FutureMusic Interview, 2008

Below is a transcript from a FutureMusic interview given to Autechre near the release of Quaristice. Scans provided by https://autechre.neocities.org/en/interviews/interview41.

Transcript

Autechre need no introduction to any follower of electronic music. Suitably homed by frequency-friendly Warp Records, Autechre — Sean Booth and Rob Brown — have taken the synthetic form and filtered it off in myriad new directions, earning them critical plaudits and devoted fans such as Radiohead's Thom Yorke and the godlike genius that is Chris Morris.

From their late '80s Rochdale roots as aspiring Hip Hop enthusiasts messing around with mix tapes and a Roland MC-202, through a succession of ground-breaking albums and frenetic live sets, Autechre have consistently come up with the electronic goods while defying categorisation. Rather than rest on their laurels, their new album, Quaristice, sees Rob and Sean no less keen to explore electronic music's further reaches. With tracks such as the metallically beautiful Simmm, the 606-rhythmic Tankakern and the bit-crushed Hip Hop of fwze, Autechre show they've lost none of their edge.

Having had the pleasure of interviewing Autechre some years back for the release of seventh album Draft7.30, the opportunity was grasped to talk to the duo on the eve of Quaristice’s release. Thankfully, Autechre have lost none of the enthusiastic fanaticism for technology I recall from our first encounter, effortlessly segueing between generative software, circuit-bent hardware and extolling the virtues of Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm. Rob and Sean share a passion for electronics and the continuing possibilities of electornic music — a fact that probably isn't lost on the software and hardware companies whose products Autechre use and who, one suspects, listen intently to the feedback Autechre invariably give them on how best to enhance their wares.

With that in mind, I endeavoured to find out more about the inner machinations of Autechre, their current stance on software versus hardware, and where music-making technology is going...

Even by your own high standards, some of the frequencies employed on Quaristice go further than you've gone before. Was that a conscious decision?

Sean Booth: "This album sort of happened by chance really. I moved up to Manchester in 2005 and for about six months we were messing around with ideas and half doing tracks. We had to rewrite stuff for the live set but we thought 'before we do that we'll put down the stuff we've already got in the kit.' Soo we had a lot of the live set running in the studio and were putting down some long jam versions of the tracks, which we'd then cut down into much shorter tracks. So it just happened like that. Rather than us consciously thinking we'd do a load of live tracks it was more like we'd been doing it and having fun doing them, and the tunes were coming out so quickly because we were so used to working with the interface."

Rob Brown: "I was just gonna say that it was quicker because of the hardware. When Sean was moving house I could’ve been in a state of limbo but I'd built a studio at mine and I'd been using the equipment from our live setup and stuff was just coming out — deeper stuff than you'd usually get from an afternoon’s work. You can spend three weeks working on something and end up with it sounding really staid compared to the original idea, but this stuff was coming out queasy, really weird and nice."

And where did you go with it from there?

SB: "It lent itself towards production as we were really trying to get it right at the time. A lot of the arrangements and how the sounds changed were off the cuff so that part of it was being considered a lot less, whereas the actual sounds and how it was all produced had the most conscious thought put into it. So I suppose, consciously, we've probably become a little better at the production, which has meant we can relax a bit more. There's bits where we've been running it and I've changed a sequence, and rather than thinking that it's maybe ruined a particular take we'd just let it carry on. So when you hear big changes in a track, that tends to be where there was a big chunk missing."

Did working that way leave you with a logistical nightmare, having so much music from the jams?

RB: "Kind of — just the sheer amount of projects."

SB: "We did have about four months of just pure listening through and editing, but Digital Performer has all those new tools like Slide, where you can move the audio within the sections."

RB: "You can have takes for each track as well. You can run the thing you're working on, stop and save, go to a new take and it doesn’t delete anything. Everything can also be orientated in a way that’s native — like the live set’s good for us using the equipment because we've done it hundreds of times, sometimes back-to-back, day after day. Then there might be some big one-off festival where one of us might've had a month to prepare some new ideas then just go with it on the night."

Is that the trusty old TR-606 Drumatix dusted down for an appearance on the track Tankakern?

RB: "As with every album, a facet of the older stuff perhaps comes alive again. We originally bought our 606 off a local Hip Hop guy for £50 and we thought he couldn't program it as it was in really weird time signatures and rubbish 11-step rhythms. We were really dissing him for ages until we realised that's what happens to the 606s if you take the batteries out of them for too long. We used to see the 606 as a baby-cousin to the TR808 as we'd always seen Mantronix going on about his 808, but all we could ever get was a 606 and the only record I had with a 606 on it was The Gap Band... I wanted to be a bit more Hip Hop than that!"

SB: “They actually sound the same kind of metallic/plastic that they look. I like how solid they are and they distort nicer than some other drum machines."

What hardware have you been using for live sets?

