Weekend Live Music Wrap-Up: Autechre in the Dark, Destroyer in the Groove
Autechre performed in total darkness, forgoing the projected psychedelic imagery that stationary electronic musicians often use as a visual stand-in. Even peering in from the side-front of the stage, you could see only the laptop-lit vape plumes constantly cascading from Booth’s mouth as proof of life. The iPhone thwarting presentation forced you to consider what was happening in the music, but the music wasn’t so easily considered. They started with distorted drill beats, moved on to warped approximations of brief, booming hip-hop. Not leaning on their old records, they cycled from sound to sound, allowing grooves to develop for no more than a minute before melting them back into a pool of metallic lava. The speaker-worshippers up front made some effort to dance, only to see their rhythms inevitably devolve into spasms.
At peak power, this sort of abstract electronic show disorients, overwhelms, and then, ultimately, produces euphoria. Shuffling in the dark, body rippling with constantly shifting low-end in conflict with the steady cadence of my own heartbeat, was disorienting for sure. The grand old Masonic Temple, built in 1907, was a somewhat ill-fitting choice for these low, corrupted computer tones, and the alien sounds were more muffled bouncing off its old walls than might have been ideal. Challenging room acoustics kept the show from overwhelming, or even quite drowning out any peripheral chatter to the point of rapt attention. The changing tones stuck doggedly to medium tempos rather than rushing to quick-beat catharses. That kind of pleasure denying, expectation twisting performance is likely what Autechre set out to do, and, in a lightly perverse way, that might have been exactly what their cult audience expected. They’ve been fucking with people’s ears for over twenty years, and earned a legend’s welcome for their steadfast difficulty. Their set was agitating rather than euphoric. Being kept awake, alert, and off-guard over the course of an hour is exciting in its way, but the end result was not to find one’s mind a sudden swamp of seratonin.
The crowd that filled Webster Hall the following night for Dan Bejar’s Destroyer were, if not more lively, then at least less sullen than Saturday’s black brigade. The basic demographic overlap was high, yet it was easy to assume that this was a different set of people entirely. Bejar took the stage with a maximal seven piece band, featuring two guitarists, two horn players, a keyboardist, a drummer, and a bassist, all men in their 30s and 40s who looked like recording studio pros. Spotlights caressing his afro, Bejar had the bearing of a guy who might rather be in darkness, or maybe a confused, still-sleepy fellow who, until very recently, was. He’s ever more plausible as a creative writing professor than a rock star. But rocking a clean and dry indoor raincoat, he’s had a crucial bit of old man panache in spite of himself.
Destroyer’s current set is made up of saxed-up songs from Poison Season, a few deep-cuts morphed by his current band’s brass, and many of the clean pop hits from 2011’s commercial peak, Kaputt. On that record, Bejar’s obsessions fortuitously dovetailed with similar strains of indie youth, meeting the kids at the low-key intersection of subdued disco and opulent soft rock, a knowingly, immaculate version of the sound chillwavers were misrembering. Those songs delivered the night’s most consistent crowd freak outs. The songs from Poison Season go deeper into classic rock, alternately tweaking those sounds into bar-band anthems or light-jazz cabaret. Maybe the most interesting moments of the set were the reupholstering of two songs from 2006’s Destroyer’s Rubies. That album was long, complicated, and wordy in a way that’s completely fallen from critical favor. While the influence of sorta-similar bands of that era—Fiery Furnaces, Of Montreal, Frog Eyes, and the Decemberists—feels completely absent from contemporary indie-rock culture, Bejar glides on. His band played Rubies’ “European Oils” as if it were a triumphant, second set encore by the E-Street Band. New single “Times Square” brings those same Boss vibes, with the earnestness turned down slightly to better resemble David Bowie’s alien approximation of Philadelphia soul circa Young Americans. Inscrutable pop auteur or no, Bejar came to rock out.
In final comparison, the two shows could hardly be more different. In striving to keep outpacing a future that could catch up at any minute, Autechre remains unsettling. In romantically filtering the past to better fit his own wine-and-word-drunk persona, Destroyer gets comfier all the time.