: Yeah, OK. That Dale Kiss FM show, he'd have like Future Sound Of London show takeovers and stuff, and it was just mind-blowing.: Up north, we had no contact with The Black Dog, B12, any of them, so it was definitely Colin Dale's show that made us go, "Fucking hell, look at all this that's going on!" It was a bit hard for us, we used to take our tracks into [Manchester record shop] Eastern Bloc and they'd just laugh at us because it weren't dance floor enough. Then when we met Warp—we'd been sending them demos for a year but we properly met them in '92—they didn't really know about this stuff either, so we were kind of discovering it together with them. That AI series really came about because we were going, "We wanna put some tracks out," and they were going, "Yeah, but there's no context for this music, we don't know how to market it or anything." So they really decided they needed to make some context for it.: Yeah, it was really bitty and mixed up. We didn't really know where we were. There wasn't any sense of a scene. Whenever I tried to talk to other musicians, they'd say the same: there is no scene, it's just a... thing. It's a bit like Madchester or something, just a fictional media construct, it doesn't really exist. There was no electronica scene in the UK, there was just student nights, [legendary hippie rave club] Megadogs, playing occasional weird things that people had put together around other acts, playing nights on your own with your label mates, just doing a tour with a couple of other bands. There weren't much going on, so you'd just try and find stuff, and you'd see the same 500 people at every event. So actually thinking of it like that, maybe it was a scene. I don't think any of the artists came into it thinking "we've got a scene" though. We were just a bunch of kids who liked doing acid and staying in listening to weird music, which isn't very socially compatible.: It's more just about: drench yourself in music, find the stuff that would save your night if you were in a bit of a state. Those records like Orbital "Belfast" that could just cut through and transcend, even get in the charts.: A lot of the tunes we were listening to were club tracks, it's just that they had this secondary use, too. Tracks like [Epoch 90's] "V.L.S.I. Heaven"—if you sit at home and play that when you're tripping, it sounds fucking amazing. And we'd always end up just slightly drifting from that. That's how we got into Coil and stuff, because it's compatible but it weren't coming from the same place.: There was a funny thing that happened in the mid-'90s: we were quite young and felt like we were being adopted by people maybe half a generation older than us. Like the Oscillate lot—we did our first ever proper gig in Birmingham for them—or the Megadog people, 'cause we'd end up touring with them.: Got to interrupt to say, Oscillate, fucking legendary night that, doesn't get nearly enough props.: And with them, I think we'd find a shared resistance to music that was obviously hostile, and there'd be this sense that you were looking for something that was either a bit kinder or a bit more cerebral in its effects. That's why we'd end up playing alongside someone like Seefeel, or following Megadog round in a car for four days playing a bunch of massive student raves.: I think you see something like that now, you know. People coming to terms with the fact that a lot of dance music's getting listened to at home, as well as in the club. Producers are aware of that and they'll make their tracks a bit deeper because they're aware they're listened to in more than one way and in more than one place. Objekt's a really good example of that. Even like "Cactus," which is obviously a massive tune, it's a really deep production, he's spent time making it pay to listen to repeatedly, it just works. And since bass music died off a little bit, there's all this other stuff that's coming out that's not even dance music any more, it's just weird electronic stuff. Someone like Arca probably couldn't have done what he's doing now ten years ago, but the climate's shifted a bit.A lot of Americans in particular who are getting into dance music, they don't have anywhere to go to listen to the tracks they think are high-grade tracks. They'll hear great stuff coming out of Europe or whatever, but only have shitty house or EDM clubs to go to, they've got no context to understand it, and I think there's a pressure there pushing the music in an interesting direction, same as when we were just doing acid at home!: Yeah, probably around the time Tri Rep [] came out. We met Peter Rehberg in 1994, and we started to get wind of what Mille Plateaux were doing around that time, a few European labels putting out music that was a bit cooler sounding, or more detached or something. It didn't seem to have as much funk or soul, but it had this other something, which could either be really throwaway or really good. We were really picky, we