SB: "Obviously we cut down the equipment we take out for the live sets so there’s the Elektron SPS-1, Elektron SFX-60, Nord G2. an Akai MPC1000 and a Mackie mixer."

RB: "Usually we specify that we want a Mackie Onyx because that's what we've got ourselves. We take our own DI and our own dbx 1066 and there's as WaveIdea Bitstream 3x controller."

Does the Akai MPC betray that underneath the glitches you're still Hip Hoppers at heart?

RB: [laughs] "I never had an MPC. We had a Roland R-8, which was a sort of undergraduate to the MPC world. Mark Broom had the first MPC I ever laid my hands on and it was perfect for him, a House producer doing MPC tracks. But at the same time I think Akai have always had an over-simplistic approach. Yeah, it might be a de facto 16-bit recording quality, and the bigger ones are 96kHz sampling rate..."

SB: "The MPC1000 runs the JJ OS doesn't it?"

RB: "Yeah, there's a Japanese kid who makes the OS for the MPC2500 and the 1000, which massively modifies it. It's like when you've got a bit of equipment that's the runt of the family. With a big corporation like Akai they'll make the middle one pretty good, the big one too big but well spec'd, and make the smaller ones a nipped-up version of all the others. Basically, this guy JJ has blown that wide open by getting to the CPU and into the OS and he's made it work just how you'd really want it to work.

"When I bought the MPC I was really depressed. I thought 'okay, it's simple and it's the interface I wanted, but it gives me all these MIDI channels and all these Mute capabilities and live stuff I can do.' Even though it might feel like a playback device, JJ made it a performance machine again. He put a few MIDI roll editors into it, a controller, and vector programmability into some of the controls. It's still restrictive but there are some gains from that. All he's done is make the interface a bit harder to read."

SB: "The best thing would be to have a Kurzweil board in an MPC unit. The quick interface and the fact the keys are all laid out for you on the MPCs makes you do different kinds of edits. Obviously we grew up with the Roland R-8, which was a big part of our studio for ages. It had 16 pads so the idea of having one drum and pitching it around the interface was [???] natural for us. In fact, when I first got an MPC I remember thinking it was just like an R-S — or rather, what you'd like to be able to do with an R-S. To me they're both still great machines even though they're not offering anything particularly ground-breaking."

We seem to be coming back to 'hands on' with hardware controllers from 'hands off' with software.

RB: "The choice of hardware is becoming ridiculous now. In the 1990s you could get a Penny and Giles 16-fader unit for £4,000, then you had your Peavey 16x with only a couple of things in between. Now you have the BitStream, which is solid as a rock yet it's got some ridiculous software programming where you can program everything to SysEx level. So now, even at entry level, people can download some Mackie emulation templates and they're away. Then you have the nutters who are writing these huge strings for their SysEx."

SB: "You could use it to control all the parameters of a jumbo jet with the amount of SysEx programming it has! I wouldn't say I like hardware more than software as we still do a lot on computer and, by their nature, computers are multi-purpose — that's the point of software. Using a hardware machine I'm still using software, it's just that it's been designed to work optimally with that machine."

So have Autechre moved on from software?

SB: "Well, the last album was made using a lot of hardware but we were using it in a very 'softwarey' kind of way. We'd set up multiple hardware sequencers but once it was set up for us to program it was just a matter of pressing 'Play' and making sure that the MIDI sequencing was synced then recording it into Digital Performer. So it was like a base-system of hardware..."

RB: "But the computer was still in the hub of it all."

SB: "As I said earlier, with this album we did these long jams and had a horrendous amount of stuff recorded but the computers enabled it to be really quick editing it all down. If we had to use tape to do the same album I wouldn't be quite so chuffed! So I can't sit here and say that hardware's brilliant and software's not. Fair enough we weren't using the computer or anything exotic other than the editing but it enabled that so well, and a lot of people take that for granted. If there was a hardware machine that enabled us to do the kind of editing we do on software then I'd probably go for that, as it would involve more buttons and less mouse."

So some kind of intermediate interface twixt mouse and button is required?

RB: "There was one point in the late '90s where we thought it was all going to come together when Wacom brought out their Cintiq touch-monitor devices. That was suddenly your hardware box."

SB: "Surely Apple are going to release a giant iPhone with a touch-screen for doing music? If they got that together all the others would die immediately."

The way you explore and use your equipment reminds me of that Brian Eno quote where he asserts that a high percentage of DX7 synths had never even been programmed.

SB: [laughs] "Yeah, but you can understand why, as it must've filled people with dread who were come away from analogue synths at the time. A lot of kids now would probably get their heads around it a lot quicker as most have done at least some IT training. In its time it was quite prohibitive though, and that was the test of whether someone was a good programmer, if they could program a DX."

So there's no bespoke Autechre hardware/software in the pipeline?

