The Fridge, London
12 April 2001
Autechre play in the dark to an audience bursting the seams of The Fridge. The auditorium is packed, the crowd heaving without much dancing going on, and the beats are fractured into shapes that would make rhythmic movement something of an exacting chore. People seem slightly nonplussed, but no-one’s scratching their chin; or at least not in full view.
The sounds which are emanating from the chunky speaker rig are made in such a way that the ticking percussive parts, the bass rhythms and the stabs of once-keyboards and analogue synth spasms tumble over each other. Undulated snare shapes make collisions, the propulsive sway of loops and precisely-placed polyrhythms even twisting backwards into a regurgitative lurch of a gear change across the entire mesh of interlocked pulses. Software drum and bass turned upside down, techno twisted through a grinder; HipHop in absentia, yet present in spirit form. It’s a parallel universe of sound. When one looped beat has had its guts remodelled, another takes its place; identifiably of the format to which it’s proposed to dance. With the cerebral aspects of their systems music going slightly awry tempting the music into the direction of a head-body dualistic split, it’s still refreshing that Autechre can make such a gripping rush of physical sound shake the walls. All this and it’s so tempting to click along to the stuttery rythms on a drinks can tab too.
A clinician in the audience observed that it felt like Autechre make music for drugs which have yet to be synthesised. Flowing out into the cold Brixton night, the relative quiet collage of the noise made by traffic seems both alien and somehow of a kind. With the recursive, layered chaos in expansion still clicking up a mechanistic fuss like a popcorn machine gone to Ketamine abuse in the venue under an intense barrage of coloured lights, strobes and smoke, the city has another dynamic, symbiotic soundtrack to assimilate.
-Freq1C-
