necessarily Autechre’s intention with how they have crafted their live environment, but it was certainly the exact experience I had. In that same article linked above, the writer describes music by Gilles Gobeil, a composer who was inspired by Dhomont, as featuring “jarringly loud, [with] explosive passages lasting only moments and coming from seemingly out of nowhere, automated heavy machine-like sounds, huge dynamic build-ups providing at times unbearable tension (sometimes without release), sweeping sonic drone vistas that range from the beautiful to the downright sinister and… an occasional element of humor.” This passage accidentally also describes the Autechre set fairly well, especially the much more chaotic, frenetic, and downright assaultive latter half.

Alongside this “brain-cinema,” during any live performance of considerable length in which I am deprived the usual stimulus that distracts me in regular life, I also experience a pleasant kind of banal mental drift. I switch repeatedly between concentrating studiously on the live experience (trying, without any musical knowledge, to puzzle out what is happening, how the set is being created, why those particular sounds are being chosen, what might be coming next), and thinking about commonplace topics (what do I need to get the next food shop, what might happen in that work meeting, what is the point of existence, what breakfast cereal should I purchase next) that slide into mind. As a part of this, periodically I’d open my eyes again to see what was going on around me. Most people were standing and nodding, while some, seemingly more seasoned, attendees were going totally berserk. A man beside me was throwing the most intense rave shapes, such that he cleared his own small circle in which to writhe and flail limbs as he pleased. It felt good to see him, and he certainly didn’t need darkness to feel un-surveilled and free.

When the lights came up, I wanted to know more about how Autechre makes the sounds they make and what kind of collaborative process it takes to create all of those frenetic squarks, bleeps, and breaks. One of the pleasures of listening to the live set was in trying to work out how much of the directions the performance took, its dilations in speed, dissonance, and rhythm, as well as its general rising intensity and gradual descent from recognisable rhythms towards something more devilishly atonal and berserk, were pre-planned, or what was responsive and improvised, and whether there was any performative process of call and response. I read a good interview with Philip Sherburne, from around about the NTS Sessions time. Describing their working methods then, Sherburne writes that Autechre’s sonic workspace, which they call “the system” is “a labyrinthine compendium of software synthesizers, virtual machines, and digital processes that they readily admit would be indecipherable to anyone but themselves.” And their process, which they call “fuckery” involves “endlessly tinkering with the software in their respective studios until the results sound good enough to merit hitting the ‘record’ switch.” In making music, Sherburne writes, “they consider themselves explorers as much as creators—spelunkers navigating deep in the recesses of their own mutant technology.” This tracks with what I saw live, wherein it sounded like two guys almost throwing chunks of sound at each other, bouncing back and forth off the energy of what was being received, and then amplifying with another combination of responsive melodies, almost as if testing the shape and potential of material to be later recorded and frozen in a fixed linear format. Walking out, some sweet old North Face bloke near me told his mate how what they had just witnessed was “free jazz with electronic instruments.” Reading a few interviews with Autechre on the train home in which they seem to staunchly oppose being described as “avant-garde,” I figured they would have hated this description, but that is kind of what making art is about: you just have to enjoy making something as once you throw it out there you can’t control how it will be received.