Review: Autechre / Mark Broom, The Prospect Building – “exhilaration, paranoia and occasional dancing”

Bristol is really looking after fans of electronic music at the moment. The long dormant Sabres of Paradise are coming to Strange Brew later in November, while this week alone sees visits from The Bug, Clark and Daniel Avery among others thanks to the excellent programming of this year’s Simple Things festival.

This evening’s show at The Prospect Building – also part of Simple Things – features Autechre, one of UK electronica’s most revered acts. Like Radiohead – who have claimed them as an influence – they made their name with forward thinking but accessible music before exploring less tuneful territory that crystallised their hardcore fanbase even as it alienated casual listeners.

Support tonight comes from fellow veteran Mark Broom, who performs a beautifully sequenced set of restless, kinetic techno laced with acidic synths, dub FX and frantic jungle breaks. Broom deserves a much higher profile given the quality of his releases over the years, not least his excellent 2021 album Fünfzig. Quirky, danceable and brightly lit, Broom’s appetising performance contrasts sharply with the more challenging main course to follow. It’s easy to imagine Autechre backstage, chuckling drily as collective joy spreads around the room.

Mark Broom

Then, darkness. The music and dancing stop, the house lights go down and the visuals that accompanied Broom’s set are replaced by a stark warning to the effect that lights from phone and cameras must also be extinguished. A palpable edginess enters the room. Thanks to a row of emergency exit signs along the venue’s back wall I can still just about see the people I’ve been dancing with, but it’s suddenly hard to read their faces.

The music is dark too – dense, elusive, disorientating. Despite their vast, wide-ranging discography, Rob Brown and Sean Booth’s live sets are essentially 80 minutes of unreleased material. Tonight this means high tempo, metallic dissonance that mostly refuses to settle into a comforting groove. While rooted in the sounds of techno and electro, the barreling kicks, ticking hi-hats and clanking snares often seem to be on separate adventures. Synth melodies swoop untethered across the sound field, like confused birds trying to navigate a planet ruled by bad robots. The sound design is delicious but the music is in permanent transition; the audience constantly on their toes.

The lack of light is important. Being unable to connect with people around you creates an introspective world focused entirely on the music. This is perhaps why some members of the Autechre faithful can seem a little puritanical, flashing stiff, sidelong glances at anyone caught chatting, and at one point turning their heads in unison as a smartphone illuminates its owner’s face in shame.

But it’s there, in the near-dark, that you experience a timelessness, an absence of context that is the ultimate aid to deep listening. It combines with Autechre’s restless progression of sound to create an intense trip that morphs through exhilaration, paranoia and occasional dancing. When it ends, the light streams cruelly into dilated pupils and, for a moment, our disorientation is complete.

Top image: Autechre, copyright BAFIC

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