Photo by Camille Blake

At the tail end of October, Autechre fans were treated to an unprecedented bounty: AE_LIVE, a concert album comprising not one but four live sets from the duo—Krakow, Brussels, Utrecht, and Dublin—all recorded late last year. Then, in December, five more from 2015 (Krems, Nagano, Grafenhainichen, Dour, Katowice) became available. It's a lot to process, but then, for Autechre fans, bewilderment just kind of comes with the territory.

These are, truly, uncharted waters for electronic music: Has any other act set out to document its live process this way? I actually wrote this entire piece based on just the first four live sets; it was only when I went to do a final fact check that I discovered that five more sets had been released that very afternoon. But to be blindsided by such a staggering quantity of music also feels like part of the experiment. The canon of concert recordings of experimental electronic music is not vast, but the format isn't unheard of, either. Here are a handful worth seeking out—once you manage to pry yourself away from Autechre's bounty, that is.

Autechre: AE_LIVE (Warp)

Listening to an Autechre live set at home or on headphones is one thing; seeing them live is another. Or perhaps "seeing" isn't the right word, because the duo's shows are often carried out in near total darkness, the better to subsume listeners. The live shows have the benefit of the full power of a massive, well-tuned sound system—not to mention the electrifying energy of the crowd. To get a sense of what the atmosphere is like, just listen to a fan recording of Autechre's 2014 live show in Krakow, in which intermittent shrieks and whoops punctuate not only the set's climactic moments but also, sometimes, its pauses and potholes. If Autechre's music is like a very wobbly piece of ultra-modern furniture, then the crowd noise is the fourth leg that keeps it upright. There's a soundboard recording of that same Krakow performance in the AE_LIVE bundle, and, stripped of crowd noise, it scans very differently. The room melts away, and you're plunged into a hermetic chamber of ricocheting electronic ping and squelch—headspace rather than meatspace.

No one does head music like Autechre. They're the rare act whose recordings thrive upon dryness and the live recordings are a welcome opportunity to experience their real-time number-crunching. If you ever wanted to be a fly on the wall inside a microprocessor, here's your chance. Nine chances, actually, and counting.

And while nine iterations of the same basic material might seem like overkill, the way they create their music makes AE_LIVE different from listening to multiple live sets from almost any other musician, electronic or otherwise. Rob Brown and Sean Booth don't play songs; they play software patches of their own devising, and while individual sounds and timbres routinely crop up, the permutations are always different. Each set is just one iteration of infinite possibilities. The boundary between writing, recording, and playing their inimitable strain of electronic music "is sort of gone now," Booth recently told the Portland Mercury, "because we want to get to a point where we can just spit an album out in real time. I'd say we are close to it, if not actually there already.” That's also why AE_LIVE isn't being presented as a complement to their last album, or a replacement for a new album—it is the new album.

Moufang/Czamanski: Live in Seattle (Further)

Jordan Czamanski (of Juju & Jordash) and David Moufang (aka Move D) have logged plenty of time on stage together as members of the improvising techno ensembles Magic Mountain High and Mulholland Free Clinic. They're no stranger to live albums, either: Magic Mountain High released a 2013 set as a full-length on Workshop, as well as selections of a set from as a white-label earlier this year. This document, released in October on Further Records, captures a 2013 Seattle appearance from just Moufang and Czamanski. With only four hands in the mix instead of the usual six or eight, it's a more streamlined affair than MMH or MFC, but the methodology is the same: all hardware, no computers, 100% improvised. It's a wild, woolly affair, full of mashed organs and acid basslines and crisp, swinging machine grooves. The 15-minute excerpt that comprises the LP's A side flirts with '50s sci-fi and radiophonic squeal; the more focused B side is a heads-down techno trip. No two bars are alike.

Pan Sonic: 19/01/995 20/01/995 and 05/10/995 (Jenny Divers)

Given that Pan Sonic's albums, especially their early ones, double as laboratory experiments conducted with arcane, obsolete electronic apparatuses, it's a miracle that their music can be performed in public in the first place. How can material designed to be heard in anechoic chambers be pulled off in a space as compromised as a nightclub? But their sine wave pummel works wonders in a live context. At a Pan Sonic show in San Francisco in the early '00s, I remember being lulled to sleep on my feet—not because I was bored; quite the opposite—their woozy bass vibrations sucked the consciousness right out of me. God forbid you should listen to that shit while you drive.

This pair of CDs documents a 1995 double-header at the Knitting Factory, when the group was still a trio, and a London show a few months later where it was just Mika Vainio and Ilpo Väisänen twisting the knobs. Both discs cover similar terrain as Pan Sonic's 1995 album Vakio and Vainio's Ø albums from the same period: minimalist drum-machine thump, quarter-tone harmonies, tornado-grade squalls of white noise, and bass so thick you could cut it with a knife. There's some serious acousmatic headfuckery, too, especially on headphones. Some 10 minutes into "20/01/995", as an overdriven hum chugs like an outboard engine, a tiny little ghost note whippoorwills around the margins, sounding as though it comes from outside the music—I actually took off my headphones just to be sure that it wasn't something bleeping in my room. The 19/01/995 date tips more into techno territory; 05/10/995 is noisier and more abstracted, and it ends in a shuddering, slow-motion climax that must have been a thing of terrible beauty to behold live. Screwface for days.

