5 Questions with Rob Brown of Autechre, Keyboard, June 1996

From Keyboard Magazine, issue June 1996, page 14. Interview conducted by Greg Rule. Transcript by cloudburst, taken from here: https://web.archive.org/web/19961225212256/http://www.public.iastate.edu/~brezovan/ae/textual/autint6.html

Transcript

"5 Questions with Rob Brown of Autechre.."

Dubbed the "undisputed kings of the technoid avant-garde" by Lizard magazine, Autechre is another one of those hard-to-categorize electronic outfits. Asked for a description, bandmember Rob Brown puzzled, "It's a good that nobody seems to have their minds made up as to what genre we are, because we aren't any genre, really. Our sound is as versatile as possible. We're just whatever we want to be. Whatever we want to do." Fair enough. We won't attempt to hang a label on them, but this much can be said about their sound: It's very electronic, it's very percussive, and it's very good. Gritty loops, spaced-out pads, analog gurgles, bell-like sweeps, noise bursts - cuts from their third full-length release, Tri Repetae, have been spinning non- stop in our CD tray since arriving a few months ago.

How do they do what they do, and how did they get there in the first place?? Rob Brown lays it down.

1. WHAT ROLES DO YOU AND YOUR PARTNER SEAN (BOOTH) PLAY IN THE SONG - WRITING AND RECORDING PROCESSES?

Well, quite literally, we both do 50 percent. When we first met, neither of us had any gear; we started buying gear together. So we sort of developed on the machines simultaneously. At the stage we're at now, we can always fill in for each other; I might do half the tracks, Sean will finish the other. It's quite freestyle, really; a very versatile way of working. It may sound a bit weird to people who are used to playing roles in a band -who might put an ad in the paper for a keyboardist or a guitarist or a drummer. It's nothing like that at all.

2. GIVEN YOUR NON-TECHNICAL BACKGROUNDS, HOW DID YOU ELEVATE YOURSELVES TO THE LEVEL YOU'RE AT TODAY?

I don't know. When we first got into making, it basically was a form of people's music. We'd get some loops, and make mixes. No turntables, no vinyl, no nothing. We'd record our own sounds, and start developing loops from there. When we were done, we'd just hand it off to our friends; it was entertainment for us and our little gang. It really stemmed from that. We eventually got more equipment, and we learned how to use it.

3. HOW DID YOU GET A RECORD DEAL?

We started sending tapes out to alot of labels, as a normal band would. And most of the time they'd come back. "Nice ideas there, but it needs some sort of obvious like a vocal or particular riff or ..." We just didn't want  to know any of that. We were convinced at the time that all we'd ever be doing is writing for ourselves and entertaining our mates. But Sean phoned Warp one day, said we had a tape, and on it was an hour-and-a-half long track - our most self-indulgent. And when Warp came back and said that was their favorite stuff, we were quite a bit surprised. Not long after that we started sending them more and more tracks, and after a couple of years they said "You could probably put an album out with all of this material." So we went ahead and compiled Incunabula from a lot of our old tracks. Ninety percent of it was off our 4-track tapes, just mastered straight off a DAT, and through a desk to get a decent EQ.

4. TWO-PART QUESTION: WAS THE METHOD OF WRITING AND RECORDING TRI REPETAE MUCH DIFFERENT THAN ON THE RECORDS BEFORE IT, AND WHAT IS YOUR METHOD?

Compared to the previous...well, we don't regard an album as a "project". We've never done that, so I couldn't really differentiate this album from the others in anything other than it's just newer. Just new material, really. No radical changes. We've never made any conscious effort to change. It's always been quite instinctive. A bit more of an evolution than a forced progression, I suppose.

As for the process, we mostly get sounds that we've made ourselves. A couple of sounds. And they could be anything. Some of it could be weird samples - sound effects and stuff - and sometimes one off hits that have little rhythms inside themselves. Like a couple of clicks or whatever. Then we use that, or incorporate it into a rhythm. We start from very small wave sources, anything from a sample or something we've done from a synth, and make that into a loop.

5. WHAT SYNTHS DO YOU PREFER?

We don't really use anything state of the art. We've got a couple of old Roland analogs - a small setup. We don't follow the latest crazes. I don't want to get into what we've got. It doesn't make any difference, to be honest.

- Greg Rule