オウテカ──その果てしない音の世界を調査する, December 2020

Interview by Tsutomu Noda and assistance by Takune Kobayashi

Original scans here.

Partial Translation to English here.

Transcript (Abridged English Translation)

Introduction

Interviewer: First I'd like to ask the two of you about your upbringing. Where were you born, and where did you spend your early years? Autechre is generally considered to be from Rochdale (a town located north-northeast of Greater Manchester), but Sean, I heard you're from a town near there called Middleton?

Sean: Yeah, I was born in Rochdale but I only lived there until I was three. After that my parents moved to Middleton, and I was raised there. So basically I think of myself as from Middleton.

Interviewer: According to the info available on the web, Rob was born in Devon (southwest Britain). Is that right?

Rob: We were in Devon for maybe a few months after I was born. I was born in Devon, but most of my family relatives are from Manchester, and my mum was working in Devon but she moved back home to Manchester after I was born. Rochdale and Middleton are really close, just a few miles apart.

Sean: Middleton is basically a part of Manchester—Like, it's on the outskirts of the highway that goes all the way around Greater Manchester (M60). In terms of distance it's about halfway between Manchester and Rochdale, maybe a bit closer to Manchester. But even though my family lived in Middleton, it was in an area near Rochdale. And on Rob's end, he lived in a part of Rochdale that was close to Middleton. So I went to Rob's place on foot a lot. Took less than thirty minutes.

Rob: That's right.

Sean: I guess we were neighbours, but it was kind of a weird area. I mean, if you're raised in Middleton, you're not gonna have any mates from Rochdale. There was never a reason to go to Rochdale in the first place. If you had to run some errands you'd go to Manchester for everything.

Rob: They had all the stuff that comes with a big city over there.

Sean: So that's why us Middleton lot didn't interact with Rochdale much. Even the way I met Rob, that was cos I just happened to ride the bus and met this Rochdale bloke. He saw me and my Middleton friend graffiti-ing on the bus, and he started talking to us, cause he was obsessed with graffiti as well. It really was a pretty big coincidence. We didn't really hang out with other kids, and that was the first time we rode a bus going that way. We always rode the opposite way, for Manchester. There wasn't anything for us in Rochdale. It was a boring town, or just kinda felt dead. Financially it wasn't doing too great. Anyway, that's how I met Rob, but I also made friends with like 10 guys from Rochdale all at once. One was the guy on the bus I was talking about, Ged, then I met this other guy, Dave. Actually, right, it was Dave who first said "Let's introduce this guy to Sharky." Sharky was Rob's nickname at the time.

Rob: (Grimace).

Sean: So then I met Rob through them. That was like.... Maybe not "random," but a total coincidence. Essentially if I hadn't crossed paths with Ged on that bus, on that day, basically Rob and I never would've met.

Rob: Yeah, but who knows. I mean we passed through the same town to visit the same record shop, so even if we hadn't met through Dave and Ged there was a pretty good chance that we would've eventually crossed paths there.

Sean: That's true. Actually, before we were properly introduced I'd seen Rob before. In front of the art supply store where we bought spray paint for graffiti.

Rob: Ah, that's right! Ren Bottomley's art supply store.

Sean: Yeah. And Rob was wearing this grey Kangol hat, and I saw that and I remember thinking, "...the fuck is that Kangol bloke standing in front of the art supply store?" (Laugh). Cause it was a really weird sight.

Rob: (Self-deprecatingly) Yeah, I was the shit man, posing with Kangol in a tiny town like Rochdale.

Sean: (Chuckle)

How could we forget ABBA

Interviewer: From the last official interview, there was a bit about Rob learning about Yellow Magic Orchestra from his uncle when he was in his mid-teens, and a bit about Sean editing a tape of The Pink Panther theme. Could you tell us if there's any music from before you got into electro and graffiti that you still like?

Sean: I didn't really buy records back then. In the electro scene we were all exchanging cassettes back and forth. So when the first wave of electro hit, in '83 or '84, I hardly ever bought records. I'd air-check music from the radio, or get my mates to let me dub their tapes. Even before that I didn't really buy any records. I remember liking "Dog Eat Dog" by Adam and the Ants (1980). That was probably the first 45 I bought.