Sun Electric: 30.7.94 Live (Apollo)

Sun Electric (Tom Thiel and Max Loderbauer) are responsible for some of the most intricate and sparkling recordings in IDM, but this 1994 live album, recorded at an outdoor performance in Copenhagen, is a masterpiece of pulsing, mostly drum-free ambient techno on par with Global Communication's 76:14. Across three 20-minute tracks, synthesizers shimmer, hints of percussion glint in the mist, and echoes bubble like running water. Fifteen minutes into "Castor and Pollux", the chorus of the Beatles' "Hard Day's Night" inexplicably wafts into earshot, as though heard from the far side of the park, and dubbed out and half-harmonized with the surrounding chords; it's the last thing you would ever expect to hear in that moment, and for that very reason it works wonders. The third track, "Northern Lights #5", entertains a brief stretch of fast, 4/4 techno, but the beat is submerged in such a way that it comes off like a cool breeze on a hot day—and the second half of the track, anyway, is a confused tumble down a rabbit hole of haunted ballroom and cavernous reverb.

Fennesz: Live in Japan (Touch)

Several of Fennesz' live dates—solo, head to head with the improviser Keith Rowe, as a part of Fenn O'Berg, and alongside Ryuichi Sakamoto—have made it to disc, but this unbroken, 43-minute set from early 2003 is as pure and concentrated a blast of Christian Fennesz' method and vision as you'll find. Maybe it's because Fennesz is as much a guitarist as a laptopper, but something about the way he uses reverb actually lends the impression that you're hearing him in a big room, even as the precision of his digitally carved sounds is as vivid as that of any studio-created electronic music. (The set's been recorded off the soundboard, so there is no crowd noise or room ambience.)

Listeners familiar with the Austrian musician's catalog may recognize motifs reprised from previous albums, but there are few recognizable songs or even track divisions; the noisy, shapeshifting set is a largely lateral journey that twists like a slow-moving river through the high desert. It opens with burrs of static clinging to each other, and rubbed glass, distant string samples, and the buzz of what sounds like petulant bumblebees sketch out its textures. For some stretches, it feels like eavesdropping on intergalactic radio interference, straining your ears for some sign of life amidst all the randomized white noise. Elsewhere, there's fingerpicked acoustic guitar broken into digital shards, like a malfunctioning hologram of a campfire strummer. Towards the end, the music fades out and is followed by a brief silence (originally filled with applause, I suppose) before it ramps back up into a final fistful of fingerpicking, a melodic snippet of xylophone, and a crushing climax that feels like the previous 40 minutes being twisted up and pulled through the eye of a needle. It's a hell of a way to end a hell of a show.

Wolfgang Voigt: Rückverzauberung Live In London (Astral Industries)

I once got the chance to see Wolfgang Voigt play a live performance of his work as Gas inside the lower court of Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí's Park Güell in Barcelona. You'd be hard pressed to find a more dramatic place to experience his swirling, sample-heavy drones, which smear German Romantic orchestral music into a dense, viscous strain of ambient, by turns blissful and dreadfully uneasy. While the Doric columns supplied plenty of gravitas, they also ended up making for some pretty crappy acoustics. Fortunately, this recording from a 2014 set drops you smack in the middle of Voigt's imaginary Black Forest. Despite being released as part of his Rückverzauberung series (the title translates roughly as "Re-enchantment"), it's very much in line with Gas at its darkest and most ominous. It's also freed from the four-to-the-floor kick drum that anchors so many of Gas' recordings, which lends it an even more psychedelic cast. In its final 15 minutes, bright strings give way to chopped-up vowels, and the climax is a rising swarm of voices reminiscent of the sound accompanying the obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Unlike so many live drone shows, which—no pun intended—drone on for-freaking-ever, the set's arc is clear, and gripping. Next time you feel like getting really lost, all you need is a free hour, a darkened room, and this.

Voices From the Lake: Live at MAXXI (Editions Mego)

The recorded work of Donato Dozzy and Neel's Voices From the Lake project never strays too far from 4/4 time; it's always techno at its core. The same can't be said of this October 2014 set from Rome's MAXXI museum, however. Rhythms come and go; drift is paramount. The first 10 minutes are just metallic scrape and the merest hint of a pulse; from there they plunge into the ricocheting voices and flickering static of "Dreamscape Generation" and the dizzyingly panned mouth-harp samples (anticipating Dozzy's 2015 album The Loud Silence) of "Richiami e Oscillazioni". The slowly pinging "Orange Steps", suffused in bright melodies and synthetic birdsongs, tips its hat to Global Communication's 76:14. Pitter-pattering hi-hats in "Max", the set's closing cut, put a little extra spring in its step, but you might not even notice, so dreamy is the synthesizer melody that carries us through to the burbling fadeout. It's as buoyant as ambient techno gets.