Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Apocalypse chic: Autechre, Last Days and Southbank’s Xenakis day reviewed

It’s insane that we hide Xenakis’s works in study days. They should air on prime-time, usher in the New Year

Agathe Rousselle as Blake in the new doomer opera Last Days at the Linbury Theatre. Image: © Camilla Greenwell

It was so dark, my friend noted, you could have had sex or done a Hitler salute. No stage lights, no stair lights, no desk lights, no door lights, no usher lights, no exit signs. The few wisps of illumination that did steal in created colossal shadows, giants freeze-framed on the walls. In these snatches the wooden ribcage interior of the Barbican Hall looked demonic.

A few photons lit up the Autechre boys, Rob Brown and Sean Booth, who flickered like blue flames rising from a hob. A few more nudged into view the ceiling that had become a vast charcoal grisaille. When, occasionally, someone left, the tiny glowing portal that appeared made it feel as though we were at the bottom of a cavernous well.

The barrage of doofs, thwangs, skwrshy-sweeshes of Autechre’s super-processed electronics also suggested we’d been plunged somewhere vast and inhospitable. The Kuiper Belt, possibly. Or the basement of a rusty old steelworks, perhaps, that a baby divinity had found and was hurling about its head. With the help of a beat, the set settled and landed on a groove. A friendly riff took hold. A tasteful clangor descended. The Autechre machine whirred into autopilot, cycling through agreeable, glinting abstractions. My head rocked dumbly. My mind drifted. Was anyone having sex?

It’s insane that we hide Xenakis’s works in study days. They should air on prime-time, usher in the New Year

It’s one thing to sit in the pitch black feeling like you’re navigating outer space, buffeted by solar winds and ice rock. It’s quite another to be doing this while vibing politely among a sea of IDM dads.

Much more startling was the latest show from Balenciaga’s creative director Demna Gvasalia, which seemed to be one of the most dystopian Gesamtkunstwerks the web had witnessed.

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