Autechre @ The Art School

It's the mid-1990s. I am probably wearing a global hyper-colour t-shirt and waving fluorescent sticks around. I am listening to Autechre with Serocell. Since they have been switching styles since the boom years of acid house, it's difficult to remember which phase this would have been: maybe the glitch period, an apparent response to the legislation against 'repetitive beats' (as mentioned in Kieran Hurley's monologue about the rave scene, Beats). 

"Hmm," says Serocell. "What makes you young will one day make you old." 

2014, and I am standing in a packed room at the Glasgow School of Art. I've come in for the end of a day-long festival, Simple Things, and trying to catch a glance of a man in a baseball cap, who is fiddling with some machines, possibly a computer. The crowd are facing the stage and when dancing breaks out a few feet away from me, I think it is a fight. 

"Excuse me, are you selling anything?"  

I am delighted that an attractive young woman has come over to speak to me: I don't even mind that she has mistaken me for a drug-dealer. 

"I'm sorry," I mumbled. "This is just my halloween costume. I've come as a concept." She looks nervous and walks away.

The band aren't coming on yet - is it a band or a person? - so I nip out the front for a cigarette. Inevitably, one of my ex-students is on the door. I am always pleased to see them, and prefer it when they are on the door, being responsible, and not blitzed on alcohol. We chat about dramaturgy for a while, and I head back in. 

A man stops me on the stairs and asks if I am Pharrell Williams. I don't think he is just being cheeky and I am just glad to get the reference. 

I looked him up on Wikipedia. Esquire's Best Dressed Man of 2005. I'm just saying.

Anyway, I explain to him that this is my halloween costume, and that I have come as William Burroughs, June 1973. "It less distinctive than the October 1987 version," I add. "But he still had a bit of meat on his face in the early 1970s."

Around this time, Autechre take the stage. I haven't kept up with them: I know I have their collaboration with The Hafler Trio on CD, but it surprises me when I realise (thanks to Wikipedia, again), that the last album that I bought, Confield, was released in 2001. 

I am the only person wearing a suit, and although I have a rather wonderful shirt with an elasticated panel at the back (it stretches to fit my frame and cools me down, a bit like the unstable molecules that The Fantastic Four has), I understand why raving three-pieces have been traditionally rare. I am hot and, in a sign of my age, envy, rather than lust over, the young women in the relatively skimpy dresses.

"This is the most abstract music ever made," says the guy in front of men. He is wearing a backpack - it's a dumber thing to wear than a suit, because at least I am suffering myself. Every time he turns to his mate to explain how well he gets Autechre's sophistication, he hits me with his backpack. 

I am not hearing extreme abstraction though: when I talk about abstraction, I am usually claiming that a piece of dance, or theatre, is climbing towards a metaphysical vantage point: its content is more of a foundation for general meditations on the problems that drive it. Dance is very good at abstraction, because movement can be interpreted in many ways. Music is abstract - unless Berg has borrowed an unfinished Wozzeck  for the lyrics, or Wagner wrote a libretto about the death of the old gods - but I am not sure that Autechre would win in an abstraction context with Bach, or the atonal gang, or Serocell's latest.

I am hearing a lecture. It's composed of sound, but Autechre's set is flowing through their various approaches - and sometimes juddering, of course. The rhythmic complexity stays throughout, and the subtle use of layered melody - but they reference their championing of glitches, and retain the majesty that has always been their hallmark.

But, with time, Autechre sound less like pioneers of a future music but another bricolage act. Most of the bits and pieces do belong to them, and their influence is such that one of their albums usually inspired many imitations. Glitch went off on its own adventures (I reckon that fashion for 8-Bit music came from their), the beats came close to jungle, and the weight of their bass can be heard, echoed, in dubstep. Yet, over time, their own sound reveals its sources and influence. The shining sheen of futurology becomes an elegant rummage in the past.

Not that there is the kitsch that pop music adores: they might have been around in the 1990s, but they are not nostalgically culling elements from their peers. Their music, however, as the crowd seems to admit, is not to be danced away. It is to be observed.

