Electronic music is a spectrum. On one side, we have the crowdpleasers, the big-room bangers, the tunes you might hear on an AI-generated playlist at the gym, soundtracking your spinning class. By and large, these follow many of the same rules as conventional pop music; tonally, timbrally and rhythmically colouring within familiar lines to produce familiar – and often brilliant – results. On the other end, we have the weird, the wonky and the experimental; music that harnesses the near-limitless potential of 21st-century technology to create sounds like nothing that came before them. No electronic act is more closely associated with this abstruse corner of music than Autechre.
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Rob Brown and Sean Booth met as teenagers in the late ’80s. Speaking to Future Music in 1994, Booth recalled how the pair bonded over a shared interest in hip-hop, electro and DJing. “We used to do turntable mixes together at Rob’s house and then go to my house and edit and cut ’em up, imitating early Mantronix stuff with pause-button edits on my cassette deck,” he told us.