Electronic extremity: Ryoji Ikeda and Autechre live

Text: David Britain

This month two of the most intensely visceral forces in electronic music will arrive in Paris to play live concerts, the Japanese composer and mathematician Ryoji Ikeda and the English electronica duo Autechre.  Ryoji Ikeda’s music is the epitome of a technological and scientific marriage with art. His concerts and installations often feel more like complex scientific experiments with the audience’s senses than artistic events, as we’ve known them before. Ikeda is no stranger to Paris, having displayed his sound and light installation Spectra for the Nuit Blanche in 2024.

This time he will be performing an audiovisual concert called Datamatics. His tools are the mathematically pure sine waves, white noise, square wave clicks, and binary data of computers. His instruments are specially designed speakers that can output frequencies well below and above the sensitivity of human ears. These are sounds your body perceives in the head and chest rather than ears. His music also utilises astonishingly complex mathematically created rhythms, which are usually delivered at speeds whereby your brain will have to work hard to keep up. After all, this is the work of a man fascinated by the thresholds of human perception to audio and visual data. Be prepared for a strong physical and above all visceral experience.

No one would describe Autechre as musically accessible but next to Ryoji Ikeda they may well be. With an initial love of Hip Hop production they somehow took this starting point and launched their music into their own very special sonic stratosphere. On record, Autechre’s music can go from the lyrical, to the relentless, to the down right unhinged. This is music to listen to in a dark room with your undivided attention. Autechre seem to think the same thing; there is unlikely to be any lighting in the venue Locomotive (AKA The Machine very soon), just two silhouetted pulsating figures lit only by their equipment. Like Ikeda, expect this concert to be a physical as well as an aural experience; while the dubstep and techno genres have a penchant for bass, Autechre’s incomparable beats seem to attack your chest with the same ferocity. Live they are fluid enough for the audience to be able to follow the music’s minimal evolution, effectively DJing with their own sound bites. This makes their live sets relentlessly hypnotic and at their best mesmerising experiences.

At the end of March the pair will arrive in Paris for the European tour of their new album ‘Oversteps’. Having spoken to them a while ago they explained that when playing live they prefer to explore music that hasn’t been released. So don’t expect the concert to be anything like the album. Ryoji Ikeda’s audiovisual concert ‘Datamatics’ will take place on Friday 29th January at L’apostrophe, Théâtre des Arts in Cergy. For tickets call 01 34 20 14 14. At the time of publication tickets for Autechre’s concert in Paris at La Locomotive are yet to go on sale, they are due to play there on 20th March.