Autechre

About

Also known as: Autchere, Autecher, Autreche, ae, オウテカ

Rob Brown and Sean Booth have been quietly rewriting the rules of electronic music since forming in Rochdale in 1987, starting out swapping cassette mixes and bashing together tracks on a Casio SK 1 and a Roland TR 606. Signed to Warp Records, they landed on the map with the 1992 compilation Artificial Intelligence before releasing their debut album Incunabula in 1993. Their early work drew from electro and hip hop, but Autechre kept pushing further into abstraction with each release. Tri Repetae stripped away warmth for harsher mechanical textures, while Confield dove deep into atonal, algorithm driven soundscapes built using Max. They are often tagged as the definitive IDM act, though Booth has called that label "silly". Their most celebrated provocations go beyond the music itself: the Anti EP, a protest against the Criminal Justice Bill, included a track called Flutter that was deliberately programmed so no two bars shared the same beat pattern, with the sleeve advising DJs to keep a lawyer and a musicologist on standby. That kind of wit and stubbornness runs right through everything they do.