Sound Portraits Radio {EP10} Autechre

AUTECHRE

EPISODE 10

Few artists hold a place in the hearts of today’s producers like Autechre. The British duo was among the first wave of artists associated with Warp Records and have built a reputation by challenging the perceived possibilities of machine-made music. Their first experimental and emotional recordings seemed entirely new, as if beamed in straight from a newly-discovered corner of the universe where architecture is constructed of sound and colonies of machines have learned to feel. Today, Autechre’s members Rob Brown and Sean Booth are IDM demigods. Decades after their first release, they are still pursuing their own vision of avant garde electronica: cold, clanging, cerebral, merciless, and entrancing. This episode of Sound Portraits Radio is hosted by Doron Sadja.

“I glommed onto things that sounded artificial as a kid. I was into computer graphics and electronic music. Electro was the most “electronic” music I could find at the time. The trimmings in other types of music that I found maybe a bit boring or unnecessary were not in electro; it would just be some weird noises, some beats, and some really nice synth sounds. They were the nicest sounds I had heard at that point, and I was drawn to stuff on that basis. Even the hip-hop I’m into came from an appreciation of electro. I’m always drawn to that kind of futuristic feeling.”
Sean Booth
“Yeah, there’s definitely no hierarchy of the intellect going on. All these things about us being “intelligent” and the term “IDM” are just silly. I’m not a particularly intelligent person, me. I’m diligent, I’m pretty hardworking, but I’m not that clever. I ain’t got any qualifications, I just pick up stuff that I think is interesting at the time. And 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. But that works the other way, too. I don’t listen to pop, but someone dumped a load of Max Martin tracks on me to try and explain what he was about, and it seemed really, really alien to me, like Nazi youth music or something. I think everyone has a different idea of what weird is.”
Sean Booth
“I’m drawn to tracks that are hard-to-define, where you’re not sure what the thing is genre-wise. I find boundaries a little bit stupid. I’m interested in working out why people think things are other different things and exploiting that. I get some weird kick out of that.“
Autechre
“We write software, then we’ll do tracks on that software, but if that track needs something else then there’ll be some more software programming to do. Programming is long, it’s a lot slower than strictly making tracks, but it does mean that by the end of the period of time I’ll have some extra tricks and tools to use to work with the music that’s there. I mean, there’s no actual music “there”—it’s not like we make music, then use the system to replay it in new ways. The system itself is making the music each time, it’s all about the capabilities of the system dictating what the music’s like.”
Autechre
“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 different. 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.”
Autechre

Sound Portraits is a series of lectures/listening sessions, curated by Doron Sadja, focusing on the work of iconic composers who have paved the way for contemporary electronic music. Started in 2015 as a live event at Spektrum in Berlin, the series quickly grew and exists now as both a live lecture series and a radio show on Cashmere Radio. After an introduction of each artist’s life and work, we listen to a selection of excerpts and complete works from the artist’s repertoire. Besides providing an opportunity to introduce these seminal artists to a new audience, the Sound Portraits series also offers an open forum to engage in group listening in a quiet atmosphere.

Doron Sadja is an American artist, composer, and curator whose work explores modes of perception and the experience of sound, light, and space. Find out more at www.doron.sadja.com

SOUND PORTRAITS AUTECHRE

About Sound Portraits