Autechre Interview on Today Programme, BBC Radio 1, March 2008
Interview with Sean Booth (SB) and Rob Brown (RB). Interviewer: Mary Anne Hobbs (MAH). Aired March 3rd, 2008 on the Today Programme on BBC Radio 1. Transcription by EnergyIsMassiveLight.
https://archive.org/details/Autechre20080305InterviewOnTodayProgramme
Transcript
MAH: How the sounds and beats made? Give us a bit of a basic lesson here.
SB: It depends what machines we're using. Ah god, that's an impossible question to answer succinctly.
RB: Sometimes field recordings of certain things that we find out and about we'll take samples of and chop them up and sort of rearrange them so. Get some rhythm out of maybe some of the little elements in the sounds we've got might sort of be a bit conducive and create certain sort of patterns, and the patterns that we like tend to stay in the sequences that we use to orchestrate the music with the computers and things.
MAH: Tell us some of the sound effects, more unusual sound effects you've used, and what happens to them next.
SB: No.
MAH: How would you describe it, Sean? How would you describe it?
SB: Basically, I switched on the machine and press buttons and turn knobs and change values until it makes a sound that I like and then I press the record button on the big machine and record it. That's more or less it. We just keep doing that over and over again until we got full tracks.
MAH: Rob, has it changed over the last 20 years? I mean, has it changed?
RB: Not really. We've always used like a small sort of- few amounts of equipment at any one time. The collection sort of developed over the years just as we find useful tools to sort of employ, but we can still go back to like using some of the first equipment we ever had, you know, handful of drum machines and little effects units and a little mixer or something and still get the same sort of enjoyment out of using (?) equipment we've got.
MAH: Can you run through how you fiddle around with some of the backs of computers and equipment to sort of change noises?
RB: We had a little tiny sampler once that was really aimed at children's market. Used to sell them down, you know, the local High Street sort of electronic shop or washing machine shop. Worth about 15 pounds, but you could take the back off and touch a few of the circuit elements with, say, screwdriver or something while it was switched on. It'd recreate the music you've put in there, but in a completely different sort of mangled up way. Because the circuits were being a little bit bent, if you like. And that's why they call it circuit bending.
MAH: Rob, is some of these sounds and beats accidental in places? Is every beat planned? Are there some happy coincidences?
SB: You mean in terms of where the events occur in time? No. I mean, everything's deliberate. But there have been- I mean, on Confield, a lot of the music was generated according to rulesets that we set up. The machine makes the music but I created the machine, so the machine does what I tell it to do. Effectively it's my machine and it makes the music. I don't know where responsibility lies in that situation.
MAH: Do you think the music has changed over the last 20 years, your music?
SB: Yeah. I mean, yeah, inevitably, it would, cause we changed. Quite a lot probably, so. I think, you know, there's obviously this combination: getting better at what we do and growing up a bit.
MAH: When I listened to Bike on Incunabula...
RB: Yeah.
MAH: ...it sounds quite like Tangerine Dream, and now things seem to be a lot more challenging and more experimental with your music.
SB: Right, yeah, I don't really- I mean we used to like Tangerine Dream a little bit, but they weren't like a big influence or anything. I mean, mainly we came from listening to early hip hop producers, the sort of early electronic hip hop producers in the sort of mid-80s on local independent radio. That's what we grew up on.
RB: Even music our parents used to play probably had a great deal of influence on what we like to hear, if you like. Stevie Wonder, Rakuda, bit of folk that would never know the names of any of the artists any more, a few electronic pioneers, you know, Eno, bit of- my mum never played any Tangerine Dream, but some of her friends did, so-
SB: Bit of Jean-Michel Jarre.
RB: Yeah, you get a bit of everything from sort of growing up.
MAH: Can we go inside the head of your music just a little bit? Some of the unusual sound effects on Chiastic Slide, walking noises. 'IO', you've got words. I mean, are these words saying anything?
SB: It's not walking noises, it's a tissue being screwed up around a microphone, but I wouldn't ever reveal that publicly, but-
RB: Apart from now!
MAH: So, you know, going back to 'IO': these words, do they have meaning?
SB: No, they're just- do they have meaning? Yeah, well, I guess they do, but not necessarily one meaning or an explicit meaning.
MAH: Tell us what we're perhaps imagining, what you may be think you're imagining when you listen to the music. I mean, are we inside a machine? I'm thinking of...
SB: No.
MAH: ...'Altibzz' and 'rale', or are we in space? What's going on when we listen to this?
SB: Just sounds in space, sort of, that have a kind of physical form. I don't know, that's how I imagine it.
MAH: Rob.
RB: It's weird. I think sometimes you work with the sort of sense of narrative, but it's not in any traditional sort of way. You can play with the idea of something in a track or in a song that is the backbone for the song, but really in a way isn't music. So you can play with certain sound effects and musical events and just sonic events and arrange them in such a way to taste that just sort of evoke a sense of scale or dynamics or even a surface texture of a space you're in, you know. If we're using like effects that are designed to generate reverbs or echos, the listener is going to perceive certain sized spaces, so you can you can sort of dynamically evolve these shapes and sounds to actually evoke internal spaces or scales of things, you know, the size or the relative distance to the listener if you like. So you can play with it way beyond just music and notes and scales.