Interviewer: (Laugh) I'm sorry, I don't mean to laugh. It's a good song.

Sean: (Laugh) No, I get why you laughed. But that's the stuff ten year-old kids like to listen to, isn't it?

Interviewer: You have a point.

Sean: Actually, I might've still been nine when that came out. I bought two records that day, the other one was "Cars" by Gary Numan (1979).

Interviewer: Wow.

Sean: I mean, this is just to give you a general idea of what I was like at the time. But I didn't even know why I liked those tracks. Probably the fact that both of them had kind of a weird ending, that might have something to do with it. Before that... I was listening to the records my parents had, you know. Like The Beatles and that. But personally I didn't really... Think the Beatles were all the great, you know? Basically I was like, Ah yeah they have some pretty good songs. I remember really liking "Strawberry Fields Forever." Especially that part, you know, where it changes pace and starts fading out. For some reason I was always drawn in by tracks that had a weird ending. Other than that, for a time I was kind of into—really not that into, but—The Teardrop Explodes. Also the Police, I liked the Stranglers too, Blondie as well... Well, out of that lot the one that stoked my interest the most was probably The Police. They used these weird rhythms, so I guess it just felt different from other music.

Rob: Makes sense.

Sean: Let's see, what else was there... Actually, my dad was really into stuff like Black Sabbath, that kind of 70s Rock, like Thin Lizzy. I had a vague interest in Black Sabbath I guess. That one track on their first record, with the rain and the church bells ("Black Sabbath," Track 1 of their debut eponymous release in 1970).

Interviewer: (Laugh) Those sound effects.

Sean: (Chuckle) I don't know why I liked that. Ah, that too, "War Pigs"! (Included on Sabbath's second album, "Paranoid"). I thought that was amazing, the best thing ever. Also Motörhead... I just heard all this stuff when it played on TV and liked it, that kind of thing. I'd see it on TV and think, "Oh, this is pretty good," and that was it. The first song I remember listening to was "I'm Not In Love" (1975) by 10CC, I'm pretty sure.

Interviewer: That's a good one.

Sean: Yeah. It was the first track that made me doubt my ears, you know, made me think, "Eh, what is this? Something's off." Also I remember "I Feel Love" (Donna Summer, 1977) pretty well. My dad was constantly listening to that when he drove the van. He also liked "Tubular Bells" (Mike Oldfield, 1973) and let me listen to that kind of stuff a lot. That or Jeff Wayne's "War of the Worlds" (1978, a rock-musical version of H. G. Wells' "War of the Worlds"). Listening to that on headphones on a Sunday was like a huge adventure for me at the time.

Interviewer: (Laughs). Rob, what about you?

Rob: Pretty much what Sean was just saying. I was probably in a parallel world with Sean liking "The War of the Worlds," cause I was hooked on that as well. Also whenever I went to my mum's friend's house, there was this older kid who always played tons of cool records. He was like my babysitter when I was a kid, and he would let me listen to a bunch of records. But before I got to the point where I bought my own records... I got albums for Christmas. Like The Police's first album ("Outlandos d'Amour," 1978). I think that was definitely their best work. Ah, "Parallel Lines" (1978) by Blondie, too. Also "Arrival" (1976) by ABBA was huge.

Sean: (Interjecting) Ah, ABBA! How could I forget ABBA. ABBA was a huge deal to me when I was a kid! I was obsessed with them when I was five, six years old. ABBA is amazing.

Rob: I got that album when I was six or seven, and this older mate of mine who lived in public housing liked The Police and was constantly playing them, so I got hooked on them too. My mum was really into Soul and Funk, like Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder. She also liked ELO and had their albums, and I had "The War of the Worlds." My first record player was this boxy thing that looked like a suitcase, where you had to open the lid, and you could stack a bunch of records on the turntable and listen to them one at a time. Also it could switch between 33, 45, and 78 speeds. And what I remember is (chuckle), this is really strange but, my all-time favourite record was "Peter and the Wolf" by Prokofieff. I loved that record, and the narrator was this famous BBC newscaster called Angela Rippon. She had this really great English accent, but I was really impatient and wanted to listen to it faster, so I played it at 78 speed. And I thought listening to "Peter and the Wolf" at 78 rpm was the greatest thing.

