Autechre - Standard-bearers of ambient-techno

Cryptic from their very name, Autechre (pronounced "o-tek-er") are among the standard-bearers of the new global ambient-techno. Their electronic symphonies arise from complex architectures, built on unusual time signatures and distorted sounds, with heavy use of filtered voices and digital reverb. A musical formula that picks up the fundamental insights of Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, updating them for the sounds of the turn of the millennium. But compared to other exponents of this electronic revival, such as Orb, Boards of Canada and Aphex Twin, Autechre boast a richer percussive sensibility, giving rise to a sound with more "industrial" characteristics. The band is a duo made up of Sean Booth and Rob Brown, two disc jockeys from Manchester's techno scene. Friends since their teenage years, the pair share a passion for music and for technological tinkering, playing around manipulating records with machines and creating curious "mixtapes" that grew ever more elaborate over time. They were discovered by Warp, the label that had already released work by Sweet Exorcist, Nightmare on Wax and B12, and that would go on to write the history of 1990s electronic music, with names like Aphex Twin, Boards Of Canada and Plaid.

Preceded by the 1991 EP Cavity Job (featuring "Cavity Job" and "Accelera 1 & 2"), their debut album Incunabula (1993) arrives, already radiating the instrumental sound of Autechre, built almost entirely on beats and chords. Their peculiar idea of techno, grounded in deconstructed rhythms and cerebral sonorities, proves remarkably evocative, moving between the ambient watercolors of Brian Eno and the spatial excursions of late-period Tangerine Dream. It's mechanical music, yet fluid, freely drawing on textures with jazz and symphonic lineage. As with all ambient music, Autechre too have a hidden inspiration in Ligeti. But within the folds of Incunabula also surface hints of hip hop, Indian music and African rhythms, along with a peculiar quest for "groove". Their sounds, slow and hypnotic, with minimal chord variations over a backdrop of percussion in odd time signatures, are at once majestic and desolate, far removed from any stylistic trope commonly associated with techno. The overture "Kalpol Introl" is a captivating cocktail of velvety sounds, robotic rhythm and melodic hints. "Bike" is a futurist ballet, its rhythm hovering over a carpet of disorienting sound effects. "Autriche" seems to arrive almost from some remote abyss, with a quasi-Gregorian choir taking shape over a vortex of sonic fluctuations and free-jazz-style keyboard solos. "Bronchus" is a further ambient digression, leading into the single "Basscadet", propelled by tighter rhythms and Latin American percussion. The game grows ever more bewitching, to the point that, sinking into the atmospheres of "Eggshell" – an admirable combination of melody, driving rhythm and jazz improvisation – it almost feels like stumbling upon Kraftwerk's magical "tanzmusik". And while "Doctrine" and "Maetl" seem to want to accentuate the darker, more techno-leaning side of their sound, "Winwind" combines sophisticated technological exploration (made up of loops, samples and drones) with a seductive "chill-out" sound. "444" closes the album on a note of thoroughly evocative ambient dance music. The mechanical scores of Incunabula transport the listener into another dimension, constantly disorienting them, making them lose all grip on reality. The effect is not unlike psychedelic trance.

Incunabula reaches the top of the British independent charts and is followed by the box set Basscadet. Meanwhile Autechre become objects of cult devotion among the genre's many enthusiasts, to the point that reissues of their early singles become necessary, put out through various labels such as Wax Trax!, TVT and Trent Reznor's Nothing, the label run by the Nine Inch Nails frontman. "We weren't influenced by the English techno scene," explains Sean Booth. "As kids we liked synth-pop and we were crazy about New Order. Then we got into hip-hop, until around 1988 when we decided the genre was dead. So we turned to the new 'acid' sounds coming out of Chicago. If we sound a bit 'jazzy', it's because we went through a certain kind of soul phase, old Marvin Gaye and the like. Basically, the point is that we really don't have a precise idea of what kind of music we want to make."

