by RAF KATIGBAK

“The thing about us Northerners,” explains Mark Fell, one half of Sheffield, England’s SND duo, “is that we are perhaps a bit more, how should I say it, direct.”

While Fell isn’t eager to cast generalizations on the pointed humour of his fellow countrymen, he does speak from experience. After all, he and partner Mat Steel have just spent the last 10 hours arguing on a tour bus with IDM brainiacs and “a good bunch of Northerners” Sean Booth and Rob Brown of Autechre, and Mancunian DJ Rob Hall of Gescom and Skam Records fame.

“It’s like a reality TV show—when you’re just stuck in a room with people for two weeks, it’s that kind of vibe,” Fell recounts semi-jokingly. “Today we argued about whether or not there was such a thing as the subconscious, if the idea of subconscious and conscious were two distinct categories. I was the one who wasn’t happy with that and Sean was having a go at me about it. That lasted all the way from Marseille to Rome. Luckily, we all get along and we’re all friends, we all understand each other’s Northern mannerisms and social etiquette, so no one gets offended.”

Cited by many IDM enthusiasts as among the godfathers of the clicks ’n’ cuts genre of glitchy minimalism (a genre that Fell points out they never really listened to), SND have always been fascinated with making things work. On past albums (three of them on the now-defunct Mille Plateaux label) they’ve explored the pop aesthetics of R&B, house and techno, using custom musical software systems to boil each genre down to its essence and spit it back up in a concise, fresh and infectiously rhythmic way.

“It’s funny where our musical inspiration comes from. I’ve got a little eight-year-old daughter. A lot of the time, when I’m putting her to bed, I’m singing songs to her and just tapping on the bed. Suddenly I’m thinking, oh wow, I’m doing this and then I’ll say, just hold on a minute while I go into the other room and write it down as a Max software patch. It’s strange how little human things get extrapolated into these mutations that’ll end up on stage in front of 2,000 people.”

For Fell, how he creates music holds as much importance as what is created. “In modern Western music, there’s an emphasis on music as a series of events that can be pre-planned. That finds an expression in a lot of music software that work on that linear paradigm—this follows this follows this. I come at it from the opposite end—set up a system and just see what happens.”

It’s a method of working that, for Fell, is as much rooted in the past as the future. “If you listen to early music, rather than being written down as a series of events that follow each other, it’s kind of a set of simple rules. That’s the thing that interests me, really.”

With Rob Hall and Autechre at Usine C
on Tuesday, May 10, 9 p.m., $25

>> Music Listings