Sean: Playing that at 78 rpm (laughs), what were you on?

Rob: (Laughs) Yeah. I'd do that or I'd listen to it in reverse. I think I listened to a lot of Sinatra records in reverse as well. Anyway, basically my mum would lend me her records. She had this expensive, Hi-Fi Hitachi record player, and if a record had a scratch and made the needle skip she didn't want to play it, so she'd give those to me. But yeah, so I had my own little record player, and I had The Beatles... Wait, no, The Beatles ones weren't mine. I had The Police, "Arrival" by ABBA...

Sean: The best part about ABBA is... Everyone says they were master songwriters, but the reason they're so good, the key is that the vocals are absolutely incredible, I think.

Rob: Shockingly good.

Sean: Those two female voices are just... Like, really special. For me, I think that's the reason ABBA hits me so hard. That's why... I mean of course I admit their songwriting was great too, don't get me wrong, I just think their voices are fucking incredible. Really unique.

Rob: That synchronised harmony.

Sean: Exactly.

Rob: I got some records secretly, too. My uncle Derek—my mum's youngest brother, he's about five years older than me—before he moved overseas he left a bunch of records for me. This was just before electro started to get big, and I got him to give me a lot of those records from his collection. That was stuff that I was too young to get my hands on, certified classic 12 inches and club mixes, and later on they became more and more important to me. Cause my favourite artists started sourcing breaks and samples from them.

Sean: Yeah!

Rob: Because of that, before knowing that's what it was, I had an inventory of breaks and rare grooves that none of my mates knew anything about. I got really motivated by that.

Sean: Me too... I got some Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix albums from my dad, but I didn't like them when I was a kid. I didn't even like the Stones. Somehow I understood Motörhead, but for whatever reason I almost totally passed up Hendrix. It just didn't interest me at all. But when I got older it suddenly became interesting to me, same with Zeppelin. Like I might be listening to some track and a break-beat comes on, and I'll go, "Wait, haven't I heard this before? Oh yeah, it's 'When the Levee Breaks'." That sort of thing.

Rob: Right.

Sean: In ways like that I feel a different sort of appreciation for Zeppelin than I had before. So in reality I actually got hooked on Zeppelin's beats via hip-hop... It was through listening to hip-hop that got me to think better of some of the records my dad had.

Rob: As far as electronic music, after I started spending my allowance on 7 inches... Those kinds of singles were mostly pop-culture products, or like Sean said, surprisingly different tracks, chart toppers like Gary Numan's "Cars." But I also liked Tears for Fears' first single. Also, I have vivid memories of riding in my mate's family's car listening to a track on the radio at high volume, speeding down the road.

Sean: Jean-Michel Jarre, yeah? Fuckin, yeah.

Rob: (Laughs) Yeah, Jean-Michel Jarre. They were playing "Équinoxe" (1978) on the radio, the long version. We were blasting that while speeding down the road, and I was sitting in the back seat like, "This is fucking awesome. Why isn't my family like this?" Ha ha ha!

A great starting point called Mantronix

Interviewer: What was it about Mantronix that influenced you the most?

Rob: (Exhale) I don't know... There's a lot.

Sean: For me, it was knowing that producers could be a thing. I think it was around '85 or '86, I got my first Mantronix album. And the reason it interested me was, in a way, while most other guys were throwing away electro and starting to move into what was starting to be called hip-hop, they stuck with electro. At least, that's how it was in England. So the reason I was into Mantronix was cause they were preserving the ideas behind electro, like, heavy use of synths and synthesised drums, not using samples too much, preferring to work with Roland drums instead of the (Oberheim) DMX... Anyway, really I just preferred drums with a more analogue flavour over sample-based drum machines. Well, I liked the DMX too. But at the time I was really into the 808- and 909-type sound. And I remember "Put the Record Back On" (1986) by Just-Ice playing on the radio, the DJ was either Lee Brown or Stu Allan. I think it was Lee Brown... Er, was it Mike Shaft... (Ed. All three are former DJs for Manchester Piccadilly Radio). I can't remember, but anyway the DJ said, "That last track was produced by (Kurtis) Mantronik," and I remember it clicking for me, "Hey, that's that Mantronix guy!" I was like, "He produced it...? What does that mean?" So that's what made me suddenly aware of the role of producers. They're guys who produce things, basically they're the ones who actually make the music.