SB: "We're in touch with people because over the years we've had questions about hardware and software. When we contacted MoTU they were incredibly receptive and now we know people there. Elektron were the same when we spoke to them. I never contacted James McCartney [developer of SuperCollider] as I never thought there was anything I could tell him. It's usually when there's something wrong that we get in touch with people."

RB: "It's weird with all the software that people are always aiming to optimise but never quite getting to that point. There's a shape-shifting ethic that goes on with software where you can say 'why does it have to analyse every time I make an edit?' and they'll come back and say 'just wait till v1.4'."

SB: "Traditionally, hardware companies have been these huge monoliths that you couldn't get anywhere near, whereas software companies now are often small and have somebody whose job is to deal with people getting in touch to ask how they use certain features. The software companies are constantly in touch with people about updating their software and seeing how they can help users."

Which is certainly more pro-active than the 'here's what you're going to get' attitude that some of the hardware companies employ...

RB: "Yeah, exactly. It's like JJ and the Akai scenario again. He's on OS2 now."

SB: "It's like the Elektrons too — every couple of months there's a new OS and a couple of new features, which is brilliant because they never remove anything."

Yet software seems to be less central to your studio at the moment...

SB: "Doing the tracks in the studio it was more about the 'liveness' rather than the software. We were still using the computer and occasional soft synths in real-time but mainly because latency, CPU sound and everything is at the point where there's a thinner line than ever between real-time and non-real-time. You can use a computer just to run a soft synth now and not feel like it's weird and still have it connected to your live stuff and making instant control changes. It's functioning just like a synth but it's just that you've blocked it off, and rather than using the same screen for doing your sequencing and your programming you use the other kit."

Are there any soft synths you particularly like?

SB: "FM7 is my favourite. I'm so familiar with that world and it's such a good representation but it's also, like, 5,000 times faster to program. For me it's amazing that you can make a DX100 patch on a computer in five minutes. Then there's other things like Cube [VirSyn's additive soft synth], which is very like something we used to use Kyma for with a particular use of spectral files, but Cube runs really well on even the worst computers ever and it's got amazing envelope control in it. The way they've made multi-dimensional envelope controls makes it so much quicker to program than in Kyma. The reason Cube's good isn't because of what it's offering technically, it's purely the interface."

RB: "On the last album, Untilted, I was using a few of the Arturia soft synths because they were trying to get the 'ultimate closest to the real synths'. Yeah, right! The thing is though, by the time you've got two poly voices going, the computer's almost broken because it's trying so hard. The Arturias were good to make the most bizarre patches because you have all the functionality of a massive Yamaha CS-80 and you can actually get your hands, in theory, on those synths that I never had because I was way too young and the bedroom was way too small."

SB: "I got really excited when the PPG soft synth came out because you knew they'd get it right. Moogs and Yamahas are hard but the PPG was easy. Economically it seems like a really bad idea to buy lots of synths at the moment as the resale value is so bad. You would've thought 10 years ago that if you bought loads of synths you'd be fine and that they wouldn't depreciate in value the way computers do."

Mind you, the soft synths are a lot more stable voltage- and tuning-wise than the original machines.

SB: [laughs] "I remember when we first turned up to play live at a club called Bojangles in Rochdale. They had no idea about electronic music and we turned up with a Roland MC-202 and a Roland Octopad and they guy was like 'you can't put that through my PA, that's a synthesizer, that makes perfect waveforms. If you play a square wave through this rig you'll blow it!' He must've thought his cones would be bouncing out of the speakers."

RB: "I remember he insisted on using our 4-track, which was better for us as it meant we made a lot less mistakes."

Any dream software/hardware that you'd like to see?

SB: "Everything I could think of is based on stuff that's already out there. I'd quite like to see a much, much better of Tassman, as I really like Tassman but it's pushing it as far as the CPU's concerned. I like the modules; I think they're really tasty. There's a lot of SPK modelling going around and they've got a good angle on it aesthetically. The filers on the models are really, really nice-sounding compared to something like Native.

"Another thing, which is more of a gripe really, is when Traktor 3, for example, came out it only runs on fast computers. For some people that's still a bit tricky and that bugs me, as you'd think something like Traktor, where you're playing three wavs, wouldn't have so much trouble for the chips running on smaller computers. I wish people would be a little bit more economical with CPU power."

RB: "I think the Analysis and Library functions slow it down. I used to do whole tracks with Logic Audio on an IBM ThinkPad with a 133Mhz processor and 48MB of RAM. They were proper tracks with maybe a couple of effects and plug-ins, then mastering. Even SoundEdit 16 was on OS 7.6 or something and still working on 90MHz machines."

SB: "I'd quite like to see a machine that lets you install your own kind of synth engine and maybe a little developing environment you could use to design synth engines. I think that's coming soon." FM