Rob Brown, half of Autechre talks

eGigs spoke to Rob Brown one half of Autechre the abstract electronic music group. Together with Sean Booth, Brown is about to set off in March on a tour and has just finished their latest album – ‘Quaristice’ released on 3rd March 2008. We spoke to him about Ataris, electronica, weird names and playing in the dark.

Hi Rob how do you pronounce the band name Autechre is it awe-teh-ker'?

Yeah I say that.

And where does that come from?

It's sort of made up in a way and it was the name of a track we did years ago before we actually had a real name. You know in sample names when it's done with computers and stuff, you've got to put something relevant. We were using old Atari computer to make them to make the tracks on and at the time you could only have eight characters - it was like a dos style eight character name on the track and then we’d sort of whack the keyboard a little bit and it filled the spaces up to eight. They made this word and that was the name of the track for ages.

Weeks of doing demo tapes and looking at the names and doing special artwork for that named track. We flipped it round and just decided to use that as our name and you know so it kinda was just invented.

So is that the same with a lot of the track track listings that you use for your albums?

Some of them are from nowhere, some of them are from some are quite literal, some are like literal file references and sometimes when you're making stuff with three or four or five file references you might have to get a collection of file references and sometimes you'll get a pattern which looks nice or aesthetically pleasing and in it might be a few letters and a few numbers and sometimes upper case can distinguish a facet of a track you know against the background of lower case. It's from all over the place really. As long as it looks attractive to us really, in a weird way, and I don't think it's intended to be like a cold kind of rebuttal of creativity.

If somebody hadn't heard your music before how would you describe it then?

Well to be fair, if I was to meet a long lost uncle and he asked, “What do you do? Do you make a living making music? Are you a violinist or something like comprehensible?” I'd be, “Well I'm not really, I’m not a musician and don't really know how to read or write music.”

I tend to compose on a computer and it's all electronic and sometimes it’s quite hard club music, you know quite punchy always original hopefully, really fresh you know we grew up on hip hop and electro and graffiti and BMX culture and all that stuff.

So what influenced you in the early days?

Well a lot of the music and the ideas back then were about being fresh, looking back at the time, when you're 14 you don't realise that you're in a very genre specific scenario really. You know, all school kids have a lot of factions. At lunchtime’s in school you see who is in what corner of the refectory and what they do.

Well, in our corner we were break dancing and drawing graffiti in books and playing music which was electronic and break orientated and rapping and MC sort of stuff. We were doing BMX tricks and everything was spontaneous, creative, competition really. Soon as we got our hands on some equipment then me and Sean were like mixing at home first. We lived in separate towns and Sean and I met through chance really through a mutual friend at the time orientated around the graffiti culture. He met Sean on a bus one night while they were tagging. Then he met me outside the chippy comparing graffiti files and photographs and he said, “I know a guy who should come round your house he talks about music like you do and he does tapes for his friends as well.”

Me and Sean were kind of exponents in our own little gangs that had quite relative behaviour and so Sean came round and I was doing turntable mixes and he was doing tape edit mixing and we decided to mix together and edit the turntable mixes at his end it was just a fusion of abilities if you like and ideologically it was brilliant because his record collection, all his favourite tracks reflected all my favourite tracks and anything we had either side of that was just a new arm of knowledge you know and a new branch of taste or style learned.

We had these completely different facets to our make up but met in the middle and then we started doing the mixes and the mixing became more complicated because of the nature of our environment, the music was very competitive, hip hop, mantronics BDP and Just-Ice and lots of people doing very wild electronic re-iterations of rap music. That sort of caught our ear and I think we just grew up in a climate that was able to be really fresh, be quite unique, be a little bit technically proficient and that way you've always got an edge.

Has the process of creating your music been the same with every album?

It has varied. The normal rule of thumb over the years would have been getting in the studio write a load of tracks and just keep going and then maybe one day look over your shoulder and see how much you've got on the shelf. I've always hated this thing of desperately looking to see if you've got enough for an album and then perhaps finding out you haven't. That would just be the most weakening experience and so we used to take it a little bit too long, a little bit too far and have as much material as we actually needed to and then choose the best of the best.

Was that how you had to do it?

Our first album was strange because we started sending material to Warp (record label) stuff like demos, and after two years of them saying that's good, that's good we might have sent them 20 cassettes full of an hour and a half's materialb over two years, and every now and again they'd say we like that track, but the rest were a bit cheesy or a bit normal or whatever.

The reality was everything we did that was for ourselves late at night, were the ones that Rob and Steve liked. They said those were original, they didn't reflect anything else out there. And after two years, we realised everything they liked was the stuff we did for ourselves, all our inate productions. So we said wow that's brilliant, so we can freewheel and do all the stuff we want to do and you'll like it.

