Autechre Live Listening Diary (2023-24)

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 —

AE_SYDNEY_270823 —

AE_VENICE_261023 —

AE_DUBLIN_291023 —

AE_BRUSSELS_040424 —

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 —

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 —

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] 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.

Some factual details about the various dates are sourced from aepages.org, a community-run wiki.