Autechre: Extended Pleasures

Envane (1997)

Opening with a Dr. Octagon-sampling mutant hip-hop epic, Envane finds Autechre taking a scalpel to their formal influences, recombining the elements with metric precision and creating a whole new sound in the process. Career highlight Laughing Quarter couches its bleak melodies in fluttering loops of industrial noise before building to a hyper-complex yet emotionally singular crescendo that even outstrips Aphex's Ventolin in terms of caustic beauty. A highly recommended entry point into the group's daunting back-catalogue.

Cichlisuite (1997)

Comprising five unrecognisable remixes of a single track, Cichlisuite (pronounced sickly sweet) tempers the abrasiveness of its parent LP Chiastic Slide with terse percussive samples and icy sound design to produce an elegant clutch of tracks that speak more about surface and sheen than texture and feeling. Autechre would go on to greater things but Cichlisuite will always be seen as a crucial aesthetic milestone.

Peel Session 2 (2001)

Notable for the fact that Peel himself chose the track titles after the masters were delivered unmarked, these four variegated pieces catch Autechre in a period of transition. Gelk deploys one of the group's prettiest, music-box melodies before riding a cold, spectral hip-hop beat to its close; Blifil is a raucous electro workout and 19 Headaches sounds like nothing so much as an attempt to score the movement of subatomic particles. Somewhere, Dopplereffekt were taking copious notes...

Gantz Graf (2002)

Much has been written about the title track and its groundbreaking synaesthetic music video but it's the two longer cuts that make this EP unmissable. Dial. pushes the dark, relentless pulse of Basic Channel's Axis into savage new directions before seguing into Cap.IV - a juggernaut concoction of distended cut-ups and feverish electronics that hustles the BPMs into four figures before achieving its writhing, entropic denouement.

Quaristice.Subrange.ep.ae (2008)

A splendid anomaly in the group's catalogue, this single hour-long track comprises limpid drones, spare, looped samples and barely perceptible microtonal shifts that seem to mimic the serenely dislocating experience of sensory deprivation or deep trance. "It seems to really, genuinely satisy the sort of mission statement for ambient music without being what people would consider ambient at all" says Booth. (Tip: You can snaffle the full MP3 for 99p on Bleep.com under the track title Perlence Subrange 6-36).