So Rob Mitchell (Warp) said we're doing a compilation of artists that seem to be outside the general sphere of things. Dance music, ambient or electronic compositions, but each artist or track doesn't stand out enough in their own right to make an album. They said they'd collect all these tracks and put them together and call it Artificial Intelligence, which was just a name they'd thought up at the time and put out this compilation and they got into compilations.

It just blew up! The media said, “What's all this intelligent techno? Why is it cleverer than all the rest of techno? What's the big deal what's your point of view?” Every time this compilation came out one of the artists would be invited to do a full length album of their own and we were the seventh and last artist to come out. As a result our first ever album was really a compilation of stuff from the year's before that made it through Warp's gate. It was Rob Mitchell who virtually compiled it. We decided what he was allowed to have out of the ones he liked and more or less what order but he had quite a grip on the control.

Since then Steve and Rob have relaxed their control a bit and let us start to compile our own albums and after that first one was out which we considered a compilation of retro stuff, our second one was really our defacto album, our ‘right we're gonna do an album!”. Even then, we didn't think right this is going to be our first track and this one will be the second. We worked for a year and a half and culled our favourite tracks and tried to arrange them and put the puzzle together to fit well and last a good seventy or ninety minutes.

As with a lot of albums since then sometimes there will be better tracks that we leave out of the album just because they don't really fit on sonically or stylistically it might be a bit better than one or two that make it on the album. But sometimes tracks that have made the album sometimes make the whole stronger, more than the sum of its parts.

So how does this new album differ?

Well it differs significantly in some respects, usually we're sitting there at home writing loads of tracks and computers are usually at the core of the set up but the last album was sort of verging on using a lot of hardware - a lot of stuff that we could get going or create instantly and perhaps not spend three weeks creating something but spend three weeks creating something on the spot. That last album Untilted (2005) we toured a lot of the material that way on the album because a lot of it was in the equipment that was tourable.

Usually taking a computer out and all your entire studio and its entrails was impossible, so we'd always assumed that a live set was a different entity completely and have a separate set up of equipment that was purposefully orientated for performing live every night and tweaking a fixed set of parameters or you know to get something slightly unique every night but keep the core of the theme each night.

But 'Untilted' was a bit of a flash point because we managed to use some of the hardware in the album which meant it was still in the hardware when we went on tour and we managed to tour some of the album tracks quite proficiently and still modify them like we would normally live because we enjoy ourselves so much on stage that we try not to sit back and we try to really push it a little bit break our limits if you like.

And then this album (Quaristice) - we've been touring for so long that our studios were in a bit of limbo and all we had was our live set stuff which was still hot and still running and I think accidentally the album came from us trying to put down a session of the live set with the live gear, to record it and put it behind us and start a fresh.
We started recording massive jams of us re-working some stuff that hadn't been heard, stuff that had been on the live set that hadn't been on the album. We wanted this album to be distinct from the last album and things got really confused, we started to have huge these massive archives of four days of work, one folder could have nine four hours jams which were mutating and some were reflecting parts of each other and some had the same sound in but were different compositions.

Essentially we came home and tried to put down a print of what we thought we'd learnt over the year and a half of touring on the live set. We'd modified it and we'd made gains on it and we wanted to put those gains down and put them into the album and as a result we started to break into it again hacking into what we'd done and loads of new stuff sprang from it and the album came from all those bits.

So will the tour of this album, be similar to your last tour?

We've been touring so long that we've probably have had to write new live sets sooner or later because some people do come and see us serially and they see us three nights in a row and get into our set, which actually is not the same every night but in theory it's supposed to be. Mainly because we do turn up every night with the same gear and it has the same info inside its memory as it had the night before. But we've got so much access to the data that we can re-direct it every night or we can re-apply it or remix it on the spot like re-score it and people would really get a buzz out of seeing how we change and actually achieve that difference every night.

Because Sean and I have two separate set ups that are in synch we can trample all over each others ideas unfortunately at times, other times we're completely harmonious and those harmonious nights are the best ones, but you're never sure it's going to be that way so you don't always record. To be fair we wouldn't be recording our live sets on the night because we feel like that would be hexing it a bit. If you were recording and you'd made a bit of a fuck up or there's an accident and it wasn't intentional sometimes you'll be on a downer and start worrying about it half way through the set and the primary concern is to make the set the best it can be and if you're worrying the recording has gone a bit awry then you're not really concentrating.

Do you go and see gigs yourself then?

On occasion I might go and see bands I've liked over the years or stumble across something new but to be honest the last 2 years I've either been touring in clubs or hiding from all that world or just in the studio so I haven't been out that much recently I must say.

What date on your tour are you the most excited about playing?

Well, spiritually the first one in Manchester, it's a leap year so there won't be another day like that for four years. And Birmingham we haven’t been to Birmingham for a few years and Glasgow we did on the first date of the tour last year and we did pretty well. No, actually London was the first day of the tour last year and that was insane because we hadn't actually rehearsed the set properly, we hadn't done it from a to z.