Rob: (Chuckles)

Sean: Yeah. After that I started buying everything he produced, like if I saw his name on the back of the jacket, I'd take it. Cause everything he did was essentially just amazing. Just-Ice's debut ("Back to the Old School," 1986) was a huge record for me, I remember listening to "Cold Gettin' Dumb" and thinking, "Fuck me! This is amazing, I've never heard anything like this." Really, like there was just nothing else like it. And he just kept making tracks, track after track, and they all felt fresh. I think he was just an untouchable producer for like 5 years cause he could keep putting out so much strange, fresh stuff.

Rob: He was a class all his own.

Sean: Who else was there.... Duke Bootee, I noticed his name in credits a lot. Him and Keith LeBlanc. I bought anything that had his name on it, cause I liked the mechanical drum sound he had. They didn't sound like drums, just really mechanical.

Rob: [さりげないひねりもやってたよね、ベースを軽くはじくとか。]

Sean: He was an incredible drum producer. I mean, he was already a really talented drummer, but he was just a master drum programmer. The drum patterns he put together were super lively, totally different from everyone else. The guy I just mentioned, Duke Bootee, he was also a fantastic producer, like, everything he made, the sound was amazing. Man Parrish was an incredible producer as well.

Rob: Yeah.

Sean: There were more too. Ligett and Barbosa, they worked with Shannon ("Let the Music Play," 1984) and Xena ("On the Upside," 1983), they did some early freestyle tracks too. I rated them. Yeah... So the biggest thing about Mantronik for me was discovering what a producer is. His music also had this really demanding aspect to it. Basically because he raised the bar, all the other producers had to try harder. He had a huge influence on a bunch of people. A lot of producers at the time tried really hard to approach his sound, but no one came close.

Rob: Yeah.

Sean: Another thing is, he had some really eccentric ideas about how to make tracks. For example, even though he had an 808, he'd sample the 808 and use that. That's a really strange way of doing things, right, normally you would never sample a drum machine, but he did.

Rob: He used pitches.

Sean: Right. He'd mess with the pitch of the snare or the kick in strange ways. And that method influenced a bunch of producers, like Dynamix II. Hurby Luv Bug copied Mantronik a bit as well, a bunch of people imitated him. That was one of the things I liked about him I guess, he was just always ahead of the curve. I think because he was a bit different, that's why he could do it. He wasn't trying to surpass the other guys at all, he was just different, his interests were different from that of other producers. So the other guys were always one or two steps behind. Personally I think that was what inspired me the most.

Rob: Yeah, yeah. I'm pretty sure he was the first one to... Well, The Latin Rascals were doing cut-up mixes, where they'd cut tracks in half and edit them together, but Mantronik was doing that with his own tracks. Listening at the time one of the things that I was blown away by was this, like it somehow made you feel like (laughs), he was time travelling in the middle of the track. He would sample his own track, and then use the samples in the original track he sampled.

Interviewer: (Laughs) Pretty confusing.

Rob: (Laughs) Of course he was doing digital editing, but there was no way to know that at the time. He seemed like a person who doesn't really show his own hand. Not a lot of people knew that he was using a Sequential Circuits (SCI) Studio 440 (Sampler / Sequencer / Drum Machine) workstation. You can make tons of really high-quality samples with that. And on top of that he was using a 196ppq (Pulses Per Quarter) sequencer.

So after he completed a track, he'd sample the whole thing and insert it into that track, and overdub the sound like that. But to my ears it sounded like the track had been cut up with samples of itself. I thought he had to be a wizard or something to think of stuff like that, and in comparison the other guys were just plain hip-hop guys who liked scratching. So he had this reputation of being a "wizard," and I think he totally deserved it. To me, he's... Like Sean was saying earlier, a lone-wolf character, a little isolated from everyone else, that kind of thing. He was really stylish, dressed really sharp. Compared to most other Black producers, maybe his kind of Latin look set him apart? ... (Ed: The electro editing techniques of Omar Santana, Kurtis Mantronik, and Albert Cabrera from The Latin Rascals came out of Latin electro. Incidentally, a track that greatly featured this Latin electro style in the UK was 1986's ""Bizarre Love Triangle,"" by New Order.)"