With Anti (1994) comes a stance against the Criminal Justice Act, which restricted the freedom to protest and express oneself, going as far as banning raves. It's a transitional work, preceding the release of their second album, Amber (1995). Though less majestic than its predecessor, the record confirms the full talent of the two lads from Manchester. The "galactic" score of "Foil" opens onto a new interstellar journey that continues with the dramatic sounds, muffled in reverb, of "Silverside", with the surreal vignette of "Slip", with the menacing techno-industrial mood of "Glitch", with the bizarre electronic blend of Andean flutes and Tibetan mantras in "Piezo", with the icily atmospheric sonorities of "Furthur" and the robotic ballet of "Teartear"; while the almost classical "Yulquen" brings back a sense of calm and austerity. As critic Bruno Ruffilli writes, "Autechre were among the first to move from hardware to software: sounds are no longer born from drum machines and synthesizers, but are created and modified on computer." An approach that, live, "allows them to escape the rigid logic of predefined sound banks and makes it possible to offer ever-different sets." Three-minute tracks thus become "veritable suites, structured on almost imperceptible rhythmic alterations, with long drones of low notes, Gaussian noise, sounds obtained through mathematical curves and 'granular synthesis'."

The following Tri Repetae (1996) heightens the claustrophobic tones of their music, without, however, giving up pleasing melodic excursions. Among the ten tracks, standouts include the dark, oppressive atmospheres of "Clipper", the symphonic sweep of "Eutow", the exotic dance of "Rsdio" and the rarefied "Overand", which slowly slides into silence.

With the album Chiastic Slide (1997), dark and dense with industrial noise in the wake of a collaboration with Coil, the duo sharpen their sound, and in tracks like "Rettic AC", "Recury" or "Nuane" it almost feels like listening to a cyberpunk version of Throbbing Gristle's "D.O.A.". The combination of rough industrial sonorities and the gentleness of ambient atmospheres bears good fruit, as in the opening "Cipater", which closes with an Arabic-tinged melody and arrangement, bordering on the "mystical" psychedelia of the Sixties. "Tewe" is more subdued, while "Calbruc" and "Pule" revisit melodies already heard in "444" (from Incunabula) and "Slip" (from Amber), with variations on the same theme. The same year also sees the release of Cichlisuite, which might seem to offer a near-literal description of their music (a cyclical suite), but actually reads as "Sickly sweet".

EP7 (1999) gathers no fewer than eleven tracks but is, on the whole, a minor work, while the album Confield (2001) continues the "noisy" project undertaken with Chiastic Slide. The "intelligent techno" of Incunabula echoes through the sinister atmosphere that pervades the album. But the liquid, minimalist sound of their early days resurfaces only in a couple of tracks ("Uviol" and "Eidetic Casein"). Instead, what dominates is a collage of oblique and at times rather confused "patterns". Their usual refinement in choosing samples and sounds ("Lentic Catachresis" or "VI Scose Poise") seems to get lost in a tangle of rhythms that at times comes across as somewhat lopsided ("Pen Expers"), while a track like "Sim Gishel" sounds almost like the hum of computers searching for a soul. An elegant, experimental album, in short, but one that loses much of the pathos and allure of their early work along the way, retreating into an ever more frigid and overwrought musical laboratory.

Over the years, Autechre have also lent their hand to remixes for St Etienne, Tortoise, DJ Food, Skinny Puppy, Nightmares on Wax, as well as a parallel career begun in 1994 under the name Gescom (on Skam Records). Through a masterful deconstruction of the rhythms and sounds typical of electronic music, the two Manchester DJs revolutionized techno, projecting it into outer space, toward the boldest symphonies of ambient and kosmische musik. It was a pivotal operation for the music of years to come, as shown by the sheer number of acts (from Kid 606 to Oval, from Pan Sonic to Boards of Canada, from post-“Kid A” Radiohead to Matmos) who have in some way been shaped by their insights.

