Laurel Halo was fucking amazing. First half of her show just blew my mind. Second half was more of a standard 4x4 fare – good, but not great as the first half.
FWIW, I feel a bit of let down for the whole “show in the dark” thing that Ae did, but yeah, the music is what matters… I was with my eyes closed on pretty much any show I went during the fest, so not a big deal. :)
Thanks.
From: Chris Bellevie [mailto:c.bellevie@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, September 30, 2015 4:21 PM
Cc: idm list <idm@hyperreal.org>
Subject: Re: autechre US tour
This pretty much sums up their show at Decibel. Most I talked to after were put off by them playing in the dark, but I loved it, just the sound.
In addition to Cygnus and Rob Hall, we had Laurel Halo play before Ae came on. That was awesome.
On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 4:15 PM, Eric Sorenson <eric@explosive.net <mailto:eric@explosive.net> > wrote:
On Wed, 30 Sep 2015, Chris Taylor wrote:
Has anyone caught Autechre on their current US tour? Any reports?
Yeah, saw 'em here in Portland last week.
The opener (the impossible-to-google Cygnus) was awesome. Live hardware set that was electro-rooted with some great development and movement.
http://cygnusat.bandcamp.com/
Autechre played in the dark. Each with their laptop, screens dimmed down to almost nothing.
Nothing I recognized, but I haven't really been able to ID individual tracks since Quaristice. The sound at Holocene was pretty good but many in the crowd would not shut up their dumb mouths long enough to hear the quiet passages. Things would go sort of noodly noisey space and then drop into incredibly fast and 'hard' beats, full spectrum clattering glitchy things at 190bpm. Midrange "melodies" like they figured out how to suck sound backwards through the speakers. Pause. Repeat with a variation on timbre/tonality or maybe a hint of an acid squiggle done so fast it was gone before you're sure that's what happened.
60 minutes of this and then they unplugged their laptops and slunk off. Rob Hall did some nice Warp-ish DJ stuff but it was a worknight and I had to go pretty quickly.
Was it good? Yeah, it's a treat for the ears. Feels like there is a bit of disdain, or at least indifference, for the audience and what they're hoping to get out of a live show, which I don't think is new. I was hoping for some kind of the 4/4 stuff that surfaced a couple of years back, and I had to resist the urge to shout out "Basscadet!!" like an idm-dork "Free bird!!" .. but as always, we get the thing Autechre want to do, not what we want them to.
- Eric Sorenson - N45.569, W122.763 -
http://twitter.com/ahpook -