Autechre Worked in Isolation for Decades. Now It’s Unintentionally Timely
In a rare interview, the British duo discuss the making of “SIGN” and infusing electronic music with a full spectrum of emotions.
Oct. 13, 2020
Physicists have verified a phenomenon called quantum entanglement, in which particles separated by great distances somehow exhibit perfectly matching behavior. It’s something like the workings of Autechre, the British duo of Sean Booth and Rob Brown, who have been tweaking and skewing electronic music since the late 1980s.
“In general, the more we feel restricted, the more we try to push against it,” Booth said in a rare interview via FaceTime, with Booth at “an undisclosed location” in Norway and Brown in Bristol, England.
Long before the pandemic, Booth and Brown had begun working in separate home studios using what they call “the rig” or “the system”: the only two copies of a frequently updated collection of hardware and software that produces their music, allowing them to record separately and then, when they feel it’s appropriate, to share and modify each other’s tracks. Often — as they collaborate via videoconferencing — they find that they’ve come up with similar ideas even before they’ve reconnected.
“We do behave differently,” Brown said. “We sometimes try to achieve the same goal, but with greatly differing approaches. But we really do get off on the fact that we’re on the same page most of the time.”
Booth and Brown are both from Rochdale, a town near Manchester, England, and they started collaborating on mixtapes and electronic music in the late 1980s. Neither had any formal music training; Brown studied architecture at art school, and Booth spent six months taking courses in audio engineering and electronics.
“I still don’t feel like a musician,” Booth said. “I don’t know what we are, because we came from messing around with other people’s records on tape. You just learn this stuff by listening to a lot of records and then having the equipment. Most of my training early on was equipment manuals.”
Over the course of dozens of albums, EPs and concert recordings, Autechre has evolved from making more-or-less club music — reflecting the techno, electro and hip-hop of the scene surrounding them in Manchester — toward ever more unpredictable instrumental pieces.
An Autechre track can be blissful or brutal, atonal or dulcet, pointillistic or enveloping, propulsive or hovering, minimal or maximal. Autechre’s project from early 2018 was eight hours of music commissioned by the wonderfully adventurous British online radio station NTS that Autechre later released as “NTS Sessions 1-4”; its finale, “all end,” was a 58-minute, subtly metamorphosing, ultimately transcendent drone piece.
Autechre’s chosen sounds are proudly synthetic and assembled with all of the post-human capabilities of computer processing. But even as it uses loops, programmed beats and complex algorithms, Autechre’s music defies the easy repetitions and obvious grids of so much electronic music. Tempos fluctuate, harmonies wander, timbres warp. No matter how unearthly the sounds are, there always seem to be hands twisting the (virtual) knobs at whim, always listening.
Autechre recorded the album it releases Friday, “SIGN,” through much of 2018 and 2019, and completed it in February and March, when the coronavirus was only beginning to affect Europe and the United States. As on nearly all of Autechre’s albums, the track titles are deliberately inscrutable: “si00,” “esc desc,” “psin AM.” The capitalized album title, Brown said, is “an initialization, but we don’t want to tell anybody what it stands for.”
Yet the albums’s overall mood — contemplative, melancholy, foreboding, subdued, but also jumpy and brittle at times — turned out to be prescient for a 2020 of isolation, uncertainty, political strife and economic devastation.