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The closest Autechre come to a conventional publicity shot: a composite image of Booth and Brown created by
photographer Michael England.

In producing their complex, abstract electronica, Autechre have taken the

idea of the studio as an instrument to new extremes...

Autechre's Rob Brown and Sean Booth have been called the superstars of the electronic music
world, yet they operate in near-obscurity. The duo's considerable output has been released on
all the formats going — CD, vinyl, cassette, Minidisc, MP3 and DVD — but always packaged in
abstract artwork with the absolute minimum amount of information. Generally speaking, only
Booth and Brown and a mastering engineer are mentioned, and album and track titles such as
'fold4,wrap5', 'ccec' and '[Link]' reveal little.

All this apparent secrecy adds an aura of mystique and otherworldliness to Autechre. This is
apt, since their music has few earthly points of reference. It moves between the extremes of
delicate, pastoral, ambient soundscapes, and chaotic mayhem full of DSPed-to-death drum

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machines and generative sequences playing seemingly at random. Rhythms and samples are
stretched and twisted beyond recognition and wrapped in glassy digital distortion. About the
only recurring, easily recognisable elements in Autechre's music are the occasional fat,
analogue-sounding synth patches.

The question is put to Sean Booth whether the absence of information on Autechre's output,
and also their media-shyness, are attempts to get people to listen to their music, and stop
them conceptualising about it. "Totally, man," he con rms. "That's what it's about, isn't it? We
don't do credits because what can we do, thank every single person on earth? Where would we
stop? Also, track titles are an annoyance, don't you think? They're a necessary evil, but at the
same time we're trying to divert people away from a description of the track. As far as the
artwork goes, packaging exists because we need something to pack the record in, and so we
make it as beautiful as can. We have some mates who do really good visual stu , and it gives
people something beyond pure sound. But it wouldn't concern us much if we were only dealing
with data."

What's In Those Names?

Autechre pronounce their name as 'autecker'. Sean Booth explains that the name came
about when the duo were working on an Atari. "The rst two letters were intentional,
because there was an 'au' sound in the track, and the rest of the letters were bashed
randomly on the keyboard. We had this track title for ages, and we had written it on a
cassette, with some graphics. It looked good, and we began using it as our name."

Autechre is arguably the most ear-catching of all the fantasy titles that Booth and Brown
have come up with. Regarding their unworldly track titles, such as 'IV, VV, IV, VV, VII', from
Draft 7:30 or 'Eutow' on Tri Repetae, Booth comments "They're usually jokes. Some of
them will be le names. It used to be the case that we had to keep les names short,
because in the Atari they were a maximum of eight characters. A lot of titles are working
titles, or abbreviations of working titles. Some will be whatever the code number of a
track was — many tracks will be given numbers or code names because they're part of a
folder of stu that shares the same characteristics."

Going into details about some of the track titles on Draft 7:30, Booth explains "'[Link]'
was actually called '606IE,' because it was based on a manipulation of a 606 sound.
'Reniform' is a real word, meaning kidney-shaped, and 'Puls' of course is 'Pulse' without
the 'e'. 'Surripere' is the Latin word that's the root of 'surreptitious'. And in 'Theme of
Sudden Roundabout', 'Sudden' is actually the name of a place."

Pause-button Editing
Clearly, Autechre have a rather 'otherworldly'
way of looking at some music-industry issues.
Perhaps the details of their earthly existence
will o er more understanding of their
enigmatic philosophy and music... Booth is
currently based in Su olk, while Brown lives in
London. Both men have studios in their
respective residences containing largely
identical gear, although Booth's studio is
apparently slightly larger and better equipped,
and Brown enjoys coming out to the
countryside in Su olk more than Booth enjoys A forest of Digital Performer automation and MIDI
going into London. controller data gives some clue as to the detail that
goes into Autechre's programming and sound
Booth is originally from Rochdale, near editing.
Manchester, where the duo met in 1987, when
both were still teenagers. Booth recalls that he was "doing pause-button edit mixes on compact
cassettes, while Rob was doing stu with turntables. At age 11 or 12 I had already struggled to
create sounds on a BBC computer, and I had a little tape machine with which I would record
things from the television. Then I used the hi- to compile cassette mix tapes."

