One of the key outfits pointed at when trying to discern just when that pivotal ‘I’ was applied to electronic music (and the term, ‘IDM’ – Intelligent Dance Music – was first coined) Autechre’s legacy has been increasingly recognised over the last three decades, with their extremely innovative and questing spirit influencing generations of budding young producers.
Formed in Rochdale, Greater Manchester in 1987, Rob Brown and Sean Booth’s pursuit of fascinating new forms of electronic music has resulted in a vast body of work.
From the foundation of 1993’s Incunabula spawned fourteen further studio albums, including such electronic classics as 1995’s ultra-intricate Tri Repetae, 2001’s software-embracing Confield and the extraordinary Exai from 2013.
Today though, we’re casting our eyes back to a time long before Autechre became a byword for the notion of dance music as art, back when Rob and Sean were just two extremely creative guys, surrounded by a nest of wires, drum machines and beer cans.
We spoke to Rob and Sean back in 1994, right after the release of their ambient-flavoured second record Amber (in our dear departed sister magazine, Future Music). Journalist Simon Trask asked them about their earliest workflow…
“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 [1980s hip-hop and electro funk outfit] stuff with pause-button edits on my cassette deck,” Sean explained.
“We used to put loops into the [Casio] SK1 and cut stuff up on the turntables over the top of that,” said Sean. “Then when we got the [Roland TR-] 606 and the [Boss] RSD-10 we’d put samples in the RSD, trigger it from the 606 and play with the SK1 on top of that.”
In the early 1990s, Autechre prided themselves on learning and memorising every facet of their hardware set-up;
“We’ve found that whenever we buy a bit of gear we try and lay off it for six months, until we’ve got used to using it,” explained Sean. “It’s only then that we start doing things that are actually worth using; if we start using something immediately, we just do the corniest stuff with it. There isn’t one thing about the gear that we’re using now that we don’t understand. The analogue synths are second nature to us, and the [Roland drum machine] R-8 is completely our machine.”
In retrospect, the period that Simon spoke to the pair was fairly pivotal, as he caught them at a time when they were just beginning to dabble with DAWs, software and the capabilities of MIDI. Although, at this early stage the results weren’t always worth writing home about…
“Cubase is a song man’s program, and we’re not song people at all,” Sean told us. “A lot of the tracks we do are very loop-orientated, and [Emagic] Creator [the proto-version of Logic] is designed to be used by people who like working in loops. So we started using that and it was just like using a drum machine, which we were well into – using the R-8 as a sequencer gave us our first lesson in Creator, almost.”
One of the most interesting moments in the interview was when Sean explained how the pair didn’t particularly like bringing in outsiders to their two-man operation; “We’ve only really worked in one ‘proper’ studio and we just ended up getting on the desk ourselves,” said Sean. “I don’t know – we just don’t like working with other people, basically. It’s a lot easier if we do everything ourselves. It seems that in studios you have this code of practice that says you have to do things in a certain way. People say to us, ‘you’ve got this weird way of working’, but to us it isn’t weird, it’s the correct way of doing things – we’re happier working like that.”
