Autechre

Fresh off a new album, Autechre return to the Eternal City. My journey towards this event, however, was far from ideal. A few days before the show, in fact, the boss and I decided to try to interview the duo, notoriously rather elusive and mysterious (have you ever tried opening the biography page on Warp's website? It's completely blank). We put in a request to Dna, who organised the event, and to the Italian distributor, Spin-Go. On the very day of the concert, finally, we get the green light. At seven in the evening I head to the Brancaleone with my sheet of questions, excited at the thought of exchanging a few words with two of my teenage idols. Once there, I'm told that my "booking" doesn't show up anywhere, but a very kind organiser from the Brancaleone (in this whole misadventure I have to praise the behaviour of the organisers and staff of the "Branca", always courteous and extremely helpful) lets me speak with the tour manager and with the Dna representative who had set up the appointment. It turns out the tour manager hadn't been informed and was in a foul mood and hungry, as I'm told Booth and Brown also were. Result: the interview simply doesn't happen. Then the tour manager (Autechre will never say a word to me) adds that, if they're in the right mood, maybe I'll be able to put my questions to them about an hour before the show. I return to the Brancaleone at 11.30pm (the concert won't start until 1.40am), but there's nothing to be done: Autechre are not "in the mood", no interview. A shame, for them too.

But let's get to the account of the evening. Their entrance is discreet, yet effective. Autechre's music slots into the last track played by DJ Rob Hall, as the light trained on him fades out, while the lights illuminating their equipment let you make out the two men's faces. The stage is almost completely dark, save for the green LEDs of the three pairs of speaker stacks standing in front of Booth and Brown, partly obscuring them, and for the faint lights that let the duo see what they're playing while preventing anyone else from doing so. Their equipment, besides being shrouded in near-total darkness, is also protected by a number of boxes and metal shelving. In fact, if it's already hard to catch a glimpse of Booth and Brown, seeing what they're actually playing is impossible. Paying close attention, though, one might guess there isn't a single laptop among their tools of the trade. It feels like being back in 1993, when anyone with a sonic edge over the competition did everything possible to keep the secret. This attitude sets them apart profoundly from the new generation, children of open-source philosophy, who do exactly the opposite, proud to show off both their technology and their vintage gear. The recent Italian dates by Four Tet and Prefuse 73 are proof enough, to name just two examples.

The structure of their performance is also very old style, and it's more or less always the same: a beat base perhaps taken from some already-released track, perhaps not, with other beats layered on top, various noises but only of an analogue nature, and occasionally (rarely, to be fair) some thin, ethereal melody seemingly drawn from a little keyboard.

Tonight Autechre want to prove they're the sole custodians of a certain sound, and from that point of view the performance is a complete success. The problem lies rather in the approach. They choose to give nothing away to the other senses (sight above all, though the choice would have been truly surprising and revolutionary had the denial of the dominant sense been total, with complete, impenetrable darkness), to not even offer physical sensation (forget about bass that makes you shake, at a show by these gentlemen), but pure listening. That's why I'll never tire of saying that Autechre's is an abstract electronic music: it aims to create sensations in exactly the same way non-figurative art did at its birth.

The decision, however, isn't entirely a happy one, because the risk of slipping into a certain monotony is not avoided — quite the opposite. It carries on with no foothold of a familiar track, with no pauses between one piece and the next, in a monolithic performance that wears you down and doesn't always satisfy.

The concert gains bite towards the end, when Booth and Brown's beats grow far more complex, building almost into a kind of electronic noise, first based on what sounds like a looped section of "Gantz Graf", then on other hard, almost harsh beats, that assault the listener in a way that perhaps would have been better employed earlier too. Having reached the peak of this "fullness", Autechre leave nothing hanging in the air but a whistle, a background radiation, before switching off their gear and vanishing suddenly, just as they had appeared.

To close, a note of demerit for part of the audience: someone flails about as if they were at Cocoricò, complaining because the others (sensibly) don't follow suit, others chat through the whole concert, still others shout out of nowhere, and there's no shortage of a wildly out-of-place "Fatece bballa'!" ["Make us dance!"]. True, perhaps it was Autechre's job to snap out of it and win back these lost souls, and some of the blame does fall on them too, but only in small part.

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