On every press image I’ve come across, Autechre are standing somewhere, in a tunnel or in front of a lake, wearing dark soft-shell outdoor coats and looking grim.
Back in the days, they were part of ‘the big three’ of IDM. All three were – and still are – signed to Warp.
While Boards Of Canada are tight-lipped, elusive prodigies from the Scottish highlands, Aphex Twin has positioned himself as the techno trickster, the Cornish conman.
Autechre never created a marketable image based on their personalities. With them, it’s all about the music. It either speaks to you or it doesn’t. There’s not much in between.
I’m on the side of the superfans, to adapt a currently overused industry term.
That means reading through 70-page transcripts of their Reddit AMAs or putting together playlists from tracklists of 12-hour webcasts are basically my idea of a great Sunday afternoon.
In March 2020, when the first lockdowns hit, they transmitted on the audio broadcast platform Mixlr every day. Whenever I received a notification that ‘Autechre is now live,’ I dropped everything to tune in.
For hours, they played old-school hip-hop, bleep techno and acid house, industrial and EBM, weird early electronic music, Depeche Mode remixes, Madlib beats, Griselda tunes, On-U Sound dubs and more.
These sets felt like hanging out at a friend’s house, going through their record collection.
Autechre’s music tastes were shaped by growing up in 1980s Rochdale, a town in Greater Manchester.
Though Rob Brown and Sean Booth have been creating electronic music for over 30 years, they’re not exactly club people. I’ve heard them say they stopped going out in ‘91 or ‘92. They met through writing graffiti.
Judging from their interviews, they seem to be heavy introverts, and Sean has also publicly spoken about his neurodivergence, having been diagnosed with high-functioning autism – not as a child, but much later in life. (Oh hello.)
For that reason, Sean struggles with music that feels too rigidly structured. I am the same; music that manages to deeply engage me usually has an element of unpredictability (that others might perceive as randomness). That’s why I love free jazz, noise, musique concrète, and Autechre.
Many consider their music inaccessible. It’s true to an extent; it’s not easy to love. It’s more art than entertainment, and it can be quite challenging.
There’s nothing to ‘understand’ here though, as the music isn’t ‘about’ anything except the music itself. It’s the audio version of a Rothko piece or a Dondi whole-car.
The size of their discography might feel intimidating as well.
The good news is that I really don’t think there is a bad Autechre album.
I often revisit older records, and that one album I never dug too much will suddenly become the greatest thing on earth.
Signed to the influential Warp label in their formative years, Autechre started out with relatively straight ambient techno.
Their early music combines crunchy drum machine beats with lush synth pads and a strong electro influence. This style can be heard on their first two albums Incunabula (1993) and Amber (1994).
I wouldn’t say they sound generic, but they’re certainly not as unique as some of their later work. You can already hear Autechre’s genius at play though – just listen to “Flutter” from their Anti EP (1994), a meticulously programmed beat which never repeats a single drum bar over ten minutes.
By Tri Repetae (1995), Autechre had shaken off any similarities to their peers and developed an instantly recognizable, abstract machine funk.
The music was still based on quantized beats, loops and samples. There are many legends about their creative process though – like the tale that they fed text files into their digital work stations and transformed them into sound.
It’s true that starting with Confield (2001), they shed most basic rules of harmony, melody and rhythm. Their sound now grew closer to electroacoustic music and musique concrète, like Xenakis or some INA-GRM stuff, though they’ve usually denied or played down any high-brow influences.
In their own view, they were making glitchy techno tunes with a touch of sound art, which came from listening to groups like The Hafler Trio or Zoviet France.
Around the turn of the millennium, Autechre abandoned the loop approach and started feeding signals and samples into a complex, custom-built chain of generative processes and hardware units, based on the programming language Max.
They’re referring to it as ‘the system’. Whenever they talk about it, it gets a bit esoteric. But that ‘system’ seemingly became increasingly complex throughout the years.
Autechre haven’t lived in the same city for many years. Sean moved to the countryside, while Rob lived in London for a long time. They mirrored their home studio setups, and have been sending tracks back and forth to work on each other’s ideas ever since.
Moving away from the single album format, they’ve been putting out enormous bodies of work in the last decade.
The running time of their releases went from two hours (Exai, 2013) to four hours (Elseq, 2016) to eight hours (NTS Sessions, 2018). As if that wasn’t enough material to sift through, they released more than 35 full live show recordings.