didn't like all of it, but occasionally we'd hear something that was really interesting.I remember meeting Farmers Manual, thinking they were good and finding we'd been an influence on them, so there was this kind of dialogue going on between us and the Austrians. Definitely it seemed to be Austrians more than Germans we connected with.: And Sluta Leta and people like that. Not Austrian but part of the Mego crowd there.: It's hard to know how you're perceived from outside. I didn't really notice that we were being associated with them so much as they were just our mates. We were already hanging out and swapping ideas and stuff. I don't know if I could point to a moment where that occurred. Maybe the Gescom Minidisc was the most obvious thing—that's an album we probably could've given to Mego if we'd wanted, though it ended up coming out on Russell Haswell's label [OR]. We were doing quite a bit of work that maybe Warp wouldn't want to deal with at the time, and if they wouldn't it'd end up somewhere else.: Yes. Quite often. Our deal with Warp means we can only put out tracks on other labels if we don't use our own names but just use the name Gescom. We negotiated that because we wanted some way to collaborate with our friends, which would happen quite a bit—we were the only ones who had a decent studio, so our mates would be round quite a bit and naturally we'd do tracks with them. We always had quite a few tracks that weren't just me and Rob, which is what Gescom grew out of. Andy from Skam is more of a hip-hop and soul head, so he tends to go for the more fun, electro kind of things, whereas if I'm giving Russell tracks he's not going to go for any hip-hop ones!They're kind of the antidote to each other. We do always try to get Warp to put stuff out, and if they're just me and Rob, there's no reason for 'em not to unless they're really fucking unsellable tracks. Warp do have a tendency to like stuff that's proven. I think we were the first act they'd signed that didn't have any stuff out before, other than that one 12-inch. They made a really big deal of this—"Ohhh we don't normally do this," like a girl saying, "Oh I don't normally do this," to make you feel special. But we certainly don't make music that's aimed at Warp.The last time we did that was[1994]. We thought we'd be a pure fringe act when we signed, but[1993] sold like hot cakes, went to indie number one, and Warp were like, "You've got to follow that up, you need to do another album in six months." We went, [], "Oh, OK," and did this very Warp record for them. Then we never did that again. When we gave themI had half a mind that they were going to say, "Oh, it's not the same, we can't have this." But they went for it, and that gave us the confidence to do what we really wanted, so on Chiastic [, 1997] we went all out to be as weird as possible. I think that's when quite a few people jumped ship.: I see now thatis clearly more off-angle thanand, but actually we always thought we were pretty off-angle inherently from the start. That's why we could mix with the likes of Mego, Skam, Warp or whoever. We've always just been us, we've always just been the sum of our influences, and whatever style we've turned our hand to, it's just been us. Natural. But whencame out, yeah, it did change—the colours changed, it all went a bit khaki, a bit robotic, a bit more combative—and people getting into that was a confidence boost.: We'd always done that stuff! We'd always done tracks that seemed too weird to put out, and just put them on DATs and called them our "Noises DATs." We'd do 'em for listening to, just for us. So when I first heard Mille Plateaux, it was a definite, "Fuck, I do tracks like this, but I just never put 'em out because nobody wants them!" Then suddenly labels wanted it. Some of that stuff on the Gescom Minidisc was really old, and we'd just never thought anyone would put it out. This is back to them early days of taking tapes to Eastern Bloc and them just laughing. At the time I used to think, "Fuck you, this is really good, you're just not listening right." I was a right arrogant little shit, I really thought, "You're wrong, I'm right, these tracks are good, and you don't get it and in five years you'll be wishing you'd put em out." They wouldn't have made any money though.: Nothing cheesy, but I do have this urge to make a hip-hop album at some point. We do hip-hop tracks, but we don't put them on albums because they're too empty sounding. They're like plain breaks tracks. We both have that in us, we both do a fair amount of that stuff, and it doesn't really have an outlet. There are MCs I want to work with, but in my experience working with MCs doesn't always go that well, there're all kinds of hiccups that can happen. So we just don't do it because it's just too much brainwork.: If it was as simple as just turning up and flowing as we would with our mates on the early Gescom stuff then it'd be fine, but it never is. We've got