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By Wyatt Schaffner
Twenty-some years ago, Sean Booth and Robert Brown of English duo Autechre had a eureka moment, when a bottle of soda spilled onto their sampling keyboard during a recording session. It modified the sound chip within the cheap piece of gear, incidentally retrofitting a now-customized instrument, which they giddily tracked out using just a drum machine and delay pedal.
It was a happy accident that would benefit their long and influential career as electronic music pioneers. Eleven albums in, Brown and Booth's "song machine" remains, its organic composite of hardware and digital elements evolving harmoniously with modern computing speed, using open-source algorithmic programs like Max MSP in conjunction with custom-built programs in a highly configurable modular system.
But according to Brown and Booth, Autechre's creative process is less high-minded than it seems. It's actually rooted in early hip-hop—the futuristic jams of Afrika Bambaataa being more integral to their generative sound design than, say, Stockhausen—and particularly graffiti writing.
"Wild-styling in graffiti was an early example of a form taken to the extreme," Booth says over Skype. "With the competitive nature and spirit of hip-hop, you are only doing the graff for other writers to recognize. [Autechre] was never intended to be for a wider audience."
During their formative years in Manchester, Brown and Booth started swapping tapes and making re-edits, deliberately remixing tracks to obscure their origins. The duo clicked on the idea that you could "force music into these abstract shapes, combining with obvious science fiction elements," as Brown puts it.
Autechre's original synthesis of these ideas earned it a place on Warp Records with its 1993 debut, Incunabula, and they remain the backbone of the group's output, all the way through its last full-length release, 2013's Exai. In creating the architecture for its sound, Autechre's collaborative process remains vibrant.
Performed live, the Autechre machine is an entirely different entity than its studio form. Both Booth and Brown take the stage with the intention of holding back certain elements in the name of complementing onstage modulations performed by the other. By affecting the way that harmonies work, the two performers work within sound on a much smaller scale, and are able to anticipate algorithmic changes in the music and make adjustments, creating an optimal mix in the spirit of improvisation.
Embarking on their first U.S. tour in eight years, it's clear Brown and Booth hold a certain reverence to the country that created the music that has most defined their sonic discovery. On their last tour of the States, however, promoters eagerly lumped Autechre under the "intelligent dance music" misnomer, which American audiences had already consumed and regurgitated as a "glitchy beat thing," according to Booth. Carrying around cumbersome hardware equipment, while insisting on traveling by bus—a romantic impulse driven by the desire to absorb the socio-geographical tapestry of the U.S.—the duo barely broke even financially.
So why is this notoriously oblique icon of electronic music playing two nights in a place like Portland?
"The only reason we did it was because, fuck it, it's kind of a first," Booth says. "We are open because we haven't been in America for a while. We haven't done as many shows back-to-back. We haven't done this in eight years, and we are prepared to be a little more open to that, and the risks involved. We are influenced by the landscape coming into Oregon. It feels familiar to the north of England but very grand and epic. It's visually exciting. And it smells fucking great."
SEE IT: Autechre plays Holocene, 1001 SE Morrison St., with Cygnus and Rob Hall, on Wednesday and Thursday, Sept. 23-24. 8 pm. $25. 21+.
Willamette Week