Sean: There was that too, but also he was working really hard. I think he was feeling burned out by around '89, I remember reading an interview where he said he was sleeping in the studio. He'd wake up, work on a track, and then fall asleep in the studio again. I read that and I remember thinking, "That's right, that's what it's like to be immersed in something." It reminded me of myself, cause I was completely obsessed with making mixtapes, too. Edits as well. He had Omar Santana or the Latin Rascals make some cool edits of his stuff. Most of it was just dub versions on the B-Side, but even then those B-Sides were awesome. The editing just, insanely cool. Like, it would be impossible on a modern DAW, it's that detailed, these edits done with just tape. Omar Santana is an absolute crazy editor, he inspired me loads. I was constantly making mixtapes, using the pause button to compile them. Basically I wanted to be Omar Santana.

Rob: We were both pretty hyper-active kids.

Sean: Yeah, that's right.

Rob: That's why, our new mutual friend Ged, when he introduced me to Sean he said, "There's this bloke like you who won't shut up about music. When he starts going, no one can stop him. You two have to get together and talk!" Then I met Sean, and he was the only one who was into the exact same stuff that I was, and just as deep. Hyper-obsessed. Mantronix was probably that kind of hyper, too. The tracks he makes are just.... Like an all-out war. From my perspective it was like being on a battlefield. Just amazing, too good.

Sean: Yeah, Mantronik went at it like it was a battle, definitely. That's why he was absolutely a "fighting producer." He was trying to knock out the other guys. You can probably tell that by listening to his tracks. There were other great producers at the time, too, like Marley Marl. He was like, ruthless, like he came at you from all sides. But still, he's different. Like Marley fights fair. But Mantronik, he abruptly changes the direction of the track right in the middle. Like the tempo suddenly changes, that kind of thing. Basically developing in a way you didn't expect. In contrast Marley is like, really solid, dependable development. That kind of producer. No one pushed genre boundaries as much as he did. He was the first one to incorporate breaks into the mix in a more interesting way, sooner than everyone else. He was a huge inspiration on what would later become hip-hop. But Mantronik was really unique! Nobody could get close to him. After a few years I think he lost that energy, and the kind of spirit of the way he did things went away with it.

Rob: We felt like we'd caught up with him.

Sean: So we could see this, like, huge gap that he'd left behind. When we started making music in the late 80s, we felt like that path still wasn't finished.

Rob: Yeah.

Sean: Hip-hop at the time was moving in the direction of cutting up breaks and stuff. Looking back on it, I think Marley had a bigger impact than Mantronik. But Mantronik had, like this... like the story wasn't finished yet.

Rob: I think that was probably because Mantronix wasn't one of those guys in that area whose name would come up straight away, who was really well-known and well-received. But what Sean said is right. There's a handful of guys who fit in the space between Marley and Mantronix who I really love.

Sean: Yeah, like Bomb Squad.

Rob: I think he (Mantronik) really dominated my childhood. He seemed a bit younger than the other guys, and to some extent being a kid is about trying to act older than you are, right? So he was different from the other guys in the sense that he fit into the concept of like, Peter Pan.

Sean: One of the reasons Mantronix was more well-received in the UK than anywhere else was because they were tied together with the electronic soul genre, which was popular here at the time. In terms of bands, Loose Ends, Deluxe, that kind of stuff. That, and they also connected to synth pop in a very loose way. Mantronik got loads of inspiration from synth pop, but after that the only influence America got from that was Detroit techno. For example Juan Atkins, I think you can tell from his stuff that he definitely was influenced by synth pop. When you think about it that way, strangely enough, Mantronik had more in common with Detroit electro than with New York hip-hop.

Rob: Right. That's why he was an outsider, in a sense. But he was completely dominating the game in his own area.

Sean: He was.

Rob: It's pretty interesting.