In 2003 Autechre returned with Draft 7.30, ten tracks of highly architectural electronics. The title track is defined by a compact aggression full of black-and-white contrasts, strafed with a taste for sudden dynamic imbalance in the composition. The geometric, artificial harshness of the tones in “Xylin room” aligns with the focal variety of “IV VV IV VV VIII” and the abyssal lines of “6 IE.CR”, striking a balance that keeps Autechre from ever falling into stereotype. “Theme of sudden roundabout” is lit up by the expressive charge of a dehumanizing funk. The following “VL AL 5” welds acoustic and electronic segments into a Tsukamoto-esque porno-noir, full of mutant almond-eyed lap-dancers. Phonic clots, a paroxysmal accumulation of sonic debris marking out the pulse of a gesture, organizing a rhythm: “P.:NTL” has a 'black' core, and it's not hard to find it even while swimming through a tangle of white noise that seems to smother everything. Melodic, harmonic and rhythmic devices converge into one giant, highly dialectical formal arch, within which they end up alternately shredded or exalted. A track like “V-Proc” lives on a surface that doesn't exclude depth, reaching a strong dramatic intensity: this is inner geophysics, what surfaces once the crust has been scratched, somewhat like Kricke's “Plastica spaziale” or Raoul Ubac's “Intérieur”.

In 2005, however, Untilted confirms the impression that the British duo has by now hit a dead end. Any opening toward the new disappears, or rather collapses into sterile repetition. Yet “LCC” didn't start out badly: a cascade of beats, a paranoid obsession stripped almost to the bone, hard and shadowy right up to its final landing on nocturnal, almost reassuring shores. But “Ipacial Section” already recycles the same sounds, seasoning them with listless, inconclusive autechrerie that drags on for more than ten minutes. In short, it's the weariness of an already-familiar formula that wins out. So the vocal samples aren't enough to fully redeem “Pro Radii”, nor is the thin melody enough to keep “Augmatic Disport” from being boring. The closing “Sublimit” amounts to 15 minutes of arrogance and exhaustion, a pointless tour de force through the duo's most hackneyed clichés. Only once do the sounds, melody, 'mechanical' beats and kinetic suggestions blend effectively: the track is “Fermium”, the one true highlight of Untilted, which opens with the jolts of a typically crooked Autechre melody before arriving at its bare, closing beats.

On Quaristice (2008), what's missing once again is composition. Fatigue is paired with a total unwillingness to take risks. And above all there are few production ideas, even though some good moments of music can be found, especially in the opening tracks.

Nothing memorable, though, nothing that leaves a mark, however faint. Harmless tricks as old as Warp-style electronica take center stage. Perhaps worth noting is the disappearance of beats from several tracks, which thus become pure ambient — a decidedly unusual choice for Autechre. But beyond that, there's really nothing else to report.

This record is a fine symbol of the serious creative impasse in which everyone still thinking about electronic music in terms of more than a decade ago seems stuck, and of the impossibility of updating certain stylistic canons.

After a brief pause, Warp's standard-bearers get back to their laptops, churning out their tenth LP.

With Oversteps, it's a return to their origins. No more harsh edges, but minimal electronic expanses furrowed by glitches and sinister patterns. But what (doesn't) surprise is the duo's ability to still attempt a new path. The attempt, however, only half succeeds, clashing with a sound that now seems perhaps overly familiar.

That there's still real craft at work is clear right from the epic waves of the opening “r ess”, not far removed from the ambient catharses of Tim Hecker, or in the rumbles darting through the following “ilanders1”. The oriental flavors and warped mirrors of “see on see” are delightful too, as are the cascading “redfall” and the advancing permafrost of the closing “Yuop”.

Overall, though, the album — perhaps overlong — suffers from ghosts that induce yawns rather than chills. Too many filler tracks pile up, diluting the impact even of the best songs. Skipping tracks like “qplay” or “osveix3” can only do the listening experience good.

In any case, Autechre prove they're still alive, still able at times to cast a spell.

Just four months later, Warp's knights release Move Of Ten. The one-two punch signed by Sean Booth and Rob Brown echoes — not even all that faintly — the Kid A-Amnesiac pairing by Radiohead. Setting aside both the musical approach and the overall quality of the operation, the sense that we're facing, as with Yorke & Co.'s records, two efforts that are different faces of the same coin is rather evident.

Where Oversteps stretched its sonic material to the max, shaping it into a continuous play of elongations, Move Of Ten zeroes in on the more pulsing side of the duo's sound. The opening “Etchogon-S”, caught between celestial dance beats and crystalline vertical slashes, opens the door to the dense swarming of “y7”. The grim, sinister dimension surfaces in the cybernetic swarms of “pce freeze 28i”, while dry, razor-thin basslines prop up the void running through “nth Dafusederb”.

