Autechre: Flux Capacity

‘Where to start with Autechre?’ – along with ‘Do you crave to supersize your wang?’ – seems to be a question that the seasoned online messageboard user is faced with on an almost daily basis. The Skinny has long held that the best advice is simply this: Start at the beginning, work through chronologically and don’t miss anything out. It’ll save time in the long run. Anyone who’s ever tried to compile any kind of Autechre best-of will testify to the trauma involved – like trying to put together a compilation of Jim Davidson’s shittest jokes, the sheer wealth of eligible material nullifies the very point of the process. It’s pleasing then that Warp have more or less adhered to this philosophy when compiling the new EPs 1991 - 2002 boxset – a sprawling 5 cd collection of the duo’s non-album releases from the first half of their career thus far.

As is fitting for a group that cut their teeth spinning Belgian techno on Manchester’s IBC radio in the early ‘90s, the collection kicks off with the Cavity Job 12” – comprising a pair of wily UK hardcore cuts dedicated to the pirate station that gave them their first airplay. With its up-front acid synths and rave-friendly vocal loops it’s hard not to view this release retrospectively as a calculated attempt to get their name out into the musical consciousness – a foot in the door that would provide some creative breathing space. Indeed, within a year Autechre would find themselves prepping a markedly different pair of tracks for Warp’s classic Artificial Intelligence compilation – a watershed moment that reified the burgeoning feeling that techno could only continue to evolve if people realised they didn’t actually have to dance to it.

This sense of deliberate evolution really becomes evident on 1995’s Garbage and Anvil Vapre EPs as Autechre go about the process of stripping down the techno form to its atomic core – the relentless pulse that condenses time into a single energetic moment – and repurposing it as a vessel for pure experimentation. In this crucible we find Autechre gleefully employing the magical timbres of Coil to transmute Kraftwerk’s perky melodies into something strange and imperious; we hear the empyrean tones of Jon Hassell’s ‘fourth world’ music acquire distorted inflections as they react to the agency of Basic Channel’s unyielding kinetic flux.

Whilst Anvil Vapre’s innovations would find particular resonance with the Birmingham-based coterie of Surgeon, Female and Regis (a gifted triumvirate whose mission to perfect a super-strain of aerobic, atmospheric techno continues to this day), by 1997 Autechre had moved on by going back to their roots; their Envane EP taking the blueprints of ‘80s hiphop as a launchpad for increasingly ambitious experiments in texture and rhythm. With each new release came new epiphanies brought about by intuitive developments in their methodology; this process perhaps reaching its apogee during the title track of their 2002 EP, Gantz Graf.

Here was a music which seemed to apply a combative b-boy logic not only to the history of electronic and experimental music, but to the very idea of sound itself – each tone turned inside-out to explore its abstract potentials; each rhythm energised then atomised to make way for the next. At such moments it seems as though Autechre are capable of almost anything; of not only mining the past for the meanings and potentials that fell between the cracks, but also presaging that which is to come and using it to shape the present. In their work Autechre have created a language of possibility and EPs 1991 - 2002 stands as an integral component of their discography – one of the most unassailable bodies of work in contemporary music.