Like any artists, Booth and Brown have developed a lot, but two important constants remain
from their early musical activities. First, neither played instruments or were musicians in the
traditional sense of the word. For a long time they worked in a hip-hop vein, adapting and
editing other people's material without a conscious ambition to create their own musical
identity. Second, they have an intrinsic interest in music technology. Much more than just a
tool, technology was, and is, something they appreciate for its own sake.

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"We used to do hip-hop-type mix tapes," explains Booth, "with pretty intensive editing and lots
of loops. We'd use the pause button to create
loops, just recording the same section of tape
over and over again onto another tape, and
then put scratching on it. We went from
cassette decks and Walkmans and stu to
multitracking, for a long time using a simple
four-track cassette recorder. In 1988 a friend in
Rochdale let us use his studio, where we began
using an Atari and Cubase and Creator, and
machines like the Roland R8 [drum machine]
and Casio FZ1 [sampler]. We also acquired little
Sean Booth and Rob Brown have always had a
delay devices and this little Boss thing that penchant for modifying and building their own
could do delays and be a sampler. Next we got hardware. Cycling 74's Max/MSP allows them to take
a Roland TR606, with which we could trigger the same creative approach in software, designing
the sampler. We began making beats then, as and implementing their own controllers, connections
and sound generators. As you can see from the
well as doing tape editing. Next was a Roland
screen shots in this article, some of these are quite
MC202, and we got a Korg MS10 synth, and so
elaborate, with unusual and attractive visual
things gradually built up. interfaces.

"At this stage we weren't really thinking about making music that was our own. What we did
was modifying what existed. We didn't really think about ownership of the music either. It was
a few years later, when someone said, 'Oh, these tracks are good, are they yours?', that we
recognised that we'd almost stopped making sounds that were recognisable. It seemed as if we
had been in a grey area for ages, and then suddenly we were aware of actually creating music
and playing it to other people, and they were saying it was ours. I think these congratulations
satis ed our egos so much, we decided the music was ours!"

Constructing Harmony
Until this stage Booth and Brown had considered their musical adventures a hobby, and were
attending further education, presumably with a 'proper' job in mind for later. Brown went to art
school and studied architecture, and Booth attended an audio engineering and electronics
school for six months. While Brown's experience with architecture would later provide
reference points for the structuring of the duo's music, Booth's spell at the audio engineering
school sharpened his sense of how not to do things.

"I was taught how to deal with guitarists and compression on vocals," he explains. "But I didn't
have the slightest interest in this, it wasn't exciting to me at all. I was thinking about drum
machines and e ect units and small analogue synths and wanted to know what to do with this
stu . I didn't want to learn how to mike up a drum kit, I wanted to know how to use the studio
as an instrument. It was the opposite angle really. And so I decided that if I got a rubbish job,
bought equipment to use at our house, and had no-one around telling us what to do, we'd
make better music."

Booth has talked about "the idea of engineering being beautiful", and when asked to elaborate
he enthuses "Yeah, totally. I think we have a natural ability to recognise harmony and I think
this exists as much within an engineering context as it does within music. Working in a studio is
really no di erent than building a bridge from metal girders, isn't it? Constructing harmony
from a load of prede ned frequencies is essentially no di erent. To me it's all construction,
building."

Upside Down
After a few false starts with small labels, Autechre signed in 1992 with Warp Records, one of the
UK's pioneering electronica labels. Their rst singles and their debut album, Incunabula (1993),
were well received and allowed Booth and Brown to give up any 'rubbish jobs' and become
professional music makers. A string of subsequent singles, EPs and albums followed, among
them Tri Repetae (1995), which many still regard as their magnum opus, the 'di cult' Con eld
(2001), and their most recent full-length release, Draft 7:30 (2003). In addition, Booth and
Brown are also involved in a collective called Gescom, which allows them to release material
more suited to the dance oor, and have applied their remix skills to music by Saint Etienne, DJ
Food, Tortoise, Slowly and others.

