Autechre live review: undefinable electro in the dark

Apollo Frequencies is a series exploring sounds that seem to come from another world. In this week’s edition, Raphael Helfand attends an Autechre show in the not-so-pitch black.

Dark, pragmatically stylish clothing. Hats to cover male-pattern baldness. Sidelong glances. Skittish gaits. If you weren’t sure of how to get to the Autechre show in East Williamsburg last Saturday, you probably did what I did: follow the black denim and sweat-stained snapbacks until they reached Brooklyn Steel around 10 p.m., in time for the late show from one of the most important avant-garde electronic groups of the last 40 years.

Standing in line with hundreds of my comrades, I watched a mostly shellshocked procession filter out of the Mancunian duo’s earlier performance. One, grinning wide, said he felt as if he’d been trapped inside a drum machine for the past hour. Another was resolutely unimpressed. Already an Autechre hater, he’d come to bear witness to what he said was “brutal, terrible music.” Nearby, a large bearded man named Mike Videopunk shouted “FREE IDM!” as he handed out flyers for his live hardware improv shows in Ridgewood.

Inside was a similar feast for the self-deprecating experimental techno fan. I looked around for the much-memed sheets of paper listing the Draconian rules that Rob Brown and Sean Booth have imposed on their audiences for the lion’s share of the 21st century. Most had been ripped from walls and stage doors by fans, but one remained taped to the corner of the lobby bar. “Autechre will perform in the darkness,” it read. “For their set all lights in the venue will be off. Please plan on being in one place for the performance and do not move unnecessarily until it has finished when the lights will come back on again.”

If you’ve never been to an Autechre show but experienced a sense of déjà vu when reading those words, you may have seen the 1984 film Footloose. The movie follows a teenage Kevin Bacon’s move to the small town of Bomont, Utah, where dancing is illegal. Fast forward to 2001: Autechre has begun asking venues to shut their lights off and prohibit all nonessential movements to their music, which has veered sharply left from their electro roots into strange abstractions coded from scratch in Max MSP.

Autechre’s aim is not, of course, to create a dance-free zone in service of Christ. In fact, they once made a whole EP in protest of a U.K. law that could accurately be dubbed the Footloose bill, prohibiting gatherings of 20 or more people featuring music that “includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.” Their goal, rather, is to remove any sense of spectacle from their sets. Since their performance consists of operating inscrutable gear (to most non-professional observers) to trigger sequences of code, the only thing they’re depriving the crowd of is a light show.

“I want to close my eyes and get lost in the sound,” Booth recently told the Reykjavik Grapevine, explaining why he and Brown prefer performing in the dark. “People have been dancing to music for thousands of years, right? And for the vast majority of the time, they didn’t have a massive LED wall trying to blind you. I think we’re in safe territory.”

Brown and Booth have both rejected the term IDM to describe their music — a wise decision considering the acronym’s racist undertones. Many of their fans, however, seem to have missed the memo. I entered Brooklyn Steel on Saturday as a casual Autechre enjoyer with an open mind and an anthropological concern: What happens when the world’s most intelligent dancers come out to see what they view as the world’s most intelligent dance music at a place where dancing, however intelligently, is frowned upon?

Booth and Brown wasted no time setting up the parameters of the universe they’d be building for us on Saturday night. As soon as the clock struck 11:30 p.m. and the lights went down, they launched us headlong into an austere underworld of punishing percussion. It’s one thing to listen to Autechre on high-quality headphones or speakers at home, and another thing altogether to hear the cleanest, deadliest kick drums you’ve ever laid ears on hurdling toward you through a state-of-the-art L-Acoustics sound system in a room the size of a small cruise ship.

In the next 80 minutes, the pulse was rarely static — Booth and Brown have a penchant for jarring jumps from half to double time — but the backbeat could generally be relied upon as an anchor on our warp-speed journey through the murky depths. Imagine a glass bottle colliding with a hardwood floor without breaking, then add enough bass to make every solid surface involved vibrate 10 times faster, and you’ll start to get the picture.

Everything else had a tendency to evaporate soon after it materialized, and the odds of its return were roughly 50/50. Recurring characters included a wide-mouthed four-chord synth motif that could easily have soundtracked a spaceship’s slow-motion ascent through the stratosphere, satisfying sub bass squelches that scrolled in and out of focus for added emphasis, buzzes that ranged from low-hum static to high-voltage electrocution, and impish mini-melodies that darted back in the second you thought you’d put them out of your mind.

The show’s volume was oppressive at its best. Had there been true pitch darkness, it would have been a legitimately terrifying experience. Unfortunately, Brooklyn Steel is a business establishment, and its promoters’ reluctance to enter into litigation with 1,800 injured IDM fans led to an overabundance of illuminated exit signs that fucked with the vibes. But it was with this light that I was able to see the answer to my Footloose-inspired question: dozens of people hitting little dances so disgraceful that, if a fundamentalist preacher wished to ban them, I wouldn’t protest. It gives me no pleasure to report that even I, a man of iron will and lead feet, found myself hopping around a bit.

The set sagged a little as it entered its third quarter. Feeling bored for the first time, I took my earplugs out, only for Autechre to immediately lock back in. The last section of the show comprised 20 of the most electric minutes of live music I’ve heard in some time, even with the performance aspect missing. The night culminated in an obliterating whoosh that panned fiendishly around the room above a series of increasingly abstruse breakbeats. The passage was so intense that the crowd erupted into whoops and cheers before it finished. When the show ended unceremoniously a minute later, it felt right on time.

Outside the venue, my intelligent friends and I tried to put what we’d just seen into words. The word “great” was thrown around, as was the word “loud.” Two of them had tried 2C-B for the first time, and while one freaked out and left early, the other seemed to have experienced Autechre in a way the rest of us couldn’t. “I don’t even really know what I was hearing it was like dots and loops and bleeps and bloops and klonk and whizz and whirrr and beep boop CLANK WOOOOSH [redacted],” she texted me later. “POUNDING ALIEN MUSIC!!!!!!!”