all these facets and guilty pleasures and other things. I was really into soul music, when we used to listen to late-night radio in Manchester on Sundays, I'd sit and record the best of each hour and it didn't matter to me which show it was from, whether it was some Sade DMC remix or some brand new Marshall Jefferson. So that's in me, definitely. But for us to be in this arena where we're seen as "just Autechre,"—no, it's not frustrating, because we get to flex quite a bit of the different things we're into.: We've got away with quite a lot of different things. When we put out[2010] we thought nobody would go for it, we thought everyone by that stage wanted mega-complex-beats Autechre, they're all going to be like, "What the fuck's this plinky-plonky music?" But then again every time we put out a record that's really different, it probably isn't. When we put out[2003] we thought it was like a hip-hop record or something. Obviously it wasn't, but I'd be playing tracks to mates going, "I've really gone out on a limb here, done something really different, does it sound like us?" They'll be laughing, going, "Does it sound like you? Fuck off—it's so obviously you!"We can't really help ourselves, I suppose we're lucky like that. I think we probably would've tried to use the same name for everything if we could've got away with it, but I guess the way Warp works keeps the focus. I know Steve [Beckett] pretty well, I know his tastes, and I guess if I gave him a hip-hop album and it was good he'd put it out in a heartbeat. If we decided to do a bass music album they'd put it out I'm sure. So Warp in itself isn't stopping us doing anything. Maybe if we did a death metal album they'd say no, I dunno.: In Rob there is. He's more of a soul man than me.: I think Sean's maturing nicely though.: I like it more than I did, I listen to a lot of '80s soul now.: When we were kids it was quite a polarising thing. I've always been quite malleable, so I'll allow people to have opposing views to me without challenging them too much.: I'll tell you what though, when I first heard that James Blake remix of Untold, "Stop What You're Doing," I was blown away. I was like, "How is he managing this level of intensity with soul chords like that?" Nobody would do that! That'd be the thing for me, it'd have to be new to that extent. I really love that track, and it'd have to be as good as that, it wouldn't sound like that obviously, but it'd have to be at least as impactive as that for me to be worth doing.: Sort of one eye. I'm not hip at all. I'm the guy who finds out about a record a year after it comes out, these days. I do have one eye on Bleep and Boomkat, I listen to that stuff, I buy things I like then promptly forget the artist name immediately then it just goes in the pile. There's some artists I'll still buy everything by—someone like Ancient Methods, I'll just buy everything. I don't even know what my criteria are any more, though. But it is good to see that certain things will become fashionable or noted that are actually good. It's not like the world's gone to shit and I'm old and I hate it all—almost the opposite. I feel like it's got so good, but there's so much of it that I just can't keep up with it. I spend so much time in the studio that I don't really have time for music beyond that.I watch films and telly and stuff to switch my brain off, because I've spent all day listening to one patch and making music, four hours of this one thing constantly changing—that's it, my brain is fucking toast. I can't understand anything after that. I do want to hear records, and I do really like stuff when I hear it, but I'm not up to date because there's so many things. I don't even know if anyone's up to date any more. A thousand releases a week or whatever, how could anyone keep up? I should be asking you that!: That's true, mates are important. Yeah, it was like that with Ancient Methods. '06 or '07, when the first couple of 12s had come out, people were like, "You've got to get on this, it's really fucking good." I'd been off techno for quite a while then but that really turned my head around. I remember at the same time that noisy French house thing had got really big too, and Mr Oizo was doing mad stuff, I really loved that. That's how I'll usually do it, I'll have two or three acts that I'll grab onto, because that's all I've got to keep me held on. I'm in the dark about a lot of stuff, but like you say I like the mystery of that. When we was kids, we'd have electro tapes, there'd be 20 tracks on the side of a tape, I wouldn't know what any of them were, half of them weren't even finished because they were tapes of tapes of mates taping off the radio. There'd be this weird sense of them being elusive as fuck. I like that thing now of going online and I know within half an hour I'll have found something that I like that I've never heard of before. The world's definitely a better place now than in '92, '93, there's so much