Notes on the third worst date that I have ever had in my life
In 2012, I threw my 30th birthday party, and over 250 people showed up. I say over, of course, because I lost count sometime around when the police first showed up due to multiple noise complaints. I bribed them, they went away. Different police arrived later, I bribed them, they went away. Then I threw everybody out.
I did not have a good time. I had such a bad time that I vowed never to throw another party like that again.
But I still wanted to throw birthday parties. I like my birthday. I like having people show up for my birthday. (Clearly.) And so I made a vow to keep throwing my birthday party, but in the form of increasingly weird concept parties that would all have one thing in common: to be as polarizing as possible.
Note, here, that polarizing is not the same as bad. Someone out there is going to love my birthday party, no matter what form it happens to take. It just so happens that my birthday party might be thrown at 6:00 in the morning. Or it might be in Hong Kong. Or, as for my 37th birthday party, it was about Autechre.
Autechre are an electronic duo from the north of England. They have been active since the early nineties. They made a few really influential records, then transitioned into a singular style of music that has been called either “forbidding” or “post-human” for the past two decades. They play all of their shows in pitch darkness, improvising extensively on the software that they have custom-tuned to generate new work. They are one of my favorite bands.
Autechre are polarizing, even when you’re not throwing an Autechre-themed concept party. Oh sure, “Bike”, one of their most famous songs, has notes. This does not. And while my favorite period from Autechre falls somewhere in the middle, they are more known for music that feels like a mainframe computer having a psychotic break in the middle of a fractal apocalypse.
In the years before my 37th birthday, Autechre started releasing increasingly long, complex works. They were already known for being fairly prolific, putting out 80-minute albums every couple of years or so. Then they put out their first double album. When it was (incorrectly) panned for being bloated, Autechre responded in the normal way that regular people do: by releasing a five-hour album. And then, in 2019, they were asked to take over NTS Radio for a series of shows, and the resulting album, NTS Sessions, was eight hours in length.
Of course I own the 12xLP of this. Of course. But nobody in their right mind is going to play an eight-hour album all in one go – unless they have a reason to.
Unless they have a reason to.
And so, for the very nice, fun, regular, and profoundly normal event that was my 37th birthday party, I blacked out all of the windows in my basement, covered up every LED, rented a $40,000 speaker system, and played NTS Sessions in full, at truly consciousness-splitting volume, for eight hours straight. A basket was posted outside the basement to hold any devices. Another bowl held earplugs. Trust me, you wanted earplugs.
People came with blankets and pillows to stay the whole time. Multiple people wore Autechre shirts – which I was not expecting, but I guess I should have. The day after, two different people approached me at the grocery store to confess out-of-body experiences, presumably during this.
The third worst date I ever had in my life began normally. She showed up. We traded small talk. We discussed community, which is always a place where I shine. We connected on a few things. And then I talked about my birthday parties: how they came to be, how they are polarizing, sometimes unironically funeral-themed, etc. And then I described my 37th birthday party – which, again, was a very profoundly normal thing that regular, well-adjusted people do for the people they love – and all of the air went out of the room. She looked at me, her face dropped, and she paused and excused herself to the bathroom. She came back and the conversation never recovered.
I have a lot of compassion for this person, for it must be tremendously hard to hate all of the cool things that I do. Imagine hearing this and thinking wow, this person is weird, I do not want to hang with them any further. Imagine not desiring an absolutely insane art installation of a birthday party for yourself. Imagine not being inspired by the mind-blinding excellence of an 8-hour noise squall, rendered in flawless detail at maximum volume on a Funktion One. Just imagine the effort involved in such a rejection. The mind boggles. I think it’s far easier for me to understand an 8-hour noise record than the psyche of such a person. It is all for the best.