Easy to Be Hard
Apr 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Ken Micallef
THE CLASSIC WARP DUO OF SEAN BOOTH AND ROB BROWN, AKA AUTECHRE, CONFOUND MINDS, EXTEND THEIR MODIFYING WAYS AND GO CIRCUIT-BENDING CRAZY ON QUARISTICE
So Many Secrets
When it gets down to actual tracks and production details, Booth clams up. The dripping ice sounds and sci-fi tunnel effects of “Tankakern”? “Akai MPC, Elektron Mono and Machinedrum, 606. Nord Lead,” Booth peeps. “Fol3” sounds like unwilling farm animals being pulled backward through a death chute. Surely Booth could offer a riddle or two.
“It's all stuff that was recorded with an AKG 1000 mic,” he replies, “then processed on a homemade patch, then used as source material and cut up. Just a simple edit job on a bunch of stuff, both physical things and instruments. I can't remember all the sources. The patch itself is running about 50 or 60 samples. Then that got cut up.”
As for the animal-accident-barking-crashing sound collisions of “Steels,” he only says, “I don't want to talk about how we did that 'cause there are some secret techniques involved, but most of it is MPC.
“Certain combinations are unusual, and they strike you and have a real dynamism to them,” he continues. “We like hard and soft sounds at the same time, like an Oberheim DMX or LinnDrum combined with warm analog sounds. I like the way you can bounce them off each other. There are so many ways to combine sounds.”
Brown spills the beans with far greater ease. When asked if Autechre's established ID of using old techniques on new gear — and, conversely, inventive approaches on ancient technology — still rings true, he responds quickly.
“That's true,” he says, “if you don't throw your gear away. We have these phases of finding something that has been forgotten about. Sometimes we start a track, and often it just comes from turning on a Kurzweil or SCSI, which we don't use anymore, but let's do a sample dump and see what we can get going. Suddenly, the architecture of a synth will remind you of all those moments you have had with it, if you like. Then all the power that a synth might have in its engines — that has been forgotten in the cheaper, more mass-produced models — becomes apparent. Everything has its value; it's just a matter of investing the time and making sure the gear still works.
“And because the Nord Modular G2 framework is all text based, apparently,” he adds, excitedly, “the source materials, the patches, are written in text code. A few programmers can actually use MacPython, a low-level Mac editing terminal, to compare old modular text patches and replace them with new G2 modular text patches. You can actually find patches that were made in 1994 that can be opened up and reused, in theory. It is that way of cheating. You just figure out a few distinct command-line phrases, and you've got all your patches available in the new module.”
Inspired by Marley Marl, Mantronix and Art of Noise, Autechre today sounds as unique and as radical as their hip-hop heroes did in the mid-1980s. That Booth and Brown still cite those seminal artists as inspirational says as much about their working methods as their music, and that of their musical forefathers.
“All of those people were hugely creative,” Booth says, “using equipment in ways that didn't sound like anyone else using the same equipment. They did all sorts of things to make their tracks sound fresh. I really tapped into that as a young teen; it made me think, ‘It's not about having all the equipment in the world, it's how you use what you've got.’ We can have one synth and still not know everything about it after three years. And I don't mean its functions, but how you feel about it and the way that it can sound. That can take a long time, especially now that one synth can give you such an array of different things. It still feels totally endless.”
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