The raviest of Autechre's 19 live sets, all released simultaneously last month.
www.residentadvisor.net
Around 13 minutes into AE_LIVE_ASHEVILLE_081015, a pileup of itchy scribbles and horn-like tones reach an extraordinary density. It's a moment in which Sean Booth and Rob Brown take their place in the avant-garde firmament right next to innovative jazz players like Cecil Taylor and Albert Ayler. Then, less than two minutes later, a spanking booty electro beat and flatulent bassline spring out, surrounded by digital birdsong. It's pure rave. Utterly psychedelic, discombobulated, maddeningly unpredictable rave, but rave nonetheless. The crucial thing, though, is that there's no boundary between the two surges of sound. One grows out of the other naturally. Both are part of the same process, and all of it is totally Autechre.
[...]
As ever with Autechre, if you don't get it, you don't get it. To plenty it's just noise. And amen to that. In this age of constant availability and musical snacking, isn't it nice to have an act on a big stage willing to present something daunting, something that threatens to overwhelm you? Because this is overwhelming music, and it does test your faculties at points—but it is also music of pleasure, just as much as anything in Autechre's catalogue. It isn't austere, it isn't clever-clever, it isn't something that requires masters degrees to understand—it just needs you to give in to it. And maybe that's why, more than anyone of their generation, Autechre still feel relevant. Their music makes sense in the era of Objekt, NON Worldwide, PAN and UIQ. It's radical, but still aimed at the brain and body with that pure rave intensity, humour and passion, and with that improvisational wildness and freedom always either latent or—as here—out in the open. It is out of its mind and all the better for it.