The industrial school resurfaces forcefully in the lukewarm spectres of “Iris Was A Pupil” or in the placid dub-ambient of “No Border”. Closing the circle are first the ambient breath of “ylmo” and finally the ambient-breakcore expanses of “Cep puiqMX”.

After a string of mediocre works, Autechre return to Olympus. Electronic music for all tastes, from techno to industrial to ambient. A joy for the ears.

Two years on, and they're back with a new and intriguing work, Exai, an album that sets itself up as yet another challenge aimed at themselves, at the listener, and at the electronic music market, after it had devoured Dubstep and grime, footwork, jit and trap. A world that had rediscovered breaks, non-melody, the subwoofer as totem, a world that watched Skrillex declare his love for Aphex Twin only to get slapped down by a fanbase hungry for drops. A world that in 2012 rediscovered house music as if it had never existed before, as if thirty years of clubbing had never happened. After all this, and after Oversteps, Autechre return.

They come back the way a prophet returns to his homeland: with a double monolith of 121 minutes of ambient saturation, breakcore, drill'n'bass and rhythmic skeletons that flirt with Basinski's "Disintegration Loops" — if only digital processing would let them get there ("Bladelores"). Exai is a summation of contemporaneity under the AE name, travelling through a hyper-personal world of bleeps and bass sounds that push past the footwork avant-garde of Africa Hitech on "Runrepik", setting 64th-note breaks against dark-ambient paranoia, or working the rave sampledelia of "T ess xi".

With Exai, Autechre release their most ambitious record in years, testing the listener's endurance, delivering gems that only these two could conceive, flaunting the arrogance of old masters while also setting a new benchmark for their own body of work.

Talking about Autechre, one could easily invoke and paraphrase a famous maxim of the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky: sound is the key, the ear is the hammer that strikes it, the soul is the thousand-stringed instrument. Now, let's take that observation at face value and apply it to the duo's twelfth studio album: what kind of sound is the sound we hear across the nearly 250 minutes packed into the five volumes of Elseq? For starters, it's a sound that, appearances aside, sums up all the strengths (many) and weaknesses (few) of the group that gave us so many masterpieces of deconstructed, minimal yet never cold techno-ambient, such as Incunabula (1993) and Amber (a couple of years later).

There are proto-industrial experiments like "feed1" (which got a preview on 13 May this year on BBC Radio 6) and "c16 deep tread" (aired two days later in Alaska by the folks at KSUA radio) — both featured on "Elseq 1" — alternating with the strange techno-dub-futurist patchworks of "Elseq 3" (give a listen to the mammoth "eastre" and "mesh cinereaL", 22 and almost 25 minutes long respectively).

But the Autechre opus magnum also makes room for the dancefloor and intelligent techno, as shown by the tracks on "Elseq 4", and when it wants to, it even manages to revive the electro-minimal-ambient glories that were the duo's stylistic trademark back in their first two albums.

Overall, this quintuple album (released as a download only, as happened in 2008 with "Quaristice", the band's ninth album) puts forward an idea of abstract music that goes beyond Kandinsky, attempting to "build" a multidimensional space, starting from seemingly flat beats, within which sounds lock into other sounds, giving rise to a new kind of sonic geometry, far removed from the Euclidean kind.

In 2018, on four consecutive Thursdays in April, Autechre streamed two-hour live sessions broadcast live from the NTS studios in Hackney, made up entirely of original material released immediately. An all-encompassing undertaking with the programmatic resolve of a blitzkrieg: yet it's not a mere show of power, but a series of confident advances on ground that the duo itself has always cleared well ahead of everyone else.

The screening of the NTS Sessions aims to reveal new planes on which to rest a mutable, virtually infinite series of amorphous structures; sonic conformations that stack on top of one another in an irregular succession, with rhythm marking out a kinetic flow that razes the approach of the past to the ground, while still keeping hold of its alphabet.

Listening through makes clear the impossibility of fully grasping eight hours that don't merely glimpse the future of electronic music but engrave it right away in clear, indelible letters, so that, perhaps, one day we'll no longer see them as dense, insoluble riddles but as incontrovertible answers to questions we can't even formulate yet. We're faced with an overwhelming, supreme work, essentially and inevitably unique within the electronic universe explored so far.

