Autechre "twentytwentyfive" North American Tour: Oct 1 - 29 | "Anatomy of an Engima: An Interview with Autechre" | The Quietus

Returning to deliver their "Anatomy of an Enigma" that is Sean Booth and Rob Brown's sonic quest to bridge the modernist mid-century traditions of Musique Concrete and pure computer music of INA-GRM and IRCAM, with the multitudinous forms of dance and urban beat music issuing from New York, Chicago and Detroit in the 1980s. Autechre cross the Atlantic this month on the twentytwentyfive domestic tour for the first time since their extensive sojourn in 2015, which included a night in the final installment of Decibel Festival. To witness their live performance of which there will be two at Seattle's The Crocodile, is to be inside of a chimerical three-dimensional sound object suspended in a hyper-delineated stereo field. Less a performance of music broadcast to a receiving body, the listener was instead located within the framework of an exertive, dynamic, ever changing aural-kinetic sculpture. An experience The Guardian called a "A Bombardment of Singular Sounds to Combat the Dark", that The Washington Post similarly referred to as, "Autechre's Maneuvers in the Dark". Their current process has abandoned a degree of the hardware-centric focus of the previous decade's modus operandi, in favor of a complex programming of modules and patches generated within Cycling 74's MaxMSP. Booth and Brown's role is then one of actuating the engineering of the sounds to emerge from these processes into structures, as sculptors of the finely crafted, yet oblique architectural spaces that describe the music.

This hybridization detailed in the audio engineering and music production journal Sound on Sound in 2004, "In Producing their Complex, Abstract Electronic Music, Autechre have Taken the Idea of the Studio as an Instrument to New Extremes" following on the heels of their first 21st century album, "Confield", and it's divisive mid-decade siblings, "Draft 7.0" and "Untilted". This era of their sound producing what appeared to be two schools of thought on their musical output as heard on "Oversteps" and its companion EP, "Move of 10". Drew Daniel of Matmos makes this schisming of the listenership the focus of his interview, as those converted on the first decade of output struggled to adapt to the new developments and abandonment of dance music signifiers within Autechre's work. For many, 2008's "Quaristice" and the companion album of "(Versions)" not only acted as Pitchfork suggests, a return to form, but a balancing of old and new. Along with this, there was an abundance of volume on offer as well, "Quaristice" produced a sonic corpus totaling in at over 5 hours of new music. This move toward works that cycled between assimilation of past gestures and sounds, couched within explorative forays into new territory culminated in 2013's "L-event" and "Exai", which saw "Autechre Looking as Forward as They did Back". At over two hours, the album reinforced the abundant modus of the current phase, which would culminate in what FACT Mag called, "Autechre Bury the post-Club Poseurs in the Digital Dirt" with the release of the sprawling, "elseq 1-5". In rapid succession their assembly of live NTS Session was then followed by the mini-albums "Sign" and "Plus" born of the pandemic years, which the New York Times covered in their, "Autechre Worked in Isolation for Decades. Now it’s Unintentionally Timely."

SWANS "Birthing" & North American Tour with Little Annie: Sept 4 - Oct 7 | "Enduring Love: Why SWANS are More Vital Now than Ever" | The Guardian

In a statement for his Young God Records site, SWANS bandleader Michael Gira announced both their current tour with a Seattle date at The Neptune, as well as the fruition and conclusion of this era of his singular, transcendental, brand of rock music. Having led the outfit through numerous manifestations over the decades since its inception, including a brief phase as the folk ensemble The Angels of Light, change and transfiguration have been one of their great constants of Michael Gira's lifelong music endeavor. The cartography of this four decades-spanning terrain was mapped for Exclaim in Dimitri Nasrallah's "Michael Gira: from SWANS Uncompromising Sound to Ethereal Angels of Light", and in greater detail and intimacy by friends, fellow musicians and peers in Nick Soulsby's recently published oral history of the band, "SWANS: Sacrifice and Transcendence". At the end of their previous incarnation, with the grandiose heights scaled in "Soundtracks for the Blind" and "Swans are Dead", they took celestial ascension and physical bombast to literally epic durations and dynamic magnitude. The post-reform precision and (relative) brevity of 2010's "My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope in the Sky", the more variegated and nuanced "The Seer", the extended forays heard on "To Be Kind", and rapturous hypnoticism of 2016's "The Glowing Man" ascend to, and even expand upon similarly Homeric heights. Following on the hypnotic and repetitive krautock-inspired grooves of 2019's "Leaving Meaning.", in which Gira enlisted Australian avant-jazz luminaries, The Necks, organist Anna von Hausswolff, and Icelandic electronics sculptor, Ben Frost, to enhance their tapestries of sound. The tour for that album was disrupted and eventually cancelled altogether, with Gira releasing a statement about the next work in progress and the fruitful recording sessions held in Germany. The album that came from those sessions, "The Beggar" enlisted many individuals from the band's previous lineups. This arrangement extends to the current iteration found on "Birthing" and was realized by Gira alongside longtime percussionists Larry Mullins and Phil Puleo, Angels of Light bassist and keyboardist Dana Schechter, and mainstays of the band's 21st century incarnation, Kristof Hahn and Christopher Pravdica.

