Having lived with these soundboards (1 through 9) for over a year and a half now, I find myself wishing they had shifted up the setlist a bit more from gig to gig, because I've ended up listening to the first 30 or 40 minutes of each set MUCH more often than the last half or third. Even when I do get through to the later parts of the set, I'm typically mentally and aurally fatigued enough from the first half that I don't find I have the faculties to fully appreciate what's going on, which is a problem I don't encounter with AE's work when I can listen track by track (yes, I know WATMM has provided track indexing, and I have split these recordings up into individual tracks myself, but without track names I sadly have a lot of trouble digesting them; they're just a huge unapproachable mess with not enough variation from set to set).
It seems like they've addressed this fatigue issue in the more recent 2016 sets by playing in a more blown out ambient style, but they still seem to be playing everything in a very specific order. This is less than ideal for me, as without more recognizable divergence from set to set, I'm worried I'll run into the same issue of finding the first 30/40 minutes very familiar, and leaving the last 30 minutes or so more neglected, unexplored territory. They may also address this problem by releasing fewer sets, as to be less overwhelming, though that feels kind of antithetical to this literally awesome and totally overwhelming "milk it for all it's worth" strategy they've taken since AE_LIVE.
In any case, now, when I find myself listening to the AE_LIVE recordings, I typically am only listening to the second half of whichever performance I'm diving into, which is a bit jarring and hardly an ideal listening experience. Regardless, it's nice to come back to these and hear new bits after spending a year grokking ELSEQ - for instance, I'm just now hearing a twisted version of the "7th slip" intro synth stabs around the 49 minute mark of the Dour set
Has anyone else here come across this problem with the AE_LIVE recordings? Any elegant solutions I'm missing?