The development of Autechre's music since 1993 is fairly easy to qualify. Earlier work is more
harmonious, ambient and tonal — conventional, for lack of a better word. More recent works
have become much more adventurous, with out-of-time playing rhythm boxes promoted to the
role of lead instruments. Con eld, especially, is full of digital distortion, generative sequences,
and irregular rhythms set in ambient contexts.

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Trying to pin down Booth and Brown's working methods proves harder than describing their
musical development. Not only do the duo refuse to supply an equipment list or pictures of
themselves in the studio, but they are constantly improvising with di erent bits of kit, often
modifying them and using them for purposes they weren't intended for. This is not some sort
of deliberate ploy by Booth and Brown to be pioneering or di erent, but simply the logical
outcome of the sheer joy they experience in experimenting with gear. Booth and Brown like to
get dirty and under the bonnet with any piece of gear they can lay their hands on, be it
hardware or software, analogue or digital, computer or non-computer.

"It's good to have an interest in things, to go, 'Oh, what does this do?' and 'Oh, I understand
that,' or 'Can I use it?'" explains Booth. "Many of the tools I use are the same as everyone else's,
it's just that I really like to check them out and get into the nuances of them. I still don't get
bored with them. I still enjoy using Sound Edit 16, because it has a couple of features that are
really easy to use. Or Turbo Synth is amazing. It's the simplest thing in the world, but it works.
Or the 202 sequencer. It's batty, totally upside down, but it's brilliant to use once you
understand the numbers."

Mutants
Whereas most people working with modern technology cope with the sheer overload of
necessary know-how by organising their entire setup around one piece of gear and/or
software, for Autechre no such rule applies. Because of their hunger for exploring di erent
pieces of gear and di erent ways of using it, there's no centrepiece in their studio that dictates
their method of working.

"I guess it's like with a lot of things," muses Booth, "you need to have the bottle to build the
skills you need. A lot of people build skills for just one environment, and they'll just use Cubase
or Logic, and that will be it. Whereas I'm a bit of a mutant; it's no hassle for me to stay in on a
Friday night and download loads of new software and try it out. I don't see any harm in that as
long as you have the time to do it. We're also a bit mutated in the sense that we don't use gear
for things that most people seem to think it's best for. Everyone thought the [Yamah a] DX100
was amazing to do bass lines, but we didn't do that for ages. It seemed like there was so much
more to them to explore, like they're good for brassy, reedy sounds. You could be working for
ve years with a crappy drum machine and delay unit and still nd new things in there.

"I guess because of our remix background, refashioning what already existed, we are used to
working in so many ways and on so many di erent levels. It's still us applying our personality to
what we have available. Today Rob and I often work separately, but we share everything. We
meet up with laptops and exchange large volumes of data. We do occasionally swap stu over
the Internet, but it's not the same as when you're there and can talk about what you have.

"We don't tend to build up tracks in the traditional way. It happens that we tap in a bass line on
a synth, but often we'll turn it into something else. It's hard for us to trace the origins of the
tracks that we've released. Things can be three or four generations down the line before they
are used. We also don't talk a lot about what we do. We've been at it for 10-odd years
professionally, and six years before that of messing about. It's very intuitive. Usually when
working in the studio it's like, 'Do you want to do a bit?' 'Yeah, OK.' And if we don't like what the
other is doing, we'll say, 'I'm not sure about that,' or 'That compression is a bit over,' and the
answer can be, 'It's supposed to be like that.' There's not much to discuss really. Mostly what
we talk about is how this or that works."

Talking 'Bout Our Generation

Perhaps the most challenging and potentially controversial aspect of Autechre's music is
their use of generative sequences. Con eld contains more of these than their other
works, though they also feature on their latest release, Draft 7:30. Insofar as these
sequences involve drum machine sounds they are sometimes referred to as 'random
beats'. The adjective clearly sits uneasily with Booth, who is at pains to point out that the
beats are far from random.

"There's a lot of maths and generated beats on Con eld, but we never considered that
album very di cult," asserts Booth. "It's like pop music compared to some of the stu we
had considered putting out! And even when the beats sound like they are moving around
in time and space, they're not random. They're based on sets of rules and we have a
good handle on them. Draft is really straight, using straight-up normal sequencers and
samplers. It's written note by note, where we know exactly what we put on. Only
'Reniform Puls' has some generative stu , done by Max, which also controls a vocal lter
in that track.