MAH: Is there anything extra on top of that, perhaps political, in terms of what you do? Do you have any political thoughts when you're putting your work together?
RB: I don't really know.
MAH: Should music be political, Sean?
SB: Politics is like war, but more polite.
MAH: And that's not part of your music yet!
SB: I don't think it's got anything to do with what we do, you know?
MAH: Can I ask you about the future of the music industry in terms of digital rights? Can you explain how you get your music out there and whether you want people to have CDs or downloads? But what is the future for the music industry, how do people like you make money and sort of get your work out there?
SB: Gigs, public appearances, and downloads. There are three biggest revenue streams.
MAH: Rob, is-
SB: If I'm being very, you know, straight up about. Yeah.
MAH: Is there any worry about the future of the music industry, in terms of what you do?
SB: No, it's just changed. It's just like, gig attendances are at an all time high. Record sales generally are higher than they ever have been, but individual release sales are lower because there are more releases.
RB: Yeah, there's just more out there.
SB: There's more proliferation of people doing stuff. Downloads can account for a high percentage of your income than they would do were that percentage of the income CDs, because downloads are way more profitable than CDs. I mean, we don't even like little plastic discs that much. There's, you know, there's not really much point in carrying on with any of that anyway for anybody. The only reason that you would want to release music is to let people hear it, that's the reason you want it out there, you know. You want as many people to have it as possible, so. The medium, it's not important.
RB: Yeah. It's just an artifact, really, isn't it?
SB: Yeah, it's really (?)-
RB: At times?
SB: It's like gigs as well. I mean, gigs are like, fun, more than they are a kind of way to represent what you do. They're a kind of a unique opportunity to do something creative that's different to music, the way that you would make it in the studio and the way you're sort of considering an audience in a far less sort of obvious contrived way, you sort of get a direct connection with em. And people are really moving towards that at the moment, I mean, you can really see just through- If you look on Google Trends, say, art, music, Myspace, Facebook over the last say four years and see a marked change in the frequency searches for art and music, once Myspace and Facebook started to become more popular. You can see people getting less interested in culture, they become more interested in each other and themselves. You know, it seems obvious why more people are going to gigs because the social context is now more important than it ever has been for music.
MAH: Explain how your music works live. Is it DJing? Is it mixing? How does it work?
SB: We're playing a bunch of preprogrammed stuff that we can change as much as we like. I mean, as far as it's being programmed, if you like, so. We could reprogram it entirely on the spot if we wanted, but we don't, we tend to stick with what we've got and change it within reason.
RB: Yeah, within given boundaries.
SB: Yeah, you know, the crowd help us to shape the tracks on the spot, if you like. It's a two way subjective process. It's not like strictly improv, and it's not DJing and it's not- It's just the way we do live stuff, you know? I guess it's, yeah.
RB: Some of our early album tracks were just using a handful of boxes wired together, and we had no real form of multitrack recording like you have nowadays, so we always used to have to write our tracks and perform them in a live way just to get an album version recorded. And we realized we could do that if we had just enough equipment to do like a stepping stone arrangement - of one track on one set of equipment, another track on another set - if we took those little clusters out with us, we could do a live show. So in a way, all our tracks have been like little elements that we can place in the right order to make a certain pregiven idea of what's supposed to happen like a certain song if you like, but break it down or reverse the order or change any element inside those elements, you know, so really, reduce it down to a completely new sound if you like.
MAH: Now this piece will go out at about 8:30, so we'll have been at your gig overnight. It's a sort of unconventional in a couple of senses: it starts at midnight and it's in a car park. Can you explain how it's possibly a bit more exciting, or your choice of being a bit more exciting, than a gig at Shepherd's Bush Empire that ends at 10:30 kind of thing?
RB: It does sound really dodgy, doesn't it? Put like that?
SB: I don't know. I think that maybe the Shepherd's Bush Empire could be quite good too. I think car park, yeah, I think what happened was we were talking to a couple of promoters, somebody emailed me pictures of the venue and I thought that looked really ridiculously rough, and if we put our own sound in there and we don't have any lights on at all, it's going to be absolutely correct. I mean, you could just tell looking at the spaces it's going to be right, so. That was it really, it was kind of a gut decision.
RB: It's almost the antithesis of what you'd normally do in London. Inner city venues are all much of a muchness and this is completely different really.
SB: Yeah, we've kind of grown up- I mean, in Manchester, the first parties I went to were illegal parties, you know. They were in warehouses and there were no facilities. You paid 25 quid to get in and then you just get free beer all night. And obviously, everyone was on drugs and there was strobes and that was about the only lighting in there and maybe one smoke machine. And the room was just like bare brick wall warehouse type, low ceilings like old factories and stuff like that and, I don't know. I guess when I saw those pictures, I just immediately thought, yeah, that's right, it's incorrect (?).
MAH: Is the drug culture still part of this scene? Do you have any worries about that?
