Over the past decade, British experimental electronic duo Autechre have been playing live shows in the dark. Not the darkness of a night-time bedroom but a pitch-black void, ridden of space or structure, from which they unfurl their fractal sounds to a waiting audience.
Like the pulsating dark matter we encounter when we close our eyelids, Autechre’s live environment is liable to switch at any moment from dreamscape to nightmare, all watched over by their intricate hardware manipulations. Tonight, the unassuming pair take to the Barbican’s grandiose concert hall, transforming it into a formless black for an hour of improvisations.
Unlike the fizzing ambience of their most recent albums, Sign and Plus, both from 2020, this show is loud and embodied – closer to the club-adjacent music they made their name with in the mid-90s. Opening with a series of overlapping melodic samples, Autechre’s soundwaves vibrate through the seated audience making the entire space thrum in unison. Soon, smatterings of percussion kick in, picking up the tempo in a jaunty, syncopated dance. There are snatches of two-step and trap but each element forks into a new genre quickly, denying any comfortable fruition.
The mid-section sags as the duo remove rhythmic momentum in favour of glacial chords which cascade like a collapsing land mass into a sea of static. In the darkness, though, time is a foreign concept, and it is only the sounds themselves that carry a narrative arc. While Autechre are spectrally lit by the blinking lights of their gear, they pick up the pace once more for a rousing finale, masterfully switching beats from half-time to double and back again, skipping over the rhythmic foundations of dubstep, garage and techno.
Autechre ultimately create an imaginative music of their own, bombarding their stationary crowd with vibrational movement. By foregoing the percussive backbeat that anchors almost all modern popular music, they leave us unmoored in rhythm, like the cacophony of the club without its dancefloor intermingling. Instead, this is a futuristic music made of sonic ruins – fragments unearthed from the darkness and left ringing in our ears as we go off into the night.
