Autechre@ Berghain, Berlin 01.04.2010 WTF...?

[esky]

It was awful, absolutly awful, one of the worst performance i have seen in my whole life. First the evening started with a HipHop Dj, who was ok. Then there was a guy with a ten minutes chaos noise performance which was so loud and screaming that i had to leave the floor to save my ears. The sound at the main floor of Berghain is absolutly shit. Then Autechre...i' don't like everything they do but they have
their moments. I have nearly all releases and from that i build a nice playlist in my itunes library, mostly melodic and atmospheric stuff. The last two albums were seen as their reinvention concerning writing of melodies and harmonics. And what are they performing...? First they switched of all the lights in the club except one beamer (so people could not fall off the stairs to the main floor, thanks for that). Apart from that
darkness, you could not see the guys or anything else. The "music" consisted mainly of distorted kickdrums that were fired off like a curtain fire in the first world war. In between some randomized pling plong that did not deserve the word music. After ten minutes people were starving into the nearly darkness, some started to play with their mobile phone.It was a loveless presentation, it was boring, it was shit sounding, it was bloody not worth anything. These guys do not respect their audience. They do not deserve to play a venue like that. I'm gonna get my 60 bugs for tickets, drinks, etc. back, the next releases, as i'm still interested, i will download from rapidshare or whatever.
I'm not gonna pay for their releases ever again in my life. If you think of buying a ticket, don't do it, it's not worth a single cent.

[arctic ranger]

never been to any of their concerts, but a couple of years ago a good friend of mine walked out of one here in vancouver. after that he started taking less and less of an interest of them to the point of
never again listening to them at all.

[forbiddencolors]

I was pretty letdown by the Berghain show as well. I saw them a couple years ago at the Williamsburg Music Hall in Brooklyn and that remains the most amazing sonic exploration I have ever experienced. Their most complex audio fractals were each reproduced perfectly and echoed around the space like funky high definition shattered glass.

The Berghain sound system while it may theoretically be one of the wold's best is generally tuned to sound like a monkey taking a sledgehammer to a Richard Serra sculpture. Each side of the room is so overpowered that unless you stand exactly dead center in the middle of the room you wont hear the stereo field from the other side. And regardless of where you stay you can usually only hear the bottom end of the monstrous speakers. I'd like to imagine that there were some intricate midrange and high counterpoints going on in Autechre's set that I was missing due to the horrible sound design, but I'm not sure. The Oversteps album is actually really incredible and I the few synth motifs I heard from it here and there were comforting. I get the feeling that this set harkened a bit more to the previous album Quaristice, and more to the weeks of experiementation that it grew out of than the completed tracks where it found some resolution. Anyway Autechre certainly didn't get famous by being comforting, and chances are they were probably doing some pretty high level compositional magic up there in the dark, to create what sounded rather like a kick drum rally to a mere mortal like myself. I will always support their work and give them accolades for incessantly pushing their music forward, but for the first time I did not leave the show blown away or inspired.

BTW: My wife had a moral objection to Russell Haswell's short painful noise set and was done before Autechre even started. Also their shows are almost always pitch black affairs, I believe color and light may fall outside of their aesthetic.

[SubFunk]

The Berghain sound system while it may theoretically be one of the wold's best is generally tuned to sound like a monkey taking a sledgehammer to a Richard Serra sculpture.

amen, by all respect they are total idiots in that respect (i do respect however that they make this shit hole so successful, seriously that is an art!) i mean for gawds sake until just recently they had an array system (and worse... martin sound, i throw up) in panorama bar... an array system for club sound, hello??? well they woke up and now finally it's fine & yummy meyer sound, full range. (still not tuned very well, though... but it's new so i hope it's now only a matter of time)

and to be ON topic, i think it's berghain and the sound itself, even some of the greatest soulful house DJs that played there played always super nasty shit sets, just banging away with no sense and musical feel whatsoever...

it's a monkey place that turns even great artists into monkeys.

[tadpole fingers]

I saw them for the Untitled tour somewhere in seattle (chop suey?) They didn't turn off all the lights as I remember they had a plank of wood or something put up and they were kneeling on the floor behind it.

I found a small spot on the second floor where me and a few friends could squeeze in and spy on their entire set from above, we could see them crawling on all fours fiddling with their gear and occasionally shooting us quick frustrated glances. That alone was worth the price of admission.

[squelcht]

I can not figure these guys out... They're so friggin secretive ninja electro composers. Saw them in Asheville a few years back - Same story. Pitch black. Only a few tiny tiny lights can seen from where they were performing. Sound however - AMAZING. The club is called The Orange Peel - One of the best clubs I've ever been to & also rated one of the top 5 in the states. The sound system there is fkn sweeet. I was disapointed however in their set. Boring as fuck really. FAIL Autechre. FAIL.

[cmcpress]

Autechre always perform in the dark, even since i first saw them in 1996 in Manchester and i like them for that. it's their anti-rock-dance-god-performance thing. It becomes all about the music and not about them as individuals.

It's the same as their logos being just Ae - you have to be in the club to get it kind of "musical elitist" thing.

there's something powerful about listening to music in the dark i think - your ears tend to become more sensitive and immersive.

However i haven't listened to an Autechre album since Chiastic Slide, i got bored of all the arty MSP / programming stuff and got a girlfriend instead.

[ashtonron]

They are the best thing to come out of Rochdale, apart from the mighty blastaway @ Xanadu

[Poster]

Autechre always perform in the dark

amen to that.. really great to just focus on the music..

however.. I've seen Ae for 6/7 times and must say that their shows aren't always that good..

[UKRuss]

Can I be brutally honest about them IMHO?

They're shit. Simple as that.

[SubFunk]

Can I be brutally honest about them IMHO?

They're shit. Simple as that.

still, berghain turns any good artist into a comparable shit performance.

[nuperspective]

Can I be brutally honest about them IMHO?

They're shit. Simple as that.

Amen

[nuperspective]

They are the best thing to come out of Rochdale, apart from the mighty blastaway @ Xanadu

no that would be the M66

and dont look back

[ashtonron]

They are the best thing to come out of Rochdale, apart from the mighty blastaway @ Xanadu

no that would be the M66

and dont look back

haha great! leave the biggots behind!

[Zeddy]

I saw them for the Untitled tour somewhere in seattle (chop suey?) They didn't turn off all the lights as I remember they had a plank of wood or something put up and they were kneeling on the floor behind it.

I found a small spot on the second floor where me and a few friends could squeeze in and spy on their entire set from above, we could see them crawling on all fours fiddling with their gear and occasionally shooting us quick frustrated glances. That alone was worth the price of admission.

I'm not going to add anything worthwhile to this thread really, but their album is actually UntiLted rather than Untitled. Holy crap it took me like two years to realize that. I'm glad I'm not the only one. haha