Robots in disguise

>> Autechre transform into a pop group

by CHRIS HATHERILL

Autechre are a cutting-edge experimental duo from England who first started redefining music over 10 years ago. Their seminal releases on labels like Warp made them legendary in the leftfield underground, though by this point even cool people have heard of them. After giving their latest album, Confield, a few honest listens, I finally decided that all this super experimental stuff ain't for me. Try as I might, I just can't picture people actually listening to it over and over again. It's important that producers are trying new things, and of course there's the nagging fear I'm too stupid to understand it, but c'mon. It's been years since dance music got intelligent and where has it gotten us? I decided to confront Autechre's Rob Brown directly, and ask him why people should pay to see them wanking about. He agreed they shouldn't, and then told me about the secret army of robots behind Autechre.



Mirror: So what purpose does your music serve in the grand scheme of things?

Rob Brown: It's pretty simple, really. It fulfills our need for this kind of stuff to exist out there. I'd love our stuff to actually be popular, I suppose, but I don't want to outstay our welcome with people who wouldn't normally like it. I don't want people to accept it on the strength that they've heard [it's good] from a friend or a cool magazine, even though they don't like it. We'd rather not be that cool, in fact. We recently booked a venue in Paris expecting the usual 250 people, but something like 800 showed up. It's getting silly.

M: What do you set out to do when you make a track?

RB: How we build tracks has always been a bit of a freestyle thing. In the past it's been about getting an idea and pushing it on the other person, but nowadays it's such a mad mash-up. We might start one thing, pass it off, finish the other person's tracks, build a few little program systems. I might have one thing that does a certain thing and Sean might build another that works with it.

M: So you build programs that make music for you?

RB: Yeah. A lot of the time, instead of working maybe three or four days on a track, we'll spend three or four weeks on a program that can actually make tracks like ours, with our ideas, with our parameter rules, with the sort of things that we've come to like over the years.

M: Whoa.

RB: We might have a track that's not even audible for three weeks, but we know roughly what's going to happen because we've seen what will take place on screen. And then at the end of it we'll press "go," and we'll have built in a line that tells it to record seven-minute versions all night for when we get in there the next day.

M: Sweet deal. How big is this army of robots?

RB: I don't know--30, 40, 50? It's hard to say because some of them don't work as well as others and some of them come up with surprises. I don't even know when we're going to finish. Some of these programs finish only once they've done the last straw of what we've expected. They restart themselves, stop themselves, record themselves, so it's always very much a work in progress.

At Club Soda on Tuesday, May 8, 9pm, $18.75