PIONEERS
We explore the genius of the divisive, Warp-affiliated duo who have taken the shears to electronic music staples
Electronic music is a spectrum. On one side, we have the crowdpleasers, the big-room bangers, the tunes you might hear on an AI-generated playlist at the gym, soundtracking your spinning class. By and large, these follow many of the same rules as conventional pop music; tonally, timbrally and rhythmically colouring within familiar lines to produce familiar – and often brilliant – results. On the other end, we have the weird, the wonky and the experimental; music that harnesses the near-limitless potential of 21st-century technology to create sounds like nothing that came before them. No electronic act is more closely associated with this abstruse corner of music than Autechre.
Rob Brown and Sean Booth met as teenagers in the late ’80s. Speaking to Future Music in 1994, Booth recalled how the pair bonded over a shared interest in hip-hop, electro and DJing. “We used to do turntable mixes together at Rob’s house and then go to my house and edit and cut ’em up, imitating early Mantronix stuff with pause-button edits on my cassette deck,” he told us.
The duo’s early experiments made use of the Casio SK-1 and Roland TR-606, and a precomputer recording setup saw the Roland R-8 drum machine, Juno-106, Tascam 4-track and a DJ mixer turned towards creating ghostly, fractured beats that would catch the attention of the now-revered label Warp Records in 1991, leading to a feature on the imprint’s highly influential 1992 compilation Artificial Intelligence. Since signing with Warp, Autechre has released 15 studio albums with the label and even more EPs. The duo’s style has evolved dramatically in that time, but such is the varied and freeform nature of Autechre’s music, any attempt to categorise it within a fixed style or mode is largely futile. The pair’s early work arrived at the zenith of what has often been dubbed, for better or worse, IDM; electronic music that scissored up the blueprints for acid house, techno and breakbeat and rearranged the pieces into adventurous new shapes.
But Booth has since gone on to label the term as “silly”, asking one interviewer, “is our music abstract and weird? To us or our mates it’s not! Maybe if you’ve only listened to pop music, then yeah, it’s weirder, because you’ve not been exposed to it [...] everyone has a diffe