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"When we do generative stu we work with real-time manipulation of MIDI faders that
determines what the rhythms sound like. A sequencer is spitting out stu and we're
using our ears and the faders to make the music. There's no event generation taking
place other than within the system we've designed. Sometimes we'll stripe a whole load
of stu down as MIDI data, because there may be a couple of things we want to change.
We generate these beats in Max and with home-made sequencers. And there are models
of analogue sequencers in the computer that are doing manipulation like gating and
compressing some of the beats.

"On Con eld we also used analogue sequencers and drum machines, because you can
do a lot with restarting patterns. You can hack things and maybe use a control volume to
determine what step the drum machine is playing from. Perhaps you send that control
volume from an analogue sequencer, so the drum machine is skipping around. And then
you get another analogue sequencer to drive that analogue sequencer with a di erent
timing. Immediately you have something that some people would call random, but I
would say is quanti able.

"It seems that for a lot of people, if they hear something that doesn't sound regular, they
assume it's random. If live musicians were playing it, they'd probably call it jazz or
something. But the fact that it's coming out of a computer, as they perceive it, somehow
seems to make it di erent. For me it's just messing around with a lot of analogue
sequencers and drum machines. It's like saying, 'I want this to go from this beat to that
beat over this amount of time, with this curve, which is shaped according to this
equation.'

"Or you want all the sounds and the way the rhythm works to change, and you don't
quite know how long the transform will take. You can then build a patch to do the
transform, and you do it by ear with a fader. We may have one fader that determines
how often a snare does a little roll or skip, and another thing that listens and says 'If that
snare plays that roll three times, then I'll do this.' We don't use random operators
because they're irritating to work with — every time you run the process it sounds
di erent. How we play the system dictates how the system responds."

Towards The Centre

Of course, even with Autechre's wide-ranging tastes, some pieces of kit are favoured over
others, or have a more central function. This often-used gear includes Mackie 16:8 and 24:8
desks, a Shure Auxpander, and an Apple G4 Powerbook running OS X, running Cycling 74's
Max/MSP, MOTU's Digital Performer, Emagic's Logic Audio and Steinberg's Cubase SX.

The Shure Auxpander is "basically a 8x8 patchbay with knobs instead of patches," says Booth,
"so you can decide how much signal goes into each one. It works kind of like a mixing desk. We
use that a lot. Together with the Mackies we're pretty limitless. Stu can go back in and back
out as many times as we want it to. They say that the Mackies are a workhorse, but I've had two
break on me. But I really like how quiet they are and how much they cost. Otherwise the
amount of money we'd spend on an analogue mixer would probably be what the whole studio
costs."

In addition to their computer equipment, Autechre have dozens of hardware synths, drum
machines and e ects. "In the beginning we had loads of analogue stu and tape recorders and
so on," Booth relates. "We still have quite a bit of analogue gear and we still use it. It's just
there, it's part of what we do, like the 202, the Roland SH2, or Korg MS10 and MS20, real cheap
basic techno stu from the time we were into acid house and dirty sounds. We also still have a
lot of Roland gear and pedals and stu . We even have a few Doepfer modules, the German
stu . I like to be surprised by equipment, and a lot of Yamaha gear still surprises me, especially
the old stu with the bad aliasing. The FS1R is a pretty mean thing.

"We're still using the Nord Lead 1 v2 all the time, which is really good because you can do loads
of beats with it. The version 2 software has rhythm patches, so you can have eight sounds
playing at a time on each of the four channels. It means that you can constantly have 32
sounds sitting there, which is nice for gear that size. We still use it live quite a lot because you
can do a lot of rhythmic stu with it. We also collect weird, rare outboard e ects. But these are
hyper-private. There are things with pure character, stu that's vintage. We have some real
gems, like a lot of early Boss rack units with beautiful-sounding chips in them. You can get
really musical with them, actually involving synth patches. Have a few of them and a patchbay
and a potentiometer and a bit of EQ, and you can make album after album. You don't need
computers or drum machines, that's what we learned."