Pirate radio DJing, raided by the police

Interviewer: Let me ask about pirate radio. You guys were involved in pirate radio, I think from the late 80s to the early 90s. Sean made his pirate radio debut in 1988, and in '91 Autechre made their first appearance on an IBC (Illegal Broadcasting Company) show.

Rob and Sean: Yeah.

Interviewer: I think this pirate radio culture is kind of a hallmark of the UK, but it's not a culture that we have in Japan, so I'd like to know about Autechre's relationship with pirate radio over the years, and what you've gained from doing pirate radio.

Sean: I got started in that scene by—Basically, Ged who I mentioned earlier, the guy I met on the bus, I got to know some of the others guys he was on the bus with, and that's how it started.

Rob: Ged, he was the catalyst for everything!

Sean: (Laughs) That's because Ged's the kind of guy who'll go up and talk to anyone. That kind of personality. And so this one time Ged was talking to this middle-aged guy on the bus... Maybe not middle-aged, really more like in his 30s, but anyway he seemed like he was pushing on middle-age, this soul-loving guy called Steve King. So Ged went up and started talking to Steve... Wait, actually it was Steve who started talking to Ged. Cos at the time Ged was fitted with all this hip-hop gear. So Steve said, "Hey, do you know any DJs?" And Ged was like, "Hell yeah I do! I'm friends with two or three." So Steve heard that and said, "In that case bring them to my station and let's put on a show." So through that strange turn of events I got into doing it. But Steve King is a really great guy, he's tried his hand at loads of things. So in '88 we were scheduled to appear on his show, and we set out for this town on the outskirts of Rochdale called Bury, where this one guy lived. Bury is one of those "Northern Towns," another suburb of Manchester. So we went to his house and started taping the show, and we got about halfway through when the cops showed up—

Rob: And we got raided.

Sean: They cracked down on us.

Rob: The decks and stuff were all placed in this guy's kitchen, and from the kitchen you could get to the backyard. The backyard connected to this big grass field in the back so we were able to escape, but we had to leave all the records we'd brought with us.

Interviewer: (Laughs) That's rough!

Rob: Yeah. They were all confiscated. The other guys got caught, but Sean and I managed to get away. That recording was this strange, like... It wasn't an audition or a demo, but still we felt really, really honoured to appear on that show.

Sean: We appeared as guest DJs.

Rob: They had actual turntables, and we could play our own records.

Sean: Yeah, yeah. So when they said, "Wanna appear on the show?" We were like "Fuck yeeeeeeeeeah!"

Interviewer: (Laughs) I see.

Nerds, Hip-Hop, and Academism

Interviewer: Nowadays, if you're not careful with your musical terminology you risk being accused of elitist snobbism.

Sean: There's definitely at least one kind of snobbism, in my opinion. But I think the effects of that manifest on several different levels. For example, I'm not impressed by someone's qualifications or the equipment they use. I'm impacted by what they actually do. But hip-hop in the 1980s brought about a bunch of innovations. It was a pretty revolutionary genre, but I think there's a bit of a tendency to minimise that by saying it was no big deal. I think ideas like, hip-hop has no potential, or it's not interesting from a technical standpoint, they came out of academia.

Rob: Ahh, yeah.

Sean: But that's not how I see it at all. I think someone like King Tubby was incredibly revolutionary. It's just that he's like, looked at through the context of a kind of cultural lens. And because of that people forget that he was a huge nerd.

Interviewer: (Laughs.)

Sean: So it's like... If it's a Black American guy, people forget that he can be a nerd, too.

Interviewer: There's a kind of stereotype, you mean.

Sean: Yeah. And most of the producers I was talking about earlier, or hip-hop producers, like right now for example guys like Madlib, in a sense... Most of these incredible producers, if you actually talk to them they're huge geeks, right?

Interviewer: You've got a point.

Sean: That's basically what I'm talking about. They're nerds. Wherever in the world, from Stockhausen to Madlib, they're all nerds. They're nerds at heart. Even Juan Atkins, he's a complete nerd. And I can really relate to that, on a deep personal level. Like, of course they're nerds! So with that in mind, I think in a sense there's a bit of an artificial line drawn between academic music and hip-hop. Stuff like hip-hop can be academic. But only people in hip-hop know that, and there's just not a framework for that to happen. It's like graffiti. Like, you do graffiti cause you want other people who do graffiti to think, "Man, this guy's good." But because there's this desire to have people think you're good, even in the world of graffiti there's a kind of elitism that happens. Like a guy will come out who everyone, the whole scene, agrees is really skilled.