more going on musically.: You're both totally right. Because there's so much going on now, you could argue that there's a massive background noise of actual music. When we were kids there wasn't so much of that, but the noise was social, it'd be about fighting your way through hierarchies—like kids with older brothers who had tapes off the radio because they were old enough to listen to midnight pirate radio and know who the DJs were and when they played. Certain layers that I as a young kid couldn't penetrate. And even when you got a tape, like Sean said, you didn't know who the fuck any of the acts on it were. The background noise was a negative social force, trying to stop you getting to what you wanted.: Basic fucking elitism right there. Nobody talks about the old days as being this horrible frenzy of elitism, but it fucking was.: But I never felt I was being held back by any one person or any one thing.: No, but it's like the fucking class system isn't it? You can't escape it, you're a 14-year-old, you've got an 18-year-old mate, he knows more about music than you because that's just how it is. Or was. Nowadays, that extra amount of information is not that valuable—the 14-year-old has got that at their fingertips. They don't need the 18-year-old to hold their hand. It's better because of that, but harder because you can't rely on tastemakers. I wouldn't complain about that, but obviously I miss John Peel! I don't know if you could ever have someone like that now. Do we need someone like that? Maybe we do, maybe we need someone to navigate the water and point out all the big fish. I'd like to think it can sort itself out and the kids can find the good stuff themselves, but maybe I'm naive and utopian.: Heh, yeah, I bet Google are working on that!: Oh, I'm one of those weird guys who'd do it anyway.: It's definitely habit forming.: It's fully addictive. If I have a choice of going out or staying in and doing some patching, I'll almost always choose staying in unless I'm under a lot of pressure to go out. Takes quite a lot to get me out of here. I mean, I'm not socially that bad, but I just really, really like making music. I don't have to make any effort to get stuck in here. If I did I'd probably get a teaching job or something because I'd need something else in life, but I don't!: I'll be totally honest, there's parts of what we do that are really fucking irritating. If I'm trying to build something and it's not working but I can't work out what the bug is, and I spend a month debugging it—that's not that unusual—then I'll be really fucking banging my head against a brick wall for a month. It's a horrible feeling. But what you get at the end of it, when you've solved the problem and finally figured out that stupid mistake you made five weeks ago that you could easily have avoided—well, we're back to learning. You've immediately learned. If I could do it and not have that, ever, it would be better, though. But I'm happy with it, warts and all. And when it is working, it's all set up, then doing tracks on it... well, there's nothing like it. It's amazing. So it's a compulsion, I suppose. I don't see that as being gruelling. It's really invigorating, and whatever the opposite of gruelling is— life affirming!: Better than I did two weeks ago, I tell you! I was a bit nervous. It's not Top Ten material, is it? We wanted to sneak this out, but Warp heard it and said, "No, we want to promo it a bit." So we thought, "Right, OK, we'll promo it," and we came up with a plan that we were happy with that wasn't really a normal promo plan. I suppose we tried to break their promo system by being creative. But now I've had opinions back, I feel different and a lot more confident. As we said, we're out of touch, we don't know what's going to connect with an audience. Rob and I have been back and forth with this thing quite a bit now, and it's become this enormous thing, and we don't know how to frame it, or what it is. We don't know if it's an album, or a collection of EPs or albums or just... things. We have no idea what this actually is.When we first approached Warp about doing an online store, the idea was it'd function the same way as a SoundCloud or Bandcamp account would function: it would give us an opportunity to release stuff quickly. Originally it was about releasing live material. We'd had a couple of people approach us with services for burning CDs on the night at gigs and we thought that was a great idea, but that then became, "Maybe we should make a website, which'd be easier and we could throw each gig's tracks online." And then that became, "Well, if we had an online outlet, maybe we could use that to put out tracks as and when we do them, so there'd be this new element to what we're doing." So we never expected this to be marketed like an album, the original plan was to just keep putting tracks on our website as we go. We'd already assembled these tracks into these groupings, and after the