Seventeen months suspended like illuminated hermits before the "whole" or, if you prefer, before the infinite paths of contemporary electronic music (or not, you decide), and the two return to the stage as happy as rockhopper penguins on the island of Tristan da Cunha, at the mercy of their own monogamy — artistic, that is, and useful (forgive the affront, mother nature) for one season and no more. SIGN is the comeback you don't expect. Eleven movements, brushing up against 66 minutes. Eleven unfathomable transmigrations ("si00", "gr4"), expansive ones ("M4 Lema"), hazy ones ("Metaz form8"), sci-fi ones ("esc desc"), and claustrophobic enough to make you rewind and try to pin down, while you still can, the matter and direction taken. Eleven movements that intrigue, confuse, dazzle, deceive.

The paradox, then, is served up once again. Because faced with SIGN one could argue endlessly, flipping the matter over depending on one's inclination of the moment, without ever necessarily getting to the bottom of it.

Maybe Rob Brown and Sean Booth can no longer fully fit themselves into a compact structure. Or, more simply, into a humanly digestible format. Perhaps they've just decided to lighten up, tired of embarking on intergalactic, conceptual escapes and so on. Plausible questions, which flare up between one effect and the next, a setting calibrated with experience and a disturbed rhythm just enough to enchant fans of a sound that nonetheless made its mark on an era. SIGN, in any case, never raises the bar, but rather aims to shake it, creating those seasoned vibrations you can take or leave. Setting aside this unusual angle, there's comfort in the "certainty" that time will reveal the true measure of such an ambiguous album. All this while waiting for a new, unusual instalment that arrives as a surprise just twelve days later. That's indeed the amount of time the duo chose before launching PLUS, their second album of 2020.

So if SIGN won over listeners for a specific set of reasons, tied as much to its unexpected "length" as to its retroactive "accessibility", PLUS opens up a further gap to happily romp around in.

The two mastiffs of "contemporary" electronic music once again surprise their audience in their own way, triggering chain reactions over the possible scenarios behind the operation. Online, a unified version of the two albums even appears, treated like some kind of "Zaireeka". A tantalising hypothesis, given the overall effect, but in many ways unlikely, given the difficulty of staying true to the original sound when overlaying the two. One thing's for sure: with these two, anything remains possible.

In short, there's barely time to take in one fickle work, tied equally to past and present, before we're confronted again with nine new compositions from the celebrated English outfit. Once again, the questions pile up. Is it possible that Sean Booth and Rob Brown have decided to launch a musical series dissecting their obsession with machines? Or is this simply marketing, aimed at reviving attention that has lately been confined all too narrowly to certain niches? It could also more simply be a case of two unrelated records, set loose like stray dogs into the vast digital prairies of the record industry – the physical release, in fact, isn't scheduled until November 20, 2020.

Hair-splitting questions that dissolve after the first two tracks, “DekDre Scap B” and “7FM ic”: barely nine minutes of offal, ricochets and skids, done their way. A convoluted opening precedes the disturbed frequencies mixed with beats in the faintest dub-like wake of “marhide”. All before the spectre of failed communication with the world resurfaces, this time drawing on modulations that sound straight out of the Ghost Box catalogue. As if John Brooks were flirting with Boards of Canada, to put it briefly. And if, twenty years from now, someone decided to revive drum and bass, reworking it with the tools of the day, they'd probably end up with something like “X4”.

Elusive and equally majestic, Autechre push ahead briskly and heedlessly through the three closing movements, among which the rhythmic accelerationism of “TIM1 open” stands out – essentially Minilogue sent hurtling through the solar system on an ion thruster.

Ultimately, then, PLUS broadens Booth and Brown's ultra-detached yet deeply human perspective.

Contributions by J.R.D. – Blackmailmag (“Draft 7.30), Nicola Minucci (“Untilted”, “Quaristice”), Alberto Asquini (“Oversteps”, “Move Of Ten”), Alberto Guidetti (“Exai”), Massimo Padalino (“Elseq 1-5”), Giuliano Delli Paoli and Michele Palozzo (“NTS Sessions 1-4”), Giuliano Delli Paoli (“SIGN”, “PLUS”)

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