Autechre

Rochdale, graffiti, and a Warp signing

Autechre formed in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, in 1987. Booth and Brown met through the local graffiti and breakdance scene, and the habits of that world — swapping tapes, remaking what they heard on cheap gear, working out of sight of the music industry — shaped everything that followed. Warp Records signed them in 1992, and every studio album they have made since has come out on that label.

The early run established them quickly: Incunabula in 1993, Amber in 1994 and Tri Repetae in 1995. Those records were melodic enough to be absorbed into the "intelligent dance music" tag the pair have spent thirty years batting away, but the structural restlessness was already there.

The records that kept moving the target

Chiastic Slide in 1997 and LP5 in 1998 pulled the music towards abrasion and away from anything resembling a groove that stayed put. Confield in 2001 was the real break: rhythm handed over to generative processes, with results that scanned as broken until the ear adjusted. Draft 7.30 (2003), Untilted (2005), Quaristice (2008), Oversteps (2010) and the double-length Exai (2013) each worked a different corner of the same method.

Then the scale changed. Elseq 1–5 arrived in 2016 as a digital-only set of five volumes; the NTS Sessions followed in 2018 at roughly eight hours. In 2020 came two albums twelve days apart — Sign on 16 October, then Plus, dropped without announcement on 28 October. Those remain the most recent Autechre studio albums, a gap the pair have shown no urgency about closing. Booth has said the concept of what a studio album is seems outdated to him; Brown has pointed at the drudgery of promoting one.

The live archive as the actual output

What replaced the album cycle is a live series. AE_LIVE appeared in 2015, AE_LIVE 2016/2018 in 2020, and then AE_2022– — the dash doing real work, since Brown has described the title as deliberately open-ended. The first batch of seven soundboard recordings went up on 10 August 2023, with twelve more added on 4 November 2024, bringing the set to nineteen recordings and roughly 22 hours and 48 minutes. Each one carries its own artwork by The Designers Republic, and the date and venue are encoded in the track titles: Milan, Athens, London, Paris, Barcelona, Melbourne, Sydney.

Booth has called the material the most interesting thing the pair have done in ages, and the framing matters for understanding the current tour. The set that goes out on the road is not a promotional vehicle for a record; it is the work itself, rebuilt from night to night and then published. In December 2024 the duo took a residency on BBC Radio 6 Music, which is about as close to the mainstream as their recent activity has come.

Back on the road, at a scale they have never attempted

On 26 February 2025 Warp announced 25 dates across the UK and North America — the first North American run in ten years. It opened in Denver on 1 October 2025 and closed at 3S Artspace in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on 28 October, with Mexico City, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Montréal and New York in between and Mark Broom supporting every stop. The Mexico City date, at MUTEK MX, was their first performance in Latin America. UK shows followed in November in Glasgow, Newcastle, Leeds, Brighton, Bristol and Belfast, and there had already been a short European run in August 2025 including Flow Festival in Helsinki on 8 August.

Japan came next: ZEPP DiverCity in Tokyo on 4 February 2026 and Yogibo META VALLEY in Osaka on 5 February, tickets at ¥8,800, both billed as pitch-black performances with phones powered down and movement kept to a minimum. The Osaka show was their first in that city since 2008. Then, on 2 December 2025, the European leg was announced: 24 dates between 24 September and 24 October 2026.

Where things stand, October 2026

The current tour opened at Lunchmeat in Prague, held at the National Gallery's Trade Fair Palace from 24 to 27 September, with Autechre on the Sunday — a festival that pointedly does not separate its bill into headliners and support. Vienna's Gasometer followed on 29 September, Zagreb's Tvornica Kulture on 30 September and Ložionica in Belgrade on 1 October. The route then runs through Skopje, Athens, Thessaloníki, Sofia, Bucharest, Budapest, Ljubljana, Bologna's Robot festival, Alcatraz in Milan on 11 October, Geneva, Marseille, the Bataclan in Paris on 14 October, Nantes, Lille and Nijmegen, before Vicar Street in Dublin on 20 October and Depot in Cardiff on 22 October.

The run ends at Magazine London on 24 October, presented by The Hydra and billed as their biggest headline show, their first in the city since 2022. On 8 September 2026 the support bill was confirmed: MDX and Gescom on every date, with Space Afrika, Valentina Magaletti, upsammy, Konx-om-Pax, Kyoka, Aho Ssan, Roel Funcken, Sunken Foal and Bochum Welt taking individual shows, and edv3ctor added in London alongside Space Afrika.

Their standing beyond the touring circuit showed up in an unexpected place this year. On 27 February 2026 the American guitarist Shane Parish released Autechre Guitar on Palilalia Records, a 51-minute set of solo acoustic readings of tracks from the first four albums, recorded in October 2025 with no overdubs or effects. It drew 83 on Metacritic from six reviews, including 7.6 from Pitchfork and 8 out of 10 from PopMatters — a 1990s catalogue being treated as repertoire.

The darkness, and the argument about it

The staging is the thing people talk about. Houses go fully dark — the only light is whatever leaks off the machines on stage, plus legally mandated exit signs — and the shows ask for no photography, no filming and minimal movement. Booth's stated reasoning is blunt: people have danced to music for thousands of years without a massive LED wall trying to blind them.

It does not land the same way for everyone. The Fader's review of the late show at Brooklyn Steel on 26 October 2025 described 80 minutes of punishing percussion, clean kicks, lurching half-time and double-time shifts and squelched bass at oppressive volume on the venue's L-Acoustics rig, with the final 20 minutes drawing open cheers; one person leaving called it pounding alien music. The night after, at Paradise Rock Club in Boston, CUBE and Mark Broom opened and the set ran over an hour of near-total darkness and physical force. At 3S Artspace in Portsmouth on 28 October the same material went the other way, towards texture and dynamics — Brown put it down to exploring the set from another angle using the room itself.

The complaints are consistent too, and worth stating plainly: bass heavy enough to bury the detail, sustained loudness with little relief, uncomfortable crowding in the pitch black. In Vancouver the Hollywood Theatre's exit signage let in enough light to spoil the effect entirely. Reports from the 2026 shows so far return to the same two observations — that Booth and Brown operate in unusually tight sync, and that the range of rhythms and tempos is the reason to be in the room rather than listening to the recording afterwards.