Returning to North America nearly 35 years into Sean Booth and Rob Brown's singular sonic quest to bridge the modernist traditions of Musique Concrete and pure computer music of INA-GRM and IRCAM, with the wave of music issuing from New York City and Detroit's urban beat explosion of the 1980s, explored by The Quietus in their, "Anatomy of an Engima: An Interview with Autechre". Autechre cross the Atlantic again 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."