I was one of the thousands of nerds all around the world sitting in front of my computer on October 8, 2020, listening to the first livestream of SIGN, their first ‘short’ album since 2010’s Oversteps, on the band website.
Autechre’s music had become ever more harsh and atonal, but on this new and unexpectedly concise record, they went for a broken, weirdly melodic post-ambient.
SIGN sounded deeply sad and melancholic and totally life-affirming at the same time. I was stunned by its austere beauty.
Two weeks later, they dropped a sister record: PLUS.
They’ve been following this practice for decades – to release an album, then push out one or two EPs with material that, for various reasons, didn’t make the album. (Sean has said it might have been better to edit PLUS down to an EP.)
Since October 2020, Autechre haven’t released any new music, except for the odd remix and more live recordings.
They’ve played loads of shows though. They’re usually playing in complete darkness, to make you focus on what you’re hearing, not what you’re seeing. It’s just two dudes pushing buttons anyway.
Luckily, there’s enough to discover in their back catalogue. Whenever I feel I want to hear something ‘new’ from Autechre, I just go back to a record I haven’t listened to in a while. It usually sounds completely different from how I remembered it.
Here are two starting points into Autechre’s work:
If you’re looking for some proper moody synth ambient (not random wallpaper stuff), start with their most recent album SIGN (2020).
If you want something more upbeat and challenging, go to their classic LP5 (1998), which is generally seen as one of the best electronic music albums of all time. Move forwards and backwards in their discography from there.
Be warned though – discovering their catalog requires some commitment. If you don’t want to invest hours of dedicated listening, don’t even bother.
This music is clearly not for everyone.
Media Diet
Listening: Cassie Kinoshi’s seed. – gratitude (2024)
Composer and alto saxophonist Cassie Kinoshi, a former member of Kokoroko, has been a mainstay of the UK scene for some years. This piece was inspired by a ‘gratitude book’ that Kinoshi’s mother keeps. As an everyday practice, she writes down one thing to be grateful for.
Kinoshi’s main ensemble seed. performed gratitude in March 2023 with the London Contemporary Orchestra. The B-side, the separate song “Smoke in the Sun” was recorded at Total Refreshment Centre in April 2021. This is half an hour of colourful and uplifting spring jazz, unabashedly melodic and emotional.
Watching: Adam Curtis, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011)
An astonishing BBC documentary that leaps from Ayn Rand’s libertarian philosophy to cybernetics and systems theory, and from Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes to gorilla researchers in the Congo. It makes some complex sociological arguments about postmodern society, but even more convincingly combines historical archive footage with a stunning soundtrack including Eno, Burial, and Badalamenti.
Concerts
Horse Lords (Berlin, Berghain Kantine, 09.04.24)
Horse Lords are a long-running four-piece experimental rock band originally from Baltimore, now based in Berlin. They’re into polyrhythms, just intonation and free jazz skronking, but at the same time, their music is weirdly accessible. The place was sold out on a Tuesday night. People were dancing and having a good time. I bought two CDs at the merch table: Interventions (2016) and The Common Task (2020).
Slauson Malone 1 / ML Buch (Berlin, Volksbühne, 10.04.24)
Berlin’s art school kid community collectively showed up for this double-bill at the iconic theater in Berlin-Mitte.
The New York-based multidisciplinary artist Jasper Marsalis, alias Slauson Malone 1, sang and screamed and played electric guitar and electronics, accompanied by a barefoot cellist. The music defied categorization. There were elements of no wave, free jazz, hip-hop, hardcore and noise. It reminded me of John Zorn’s Naked City, or of flicking through a video feed with the sound on.
I’ve been obsessed with ML Buch’s album Sun Tub (2023). Unfortunately, the Copenhagen-based singer-songwriter struggled with some technical issues during the first few songs. But soon enough, her ethereal voice and grunge-y, shoegaze-y guitar ambience transported me to the wild Danish seashores. Definitely one of my favorite artists right now. You really need to check her out if you haven’t.
© 2024 Stephan Kunze
I've never heard their music but reading this is making me want to check it out! all the photos you shared of them look out of a Tarkovsky film.
can't seem to shake my autechre obsession either--i think column thirteen is my favorite thing in this world