Rob: Yeah, yeah.

Sean: So it's like... A world that's hidden from the average person. The general public doesn't take notice, because they're not paying attention, you know? It's almost like most of the public isn't looking in the right place. They're all preoccupied with the context, or the culture... I don't think that's what's important.

Rob: Right. When you're in the middle of a certain context and you become part of that culture, you can't see what it looks like from the outside. You're more interested in the performance you put on amongst your friends.

Sean: Right, that's what it is.

Rob: You don't really make an effort to reach out to people on the outside, so people have no way of knowing what's happening on the inside.

Sean: People in academia are ruthlessly competitive, yeah? When you get right down to it, that's what they're doing is competing. It's the same as hip-hop. People in hip-hop are incredibly competitive, too. Everyone's trying to make the coolest shit, to come up with the best tricks and techniques that they can. When you get to the root of it, hip-hop is a really academic practice. Yeah, I'm not a timid person by nature, and I'm not gonna shy away from that. To me that's what makes music exciting. That's what makes people push the limits further and further.

Works that sell differently by country

Interviewer: "Amber" is one of the classics now, but at that time, I think that amongst Warp artists, Autechre hadn't been selling in Japan at all. Still, you continued to press forwards with "Amber" and "Tri Repetae" (95). Where did that drive and passion come from?

Rob: To be honest, Warp gave us a lot of creative freedom. I guess they also wanted us to sell more records, right? But still, they always made us feel that we were "doing the right thing".

Sean: There's that, and at that time in Japan, the Sony guys didn't know how to treat us in the early days of our work. (Editor's note: In the 90's, Sony had a contract with Warp)

Rob: Yeah maybe...

Sean: They were pretty confused - "What's this stuff?"

Rob: Sony might have thought "Well, these guys are No. 1 in the Indie chart with Incunabula and Basscadet Mixes (94)," and I think it was a hit, but it was a fluke. And it wasn't necessarily those sales numbers. Still, Sony signed contracts with several Warp artists, as did American labels. In the US, Sire placed a bet by signing several groups.

Sean: Tri Repetae did really great in America. It didn't do well in Japan and it was good in the UK.

Rob: Well, it could be that on the label side they expected "This is cool" but it didn't meet with reality well.

Sean: Ah... so it's strange. For example, in the UK, Chiastic Slide (97) didn't take off, and in the US, it wasn't even released domestically. That's because Wax Trax!, which we had a contract with in the US, got bought by TVT. Long story short, TVT never paid Warp.

Rob: It was like a big archive label that had absolutely no interest in us. <smiles bitterly>

Sean: And that's why Warp didn't get a penny. It was terrible.

Sean: It was sold to TVT and the contract was breached. That's why we were in a state where we couldn't put out anything in America for a while. We waited until Trent Reznor welcomed us to his own label, Nothing, and released "LP5" (98). That's why he (Trent Reznor) was also taking a gamble, and at that time for reasons other than the US, we were hunting for labels in Japan. As for how it was back then, different Warp acts had separately contracted with several labels in Japan. I think we were with Sony and Aphex was with Sire.

In Japan, Warner Music was being released via Sire.

Rob: Ah, it was Warner.

Sean: Because, at some points, we were ... randomly called. For example, once we were asked to support The Grid, it was a completely strange offer. Us as support for The Grid? Why? (Editor's Note: 1994. The support act of The Grid by Richard Norris of Psychic TV and Dave Ball of Soft Cell. Certainly this combination was mysterious, and  it attracted a lot of customers).

It turned out that originally The Black Dog were supposed to be supporting them, and for some reason they couldn't appear, and they called us on behalf of them. That's how we ended up going to Japan. It's where we met Ray, and we thought "Ray understands us better than Sony"."

Rob: We were hanging out with Ray in Japan. The music we'd listened to in the 80's was pretty similar to each other.