We'd done all components of the live set together with two separate set ups but we'd not actually started from beginning and run to the end and known how long it was and in London it turned out we ran an epic hour and a half set we didn't realise we were just trying to get it right first night. We must have been pretty on it as no one found it boring.

I think we're going through Eastern Europe this time too. I’ve been to general central Eastern Europe but this time we're going to Poland, Croatia and Hungary this year. And they deserve us, we've been concentrating on certain core places like Madrid, Barcelona, Berlin and all those places you tend to concentrate on going every year but we haven't been so far north or so far east. Poland is gonna be pretty interesting and pretty cold, I've just been told the gig has been switched it's going to be a coalmine now, so that should be pretty exciting.

That'll be a bit different, talking of coalmines and stuff you have been known to say that you're not keen on lighting. So do you keep the lighting effects to a minimum?

Yeah totally, about as minimum as it gets, we try to have a black out really apart from a few fire escapes getting in the way.

So this coalmining gig is going to be pretty dark!

Probably, blacker and black, but I'll build my hopes up and it'll probably be in the workingman's club upstairs.

But seriously, when you've got music that you want to listen to, and then someone's showing a massive screen, then everyone ends up staring at the screen and even if you shut your eyes you can still feel it on your retina and I think it's a weird cohesive thing where even if everyone's staring at the same thing, it works against the cohesion of the night or the music.

Say there's a shit light show, we though get it all down and when they do that we've had these mad experiences and people have come up to us saying we've never had this before this is bizarre! It's like the most simple solution and yet it actually beats hands down making any effort whatsoever so it starts to drive the music deeper into people's minds as they're listening. I think it etches on your mind a little bit more when you're listening to it and there's no distractions.

When we are on stage we're a bit lit because our equipment has a few lights and it and it shines on our faces and some people take a few flashes. But that's good, I used to love going out to warehouse parties where all people had was a strobe and maybe a UV light and then a smoke machine and just a big empty warehouse and that's where my definition have sprung from I suppose, my definition of how it's supposed to be.

So that’s a perfect gig?

When we find ourselves in darkness in a club and everyone's coming back to us afterwards and saying that was insane then we felt we were on to something and we just keep doing it wherever we can.

Have you ever heard of anyone else doing it?

Well this is the irony, this is the weird thing you'd think somebody's tried it at some point, somewhere but no I don't know that anyone has, it's become our thing. It was just accidental.

You released an album on mini-disc once, any plans to release this one on some new media?

There are no more formats now just the ether. Yeah, ether and people's hard drives. Well, maybe a genetically modified pig or something. A lot of people have done USB sticks but it's just random access solid state these days. Mini-disc was a weird one, you could pause it press edit and split your track down the middle. Delete the shit bits and join up the best bits and we grew up with that mentality with cassettes So it was great the saviour of cassette people and you could run and jog with it and it wouldn’t skip like a CD so it was portable. I think it was the new cassette for us in the digital domain. But ironically it's got lost, because it's a better sample acoustic recording system than mp3. I think now everyone’s getting downloads if there's less plastic out there as a result it's not a bad thing.

CDs do crack and CDs do break and as long as you're backing up your hard drive you're all right, but I do like the format of having something in your hand to hold, the print, I'm still into to print and paper and card. As for the disc I’m happy as long as I can scratch it on my CD player treat it like a record or a turntable.

You ever tempted to release a live record as your shows are more slammin’?

This record is very edited there's a lot of retrospective editing going on in this so a live jam and stuff that was four hours is chopped into three minutes. Yeah maybe some day but I think it's the emphasis on control, we like to show our best side sometimes and if retrospective and editing are there, as we've grown up on it, that's the way it's got to be. I'm sure we're capable of it and we're quite into a lot of improv artists but actually getting on stage with them is a rarity you know Zoviet France we've improv’d with them a few times and Jim O'Rourke has actually improv’d over our live stuff. We've collaborated in those situations I don't see why we won't do something as bizarre as that again in future.

Sonically is Quaristice finally capturing the more energetic live sets you do?

Well I guess that’s right I think this is it then, this is quite energetic without watering down an issue or an element of a track I think we're trying to keep the energy up on this one definitely.

What do you think of the music scene at present?

Well I don't know I'm buried in my own pursuits but there's not been much lately that's really blown my head off because a lot of things are coming and going. Generations are picking up where other generations have left off and nothing in new is being achieved the best genres of my life hip hop and electro have been boiled down into a mainstream by numbers sort of situation. All the freaky stuff I think is more interesting like when you get weird esoteric sort of grime.

Pirate radio in London is the best thing to listen to as you've got all these little kids that are doing their .wavs on their pcs now and their making it and their broadcasting it off the cuff. They don't need a great big industry to support them, to get their voices heard and that's more important to me than someone who has spent four year's in a committee deciding which rap track to put on a CD.

Lastly, if you had to put one track on at a party to get everyone up and dancing, what would it be?

Didgeridoo - Aphex Twin.

Cheers Rob, have a good tour.

FUTURE GIGS