SB: Drugs are available, they proliferate. I mean, both legal and illegal drugs. I mean, I noticed everybody drinking coffee in that cafe down there. I assume that that's what people do before they go on the radio, they have lots of coffee or whatever, so I don't know what I think about that I mean. Maybe I should have had some coffee, I don't know.
MAH: Rob, the drug culture I mean, does it worry you or not really?
RB: I'm speechless. It doesn't worry me at all, no. But which part of the culture or which culture is it you're really referring to? Because globally, it's impossible to tar the whole situation with one brush, so.
SB: Yeah, you can't make a statement about a thing like drugs. It's like...
RB: Speechless.
SB: ..how do you feel about cars or people? It's like, well, I feel lots of different things. We could be here for the next three days just talking about that.
MAH: So it is there though?
SB: What drugs are there, kind of thing?
MAH: Yeah, in your gigs and stuff.
SB: I don't know. I've never spoke to anybody. I've never seen anybody. I did actually see a girl once take a pill at a gig that we played at, so I know that it occurs. But I couldn't, I wouldn't know anymore. I couldn't be anymore...
RB: No, I've got no direct reference I can draw on.
MAH: And you don't judge, that's what you're saying.
RB: Pretty much.
SB: I'm not- Yeah, it doesn't make any difference to me. I mean, I do what I do for aesthetic reasons and I know that people like to involve drugs for aesthetic reasons and in their pursuits of what they like to get into and listen to and stuff like that, but I don't think it's a- No, I don't think it's a big deal-
RB: I think the primary concern is everyone's ready and able to listen to the music and dance, and people pursue those sort of standards differently.
SB: I worry more about people drinking to tell you the truth...
RB: Yeah.
SB: ...because I think drink's probably worse for you than most recreational drugs that are commonly available. Just being, you know, with permission to speak freely as it were. Very soon to become a a well held view as well, you know, I'm sure that now that they've got rid of smoking, that drinking's next. I'm sure that drinking's next, you know, and I'm sure that once they've got rid of drinking, they'll probably get rid of a bunch of other stuff, you know, like swearing or spitting, you know.
MAH: Now I want to ask you finally: You're taught at Goldsmiths. You, Stockhausen, John Cage, it's all taught at Goldsmiths. I wondered how you felt about being part of the establishment now.
RB: On the syllabus?
SB: Yeah.
MAH: Yeah.
RB: Alright, that was news to me. That's a good example of what gets made in people's bedrooms in Manchester in the sort of late 80s.
SB: Universities like to kind of- at the moment they need to seem a bit cooler than they would normally, so they're bound to have these reference points that are slightly, you know, more edgy or slightly less, you know, outside their regular sort of remit for research. And yeah, we sort of fall easily within that category, i.e. we're sort of accessible enough to be known by these people, but we're also, you know, not classical, basically. So I think a lot of kids that go study come from a classical background, so for them, I think that probably think that we're quite interesting. But we're just, you know, a couple of street urchins, really, you know. They're just sort of poking and prodding us and saying, look at this interesting people, yes, but I don't think they really get it. Maybe they get it. I don't know. Maybe they get it a bit. I don't know.
RB: Outside Manchester, we finished the show the other night. A guy was really, really talking. He's a cellist, he's classically trained and his lecturer plays our CDs during lessons and he wanted to know if we needed a cellist on our tracks. And I was just completely dumbfounded because I didn't expect, for one, that he'd want to get involved directly. We're the kind of opposite, we've got no rules, no pre learning, no standards to uphold - just taste really to orientate us.
SB: Yeah. I mean, it's not about the ideas, you always get asked questions that come from the angle of 'how do you create ideas for your tracks', right. We basically like got hold of the equipment, switched it on, messed around with it a little bit and thought 'that's good' and then recorded it, you know what I mean? It works that way around. It's like, we find what we like within what we've been doing, if you like, rather than sort of sitting and thinking 'oh, I've got this great idea, I need to make it.' You know, very often the classical sort of end of it and the academic end of it is obsessed with sort of idea generation and then following that through to fruition and this kind of way of working, if you like, means that they're in a lot of ways stuck and they don't get to generate a lot of these new ideas. You know, it's harder to be fresh if you don't allow yourself the freedom to do it, so. And I think they find that quite exciting and liberating and stuff so, I'm glad if it is being taught, at least I hope that they teach in the right way. What I imagine is that a university teacher and that they'd they'd be sort of saying 'oh well, these guys are interesting, because' and then relating it to with the music which you know obviously that isn't the way we work. We're just working purely from a taste point of view, so it's- even though I know it's being taught, I don't know whether it's being taught in the right way kind of thing. It's a tricky one, really.
MAH: And is that cellist going to appear in one of your next tracks?
RB: We've allowed lots of sources into our tracks over the years. That's why I said to him I couldn't write it off. I couldn't say no. I just took his e-mail address and said one day you might, you know. But I don't think you'd be sat there playing your cello like you expect to be playing your cello. It's something else is going to happen completely, so you know. Because if we wanted a cello sound in our thing, we just hire one and give it the treatment we give every other bit of gear in our studio the same kind of treatment.