live tracks Warp asked if we had anything else we'd like to put on the site, so it gradually assembled itself from there, really.It's not like we're trying to blow away the album format or be hyper-futurist weirdos. But on the other hand, doing it this way gives us the opportunity to think in structures that aren't constrained by physical format. If we've got a 25-minute track, it's no issue to put it out. When we did, we had an hour-long track, and we thought, "Well, there's no point adding a whole extra CD to the 'proper' album just for this one track, nobody's going to want to pay the extra money for that." But if we put it online a few people might buy it. We did that and that worked, so that fed into what we're doing now.For about three years I've been sitting around listening to these long-as-fuck tracks, going, "Hmm, I really like this, but if it's on an album everyone'll go, 'Why is this taking up all this space? It's ruined the flow of the album!'" It all comes back to this idea of the album, and the sacred thing that it is. We're not really from an albums background, though, we're from a 12-inches-and-weird-tracks-on-tapes-where-you-don't-know-who-the-artists-are background! So it kind of makes sense for us to do things that aren't format-related as such. Like when we did, we deliberately called it an EP so we could do things that weren't album-like. Obviously albums were originally just a convenient ratio of profit to the amount of plastic you need to use, and that's become a sacred thing due to the annals of rock history, and the whole thing of Great Albums—"these are the Great Albums and these are the Not Very Great Albums"—and it's about worshipping the format. We're finding that using the store we can ignore that a bit.: Totally. The format is arbitrary depending on what era you're talking about. I think one thing we're good at is compiling something really well so it gives you a feeling, from start to end, and maybe albums taught us that, with the CD limit of 72 minutes or whatever.: Mixtapes, too!: Yeah, but definitely albums with that specific limit. You didn't have the Paul Simon limits of 50 minutes or whatever a vinyl album has.: Well, we were definitely pushing against those limits. We'd be packing them as full as we could.: Yeah, one second short of the limit. We definitely fill up what's available, then we learned this flow thing from filling up two CDs—you want a narrative from start to end, and now that we don't need to change records, to get up and change to the second CD, there's no limit to how long that flow can be. But at the same time, we have high regard for the way those constrained structures work as an arc, and what happens along the way between start and end. We might be breaking out of the album structure, but it's completely the opposite of a disregard for how the music is structured.: It's one of them where if you're doing art, you have to consider the medium a lot. With this store thing that we've constructed, we wanted to be conscious of what it was and how it worked, because if we were just flinging albums up on there it would be a meaningless thing. There is a set of liberties that you can exploit if you've got that facility. I mean, I've been following various kids on SoundCloud and they'll upload 50 tracks in a day. No artist in any other context would do this, but on SoundCloud nobody's there to tell them that this is wrong. We also quite like the chapters thing, like you have if you're doing marathon TV watching. Like, if I'm watching some big mainstream show like, I'll watch four or five of them in a row on a Sunday afternoon—and that's no longer weird for people to do that. So I guess we're making music for people who'll do things like that, who want to be completist and check out the whole of a thing.: There's something about how directors make a series like that, they'll have the committee storyboarding, but there's an awareness that some people will have a gap of a week between episodes but others will be binge-watching it on a weekend, sort of speed T'ai Chi-ing through it all. There's something really satisfying about that behaviour. Going back a bit, with Warp we'd talk about an album, we'd be quite tentative, there'd be a long selecting process, and by the time the thing came out some of the tracks might be two or three years old. There'd be a six-month lead-in time to get to press, three months before release for a review for the paper magazines, and you'd end up with a compilation of tracks that were actually old, and that would freak me out.was definitely talked about as an album for a year before its release, and everything was two or three years old when it came out.: It would be frustrating talking to people about it, trying to present it as something new.: The way you play those tracks would be completely different by that point, and you're having to talk about things you did ages ago and can't even remember what you were thinking.