The albums and live performances of this past decade, spanning 2010-2018, were the fruit of an extended, ever-evolving recording process. "A Little Drop of Blood: Michael Gira of SWANS Interviewed" for The Quietus describes the often arduous writing, rehearsal, touring and recording in a dynamic creative systole and diastole. The undertaking of then translating these recorded works to a marathon live experience documented in an interview with Pitchfork of 2014, "Michael Gira Talks about How SWANS Returned without Losing Any Potency". Even more personal and confessional, The Quietus have produced a lengthy interview on the explicitly spiritual, transcendental nature of their live incarnation, "This is My Sermon: Michael Gira of SWANS Speaks". The Observer's "Michael Gira on ‘Dangling Off the Edge of a Cliff’" maps the musical trajectory's Oroborous-like path back to itself, as SWANS of the 21st Century has birthed a supreme amalgam from its own DNA. One that encapsulates the totality of their 40-plus year trajectory. From brutalist no wave minimalism, to musique concrete and extended tonal and drone compositions, to electric rock, psychedelia, blues, folk and Americana. The Guardian's John Doran postulates how it came to pass that SWANS produced the best work of their career so far. Where so many other bands of a similar vintage have retread familiar ground, revisiting the formula of past successes, Gira and company chose to instead stake everything on a fresh roll of the dice. They took a genuine gamble on creating new art rather than trying to recapture past glories and in doing so, they conjured an, "Enduring Love: Why SWANS are More Vital Now than Ever". Of the sonic topography found on this "Dark and Unsettling, Purifying and Beautiful" work on these 21st century albums, Gira has said that "My vision changes according to the unfolding of random events found in the music that we play together", and as with each release before it, "SWANS Just Keep Swimming" towards some unknown and distant horizon. And in this purportedly final iteration, "SWANS ‘Birthing’ Wants and Demands Transformation", bringing the listener through a "A Ritualistic Endurance Test That Demands Attention".

Lankum's “False Lankum” & North American Tour: Sept 26 - Oct 16

In an exceedingly rare west coast appearance, Irish dirge-folk four piece Lankum will be doing a single United States show at Seattle's The Neptune Theatre as the conclusion of a larger Canadian tour the month of October. This multi-instrumentalists outfit comprising Ian Lynch, Daragh Lynch, Cormac MacDiarmada and Radie Peat, had their beginnings in Irish traditional music sessions in Dublin's pubs, with Ian Lynch noting; "this was one of the most inspiring and influential things for Lankum, there would be no Lankum if it was not for the sessions". At these sessions the pair met singer and multi-instrumentalist Radie Peat and violinist Cormac MacDiarmada, stating further; "that’s the circumstances that brought about us in the band… Grim, but having quite a good time”. Their live incarnation during this period has been described by The Guardian as, “Lankum: More Like an Exorcism than a Gig”. From these meetings and a honing of their sound which included a doubling-down on the the drone qualities of traditional Irish folk music, they then by combining them with the edge of their early years playing self-described "crusty punk festivals", and moving beyond a sound of "Dark, Raucous Poetry from Irish Folk Miscreants", to then reconfigure their music with notes of hardcore, the weight of metal and doom, and the hypnotic, repetitive focus of trance music. In doing so, Lankum produced their own strain of "Brilliant, Raw, Detonating Folk", which was further refined into the underground folk breakout of "False Lankum" released on Rough Trade in 2023. Voted Best Album of the Year by The Guardian, Lankum’s Daragh Lynch spoke with the paper on the making of the album, "Lankum: ‘We Finally Nailed What We Wanted to Be’”. Also, in an interview about their fourth album Ian and Daragh Lynch, Radie Peat and Cormac Mac Diarmada spoke with The Quietus about Lankum's ever-intensifying extremities, transcendence through music, and their relationship to folk tradition, "The Sea, The Sea: An Interview With Lankum". In related coverage the band's side-project, ØXN are the first Irish band to be signed to esteemed national folk label Claddagh in 18 years, in "Beers, Steers & Fears", they speak about their stormy rise and announce their debut album "CYRM". Which again, like the fourth Lankum album before it, was rated five stars by The Guardian in their "Irish Folk Debut Full of Unsettling Dark Magic" review. Update: In a cryptically inspecific statement from the band, the tour has been cancelled, citing possible health or safety concerns.