Ae_Live

These past few days I’ve been making my way thru Autechre’s massive 2015 live collection Ae_Live which consists of 9 one-hour live sets recorded in various cities across Europe in 2014/15. These recordings were taken directly from the soundboards so there’s no crowd noise straying into the mix, making these recordings sound less like performance documents and more like new studio workouts, prompting some furious debate among Autechre devotees as to whether these should be treated as 9 new albums or merely stop-gap dispatches. Either way, the music is extraordinary, very much in the vein of recent albums like Exai and Quaristice, all high velocity data streams of distressed electronics, fractured beats, Industrial noise and jagged machine glitch. I've read a comment from one listener drawing a comparison with the exploratory night flights of The Grateful Dead - it’s a good analogy but a better one might be drawn with the ecstatic fire music of John Coltrane and Albert Ayler - cacophonous, atonal but strangely beautiful. More info and samples at Autechre's Bleep Store...