8. AutechreTri Repetae
I could be making this up but I imagine this era of Autechre, and the overall sound of this LP, may have been reasonably influential on you when it came to working on your first album, Flatland, where you had the chance to stretch your sound out a little more beyond the club-focused format of your records up to that point?
Yeah, 100%. I first discovered Autechre at around the same time as I came across a lot of these other records – aged about 17 or 18. As a producer though, it wasn’t until around the time of making Flatland that my practice became based enough around sound design that even attempting to make anything that was influenced by Autechre could be a remote possibility. They were always on my mind and I’d long been into them, but I certainly wouldn’t have had any idea how to begin recreating this sound when I was making my first few records.
Autechre were my introduction to alien machine-sounding music. Sure, obviously Squarepusher and Aphex Twin sounded like nothing else before but in a different way. Both were more approachable: Aphex Twin was beautiful and melodic, and Squarepusher appealed to me as a drummer. With Autechre, it was just like, ‘What are these sounds? This is insane’. I love this era of Autechre because it’s at the midpoint of their more melodic and analogue-sounding earlier era, and the increasingly more cerebral and impenetrable, whatever-you-want-to-call-it material that followed. Tri Repetae really resonated with me because it hit that sweet spot. LP5 was another Autechre record I got into at the time, but it almost felt like I was trying to prove something to myself being into it, whereas I was able to enjoy Tri Repetae completely on its own merit as a young and inexperienced music listener.
Listening to the opening track, ‘Dael’ – which is an amazing opener to an album, by the way – as a 17 or 18-year-old who had never been to a dance music club – and it wasn’t really on my radar as something that I’d be interested in – gave me this image in my head that what such a club might be like wasn’t this celebratory thing with house music and jubilant dancing, but rather this very austere, decayed space – almost like the interior of Berghain or the Kraftwerk building – where music like this was playing, and a very sparsely populated crowd of freaks and weirdos were gyrating slowly. Probably the Chris Cunningham PlayStation girl was in there somewhere. It was, on the whole, quite a weird experience in my head.
Obviously I went to a club a couple of years later and put that idea to rest, but 10 to 15 years later, I was playing the warm-up set at Tresor at the launch party for my mix CD [Kern, Vol. 3], and I decided to play a really slow set of 90 to 115-BPM stuff. I played that track and there was a moment a few minutes into it where I was looking through the metal bars of the cage that houses the DJ booth at this sparsely populated concrete room, a strobe light going off, seeing these people slowly gyrating in front of me, and I got this incredibly strange sense of déja vu.
