Photo by Camille Blake

At the tail end of October, Autechre fans were treated to an unprecedented bounty: AE_LIVE, a concert album comprising not one but four live sets from the duo—Krakow, Brussels, Utrecht, and Dublin—all recorded late last year. Then, in December, five more from 2015 (Krems, Nagano, Grafenhainichen, Dour, Katowice) became available. It's a lot to process, but then, for Autechre fans, bewilderment just kind of comes with the territory.

These are, truly, uncharted waters for electronic music: Has any other act set out to document its live process this way? I actually wrote this entire piece based on just the first four live sets; it was only when I went to do a final fact check that I discovered that five more sets had been released that very afternoon. But to be blindsided by such a staggering quantity of music also feels like part of the experiment. The canon of concert recordings of experimental electronic music is not vast, but the format isn't unheard of, either. Here are a handful worth seeking out—once you manage to pry yourself away from Autechre's bounty, that is.

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Autechre: AE_LIVE (Warp)](https://autechre.bleepstores.com)__

Listening to an Autechre live set at home or on headphones is one thing; seeing them live is another. Or perhaps "seeing" isn't the right word, because the duo's shows are often carried out in near total darkness, the better to subsume listeners. The live shows have the benefit of the full power of a massive, well-tuned sound system—not to mention the electrifying energy of the crowd. To get a sense of what the atmosphere is like, just listen to a fan recording of Autechre's 2014 live show in Krakow, in which intermittent shrieks and whoops punctuate not only the set's climactic moments but also, sometimes, its pauses and potholes. If Autechre's music is like a very wobbly piece of ultra-modern furniture, then the crowd noise is the fourth leg that keeps it upright. There's a soundboard recording of that same Krakow performance in the AE_LIVE bundle, and, stripped of crowd noise, it scans very differently. The room melts away, and you're plunged into a hermetic chamber of ricocheting electronic ping and squelch—headspace rather than meatspace.

No one does head music like Autechre. They're the rare act whose recordings thrive upon dryness and the live recordings are a welcome opportunity to experience their real-time number-crunching. If you ever wanted to be a fly on the wall inside a microprocessor, here's your chance. Nine chances, actually, and counting.

And while nine iterations of the same basic material might seem like overkill, the way they create their music makes AE_LIVE different from listening to multiple live sets from almost any other musician, electronic or otherwise. Rob Brown and Sean Booth don't play songs; they play software patches of their own devising, and while individual sounds and timbres routinely crop up, the permutations are always different. Each set is just one iteration of infinite possibilities. The boundary between writing, recording, and playing their inimitable strain of electronic music "is sort of gone now," Booth recently told the Portland Mercury, "because we want to get to a point where we can just spit an album out in real time. I'd say we are close to it, if not actually there already.” That's also why AE_LIVE isn't being presented as a complement to their last album, or a replacement for a new album—it is the new album.

Jordan Czamanski (of Juju & Jordash) and David Moufang (aka Move D) have logged plenty of time on stage together as members of the improvising techno ensembles Magic Mountain High and Mulholland Free Clinic. They're no stranger to live albums, either: Magic Mountain High released a 2013 set as a full-length on Workshop, as well as selections of a set from as a white-label earlier this year. This document, released in October on Further Records, captures a 2013 Seattle appearance from just Moufang and Czamanski. With only four hands in the mix instead of the usual six or eight, it's a more streamlined affair than MMH or MFC, but the methodology is the same: all hardware, no computers, 100% improvised. It's a wild, woolly affair, full of mashed organs and acid basslines and crisp, swinging machine grooves. The 15-minute excerpt that comprises the LP's A side flirts with '50s sci-fi and radiophonic squeal; the more focused B side is a heads-down techno trip. No two bars are alike.

Given that Pan Sonic's albums, especially their early ones, double as laboratory experiments conducted with arcane, obsolete electronic apparatuses, it's a miracle that their music can be performed in public in the first place. How can material designed to be heard in anechoic chambers be pulled off in a space as compromised as a nightclub? But their sine wave pummel works wonders in a live context. At a Pan Sonic show in San Francisco in the early '00s, I remember being lulled to sleep on my feet—not because I was bored; quite the opposite—their woozy bass vibrations sucked the consciousness right out of me. God forbid you should listen to that shit while you drive.