The show is not dramaturgically rich, in visual terms. The layering of percussive urgency, tentative melody and floating bass is quite enough, thank you. And at various points, the music essays the journey of electronic music. The clinic, clean sound draws the line back to the haute-couture of the Belleville Three gang and forward to dubstep. Autechre are archivists, cerebral and demonstrating the continuity of electronic dance music, at least up to about 2007.

And this is why I wore the suit. 

Magic Moments... Made for Sharing

Here is my weekly list of five really cool things that I saw, heard or thought while I was about being a critic. Plus two rubbish ones, just from life, really.

The pas de deux between Mina and her husband (Dracula @Tramway). 

Another good bit(e)

Mark Bruce is big on the 'pas de deux equals people having sex' equation, and never more so than when Mina and Jonathan have their honeymoon night together. Capturing both characters' tentative intimacy, while establishing their sense of alienation even in the act of love, it encouraged the dancers to stretch themselves (literally and metaphorically) to present a sensual, hesitant union.  When the other characters came back on stage, it felt like they had barged into the bedroom. 

Guy Veale's soundscape (OOG @ The Arches).
Despite its reputation as a venue for alternative performance, The Arches is a tough space to work: the rumbling of trains overhead can be distracting. Veale's soundscape for Al Seed's exercise in physical precision was both tough enough to conquer the rumbles, and porous enough to incorporate them into the overall atmosphere. Switching between My Bloody Valentine, ambient (and probably illbient) numbers and a jaunty spot of old time jazz, Veale lent Seed's post-apocalyptic soldier an immersive, daunting dark atmosphere.

Putin's Photograph on the wall (Leviathan @ Glasgow Film Theatre).
A Russian take on The Book of Job was never likely to be a chuckle-fest, but the subtle pointers to the corruption of the ruling elite through Leviathan made it as much political satire as theodicy. In a key scene, when the corrupt mayor is confronted by the over-sexed lawyer (no-one is innocent in this film), a framed portrait of an anemic looking Putin is just above their heads throughout the scene, making it clear that evil is one thing that does work in trickle-down economic theory.

Victor Zarallo and Sophie Martin (Scottish Ballet Up Close @ Tramway).
At the risk of being another critic whom Sophie Martin has to arrange a restraining order, the brief pas de deux Jealousy by James Cousins in SB's mixed mixed bill was another reminder of how she is becoming one of the most exciting dancers in Scotland, meshing contemporary energy with classical technique. Bathed in red light, and teetering between the erotic and the despairing, Cousin's choreography gave both dancers a showcase that insists on ballet's ability to explore emotional extremes without compromising on its rigorous physicality.

The Words on the Body (Autumn Nerve Dance @ Old Hairdressers).
Paul  Michael Henry is always good for a bit of butoh inspired action, but Prof Lavery (academics - if you tell me, I'll steal it) pointed out a layer to this dance. Henry's use of projected cut-ups covered his body, emphasising the failure of words to express whatever Henry's movements were trying to manifest - but their disappearance left Henry's body bare and vulnerable. Not just some funky moves, Autumn Nerve Dance posed a question about how words might shape our identities, even if they are merely reflections on the surface of our bodies...

And here's the rubbish...

That Bloke In Front of Me (Autechre @ The Art School).
When he turned round and said in a loud voice that 'this was the most abstract thing ever made,' I wondered whether his comment on Autechre's electronic lesson in history (I'll get to it) was profound or just a stupid bit of showing off that revealed an ignorance of, say conceptual art  or Xenakis' compositions. I was pondering what he meant when he followed this up with 'and there is only one sound going on at a time', which was audibly wrong. 

Him wearing a comedy sanitary towel fancy dress on Halloween (Total Fucking Nightmare Walk Home @ Sauchiehall Street). 

The internet proves this is not an
isolated activity. Thanks, internet.

While it was a bold move to challenge the hegemony of the 'sexy' halloween fashions (I was more conservative and went for 'sexy William Burroughs), the man who was wearing a big bloody tampon wasn't committed enough to the feminist subtext to really pull it off. Actually, given that halloween is supposed to be about monsters (even 'sexy nurse' had a bit of blood on her - either because she was being top beat combo Nurse with Wound ((c) Lorna Irvine) or she'd cut herself on her nasal accent), wearing a towel suggests an innate fear of menstruation. 

There is, of course, another joke about where these towels are usually found, and what this makes him, but I think that's going into misogynistic territory.