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Autechre's hardware samplers include the likes of the Ensoniq ESR and EPS, Kurzweil K2500,
Emu E-Synth, and Casio samplers like the FZ1, FZ10, SK1, SK5 and SK100. "Changing them is
brilliant fun," remarks Booth about the latter three, "get the backs o them and a few bits of
wire and have an amazing time. We mess around with electronics, and have loads of broken
half-bits of gear lying around. I learned some things at college and can use a soldering iron."

In similar DIY fashion, Booth suggests that the way they use their equipment depends on the
way they connect things. "A lot of the time we have the studio set up a certain way for one
track, and then we have to completely rewire it for the next track. That's mostly what we're
doing: putting the studio together in a certain way for each track, and I guess that when we saw
Max and later MSP it was exciting. It mirrored the way we used to think about stu . It was all
about connectivity, very much like working with electronics, the same basic principle. We found
it really easy to get our heads around."

Unsurprisingly, Autechre have dozens of programs on their Macs, including Peak, Audio Hijack,
Soundhack, Audioscope, Amadeus, MOTU's Mach V, and many others, as well as a Symbolic
Sound Kyma system. "We use anything, man. I don't have favourites, and I don't want habits
either," utters Booth. But as always, some things are more equal than others, and Max appears
to have been the most in uential piece of software in Autechre's collection, ever since they
acquired it in 1997.

"When I rst encountered Max, I thought it was totally head-exploding," recalls Booth. "We
came up with some pretty interesting stu as soon as we got it. It was almost exactly what we
needed. We initially got it for making MIDI applications, and it was a way for us to make
sequences in which we could manipulate and generate data on the y. We could do any
combination of things. For instance, if we wanted to have a snare sound late, and the bass note
as well, we could have the tracks sync'ed and variables sent across. Before then we had to do
this manually, but with Max we could connect things in a very literal way. This made it a lot
easier to work with drum machines. You could now jam with them during a live set, and get a
pattern to slide the timing. We began using Max for live work, and then ended up using it in the
studio. Most of Con eld came out of experiments with Max that weren't really applicable in a
club environment."

Keeping Track
Given all the di erent pieces of equipment that Autechre work with, one wonders how they
draw everything together. According to Booth, the band works predominantly in 44.1kHz audio.
"I'll have everything I'm doing on a drive. That's one way in which Rob and I can exchange data.
Obviously, with other software you're keeping a lot more than just the audio, but at least the
analogue sounds can be captured and exchanged in this way. Sometimes we put things straight
down onto our HHB CD recorder. Sometimes we mix it back to the computer so we can do
edits later on. A lot of the time we save whatever we can and stash it on CDs and recently DVD-
R, for which we're soon going to get a RAID system for archiving."

With a lot of Autechre's material ending up on hard disk, what does Booth think of the claim
that producing entire tracks inside of computers means that they come out sounding at and
lifeless? His answer comes back as fast as lightning, "People who say that just don't know how
to produce properly. You can make anything you do in the computer sound amazing. It just
depends on what you do. Anyone who says that you can't make music sound fat with a
computer has just never managed to do it themselves. Because you can do it. Of course there
are things that computers don't do so well, like EQ, and it's better to use a stand-alone EQ. But
computers do compression really well, and even reverb. Despite the bad press computers and
reverb get, I think you can do some very inventive stu with them. You can make really lush-
sounding synth patches using a folder full of reverb plug-ins."

Yet, despite Booth's enthusiastic defence of computers, Autechre also know when not to use
them. "There's nothing better than turning the screen o and just going analogue," stresses
Booth. "You're not looking at data representation and so you can drift o and just listen. We do
this a lot. When we're putting things down and mixing things and are trying to make things
sound right, the screen has to go o . It's an illusion that totally pollutes what you're thinking
and what you're listening to. Yes, you can be in the zone when sitting with a laptop. You
absolutely can. But you just want to listen and not interact with the device. The worst things are
the timeline sequencers where you can see on the screen what's coming up. That really f**ks
with your head when you're listening."

Published April 2004

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