Space Lord Mothers

Suicide
As far as combining abrasive industrial clatter with child-like lullabies, there are few who can hold a light to New York ‘synth-punk’ duo Suicide. Comprised of Alan Vega on vocals and Martin Rev on electronics, the popular consensus now is that they were that rarity; a band ahead of their time. Supporting slots with The Clash and Elvis Costello saw them bottled and booed, which was all latent ammunition for the irrepressible Vega. With the 2002 re-release of their seminal debut album, they even had the audacity to include an infamous, badly-received show from Brussels in 1978 that ended prematurely in a near-riot. Whilst more conventional punk bands talked the talk, there were few who embodied the movement’s spirit quite like Suicide.

Autechre
Within the field of what has been dubbed ‘intelligent dance music’, Autechre are another experimental duo who split opinion, with key-figure Tom Jenkinson, AKA Squarepusher, apparently not a fan. Members Rob Brown and Sean Booth don’t make things easy, their interviews labouring heavily with tech-jargon talk whilst track titles look more like the gibberish of a malfunctioning Hal 9000. But mere mortals need only concern themselves with the music, and from 1993’s brilliant, and accessible, Incanabula (which found a spiritual home in Darren Aronofsky’s debut movie Pi), through to the divisive LP5 and onto recent head-fuck Quaristice, they are never less than boundary pushing.

Matmos
San Franciscan duo Matmos are perhaps best known for their collaborations with ice queen Bjork. Martin Schmidt and Drew Daniel notably worked with the Icelandic one on her 2004 a cappella album Medulla, made entirely from reconstructed vocal samples. However, even before working with Miss Gudmundsdottir, the twosome had already out-bonkered the bonkers one with their 2001 album A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure. A relatively accessible and upbeat collection of seven glitch electro tracks belied the fact that they were made from the various snips and squelches recorded from surgical procedures, including plastic surgery and liposuction. Queasy listening indeed, and certainly not what the doctor ordered.