Ben Coles on August 28, 2025
Long-Awaited Return, Total Darkness, Total Focus
Berlin Atonal 2025 welcomed legendary Warp Records duo Autechre back to the city for the first time in nearly ten years, and luckily, I was there to witness it.
Autechre’s live shows are famously performed in complete darkness, and Berlin Atonal honoured that tradition. As the house lights cut to black at 21:30, the audience stood still, guided only by the shifting, multi-layered waves of sound. Without visual cues, every texture from the smallest glitch to the deepest bass hit felt heightened and urgent.
The crowd’s attention was absolute. Conversations were rare and ill-advised, replaced by quiet absorption in the sound, punctuated only by the occasional “whoop” from a devoted fan. The crowd’s seriousness mirrored the music’s intensity, making it feel less like a concert and more like a shared experience.
The Sound Journey
The set opened with blissful tones underpinned by a rumbling, sinister bassline, calm on the surface but carrying an undercurrent of threat. Within minutes, broken beats and glitchy fragments began to surface, quickly transforming the mood into something darker and more driving.
The first ten minutes felt disorientating, as if the music was building, searching and holding a kind of suspense. The volume seemed restrained at first, only fully blooming around the fifteen-minute mark when deeper, fuller beats arrived, locking into more reliable rhythmic patterns. Still unmistakably electronic and alien, but now with a firmer sense of grounding.
Around the twenty-minute point came a shift, with sweeping pads washing over the darkness and beats dropping to a half-tempo, creating space to find a groove on the dancefloor. It was a rare, more open moment before the music evolved again into fresh, intricate territory. From there, the performance moved through multiple phases: moments of bliss, crashing drums, broken patterns, blistering blasts of glitch and sampled fragments. Always chugging, clutching, driving, daring.
Climax and Chaos
There were moments of pure climax where gruelling basslines seemed to physically grip the room. Just after the hour mark though, a blissed-out ambient section emerged, filled with deepline synths and sweeping, space-age tones. It felt like we were approaching a conclusion.
But Autechre weren’t finished. A member of my group let out an audible “wow” as the peaceful finale was suddenly obliterated by the arrival of a huge drum and bass sequence that nearly tore the roof off the Kulturhaus. The next fifteen minutes were an onslaught, chaotic and mischievous, a masterclass in live electronic production.
Finally, as all things must, it came to an end, or perhaps an all end. The beats began to defragment, the soundscape unravelling until there was nothing left but the faint hum of the venue. We stepped out of the darkness and back into Berlin, our ears and minds still adjusting.
This was not an easy performance to describe. Autechre’s music is too intrinsic and too left-field for words to fully capture. But in its alien complexity lies something primal yet futuristic, something that demands you surrender to it. In total darkness, at high volume, it became less a concert and more an act of collective immersion.
I left Astra feeling physically charged, mentally sharpened, and deeply aware I had witnessed something rare, something incomprehensible, yet something beautiful.