Creativity Quote by Sean Booth

Complexity, in Sean Booth's hands, isn't virtuosity for its own sake; it's a social experiment you can dance to. When he admits Autechre's live set has become "vastly too much information", he's not apologizing. He's naming overload as the point, treating the audience less like consumers and more like a live data set. The show becomes an environment that pressures people into revealing their coping strategies: surrender, irritation, pattern-hunting, the stubborn insistence that if you just listen harder it'll resolve into a hook.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the service-economy model of entertainment, where the performer smooths every edge and optimizes for instant legibility. Booth is interested in the opposite: what happens when the music refuses to meet you halfway. "Quite interesting watching how people behave" carries a cool, observational distance - the musician as field researcher, the crowd as a swarm responding to stimuli. It's also a tell about power: he can alter conditions, then watch bodies and attention spans recalibrate in real time.

Context matters here. Autechre's late-era reputation is built on maximalist structures, algorithmic processes, and sets that can feel like being dropped inside a machine mid-operation. In an era of playlists engineered for frictionless listening, Booth frames difficulty as an aesthetic and ethical stance. Too much information isn't a bug; it's a mirror held up to our habituation to constant input, and to the discomfort that arrives when input stops behaving politely.