Elseq @ 10

A sprawling, ticking, crunching masterwork from Autechre

British electronic duo Autechre — Sean Booth and Rob Brown — released Elseq almost without fanfare on May 20, 2016. One week earlier, the song “feed1” had premiered on Tom Ravenscroft’s BBC Radio 6 show, and four days later, a second track, “c16 deep tread,” was played on a student radio station in Alaska.

Elseq was Autechre’s first studio recording since the October 2013 L-Event EP, which was a four-track coda/addendum to their 17-track, two-hour album Exai, released in March of that year. In between, they had offered AE_LIVE, a collection of nine live performances, each consisting of a single roughly hour-long track. (Between 2015 and 2019, AE_LIVE was expanded to 28 tracks, ultimately offering nearly 29 hours of music in all.)

Elseq consists of five volumes, each running between 45 and 53 minutes and containing three to five tracks. At present, the volumes must be purchased individually on the duo’s Bandcamp page, although upon its initial release the whole set was available as a bundle from Warp Records.

Autechre’s music is extremely abstract, almost opaque. Their pieces do not have sung vocals (electronically chopped-up voices do appear once or twice across their discography), conventional melodic hooks, verse-chorus structure, or — with a few exceptions — a simple, steady beat that one can dance to. They aren’t even compositions in the traditional sense. In a 2018 feature, writer Philip Sherburne described their process as follows:

Their workspace — their core creation, really — is something they refer to as “the system”: a labyrinthine compendium of software synthesizers, virtual machines, and digital processes that they readily admit would be indecipherable to anyone but themselves. Their actual method of making music could be boiled down to what they call “fuckery”: endlessly tinkering with the software in their respective studios until the results sound good enough to merit hitting the “record” switch. They consider themselves explorers as much as creators—spelunkers navigating deep in the recesses of their own mutant technology.

Sean Booth said of their methods, “It gets a bit hazy in terms of what’s a musical idea and what’s a piece of technology. If you make a sequencer that only makes one type of sequence, and you’ve used it twice, then I guess you’ve used the same musical idea twice… you can have a patch [in the visually based music software Max] that’s essentially a sequencer but it only makes one sequence, so is that a piece of music or a piece of technology? It’s hard to talk about it because you end up being really mysterious. There’s only so much you can say about it without being extremely boring.”

Later in the same piece, Booth explained that much of Autechre’s music isn’t even created “together,” saying, “We’ve never had specific roles in the band. It’s not like one of us is a bass player. We both have always done tracks on our own. All the albums, I don’t know what the proportion is exactly, but there are more solo tracks than there are tracks that we both worked on at the same time. Or we’d swap projects, you’d end up with a half-finished track and hand it over to the other guy. It’s just when you’re doing it with patches, it’s way more interesting, because you’re not stepping on the other guy’s toes by erasing or changing things because… Nothing’s frozen. It’s a lot more flexible, so there’s quite a lot of room for fuckery.”

I see these quotes as validation for my theory that Autechre is more than the sum of Sean Booth and Rob Brown. That the way they try to demythologize their work in pretty much every interview, portraying themselves as just two friends who enjoy playing around with relatively primitive equipment, is a way of averting their own gaze from the edifice they’ve created. Because Autechre music really is alien-sounding in a way that very little else out there is. It very rarely sounds to me like music made by people; it sounds like music made by machines for machines. “The system,” whatever it consists of, playing itself.

I’m currently reading Peter Watts’ 2006 novel Blindsight, a hard SF story about a group of future astronauts encountering an alien space station and the effect that confronting a completely incomprehensible intelligence has on them. And the way Watts describes the inhuman geometry of the aliens’ vehicle/habitat/whatever, not to mention their anatomy and biological functionality, very much reminds me of listening to Autechre. And it’s because of that alien quality that theirs is some of my favorite music in the world. I’ve written about Autechre a few times in the past. In 2018, I discussed their LP5 on its 20th anniversary, and said:

The more you listen to LP5, the more it makes sense. On the fifth or sixth play, it ceases to be overwhelming, and you realize that most of their compositions really only have two or three elements — they’re like techno tracks in that way, or the ’80s electro that Booth and Brown have always called their biggest influence. Armed with that knowledge, you can start listening to just one sound, and following it through from beginning to end, like tracing a vein on your arm. It’s at that point that the album really starts to reveal itself, and become so beautiful it’s like watching an endlessly spinning, deceptively intricate sculpture of chrome and glass twirl in the sunlight.

Two years later, I reviewed the then-new SIGN (without knowing that its counterpart, PLUS, would follow just a few months later). I said, in part:

The longer it goes on, the more beautiful SIGN seems to get. The robotic, post-human feel fades away, replaced gradually by a real sense of two men trying to communicate to each other across distances both geographic and emotional. Beatless tracks like “Metaz form8” and “th red a” have a kind of searching grandeur, while the steady thump and hypnotic swoops of “psin AM” resemble Autechre auditioning for a spot on one of the Kompakt label’s annual Total compilations. And the album’s closing track, “r cazt,” sounds like one of the solo pieces Booth described in 2018; it could be one man sitting in a room full of synths, slowly picking out melodies that suffuse what would ordinarily be shimmering, sunlit tones with a melancholy that’s hard to put your finger on, but impossible to ignore. It allows the listener to slowly drift back to awareness after having been sunk in Autechre-world for an hour. It’s as close to the work of Daniel Lopatin as anything in the Booth/Brown catalog.

Elseq doesn’t sound like either of those records. Instead, it sounds more like their mid ’90s albums Tri Repetae and Chiastic Slide, the stuff I described in that LP5 piece as “barbed, jagged collages of booming, irregular beats and weird crunching sounds.”

The tracks seem to owe a lot to industrial; many of the sounds have a metallic edge to them, with thick analog-sounding synths blurting and squelching atop beats that sound like synthesized handclaps playing from the bottom of a barrel. They’re also quite minimal, only consisting of two or three sounds and some reverb. They play for seven or nine or in one case (“elyc6 0nset”) 27 minutes without changing much, almost like hip-hop beat tapes created by producers in the hopes that the tracks will be purchased by rappers. I mean, “TBM2” features a literal boom-bap beat that loops virtually unchanged for almost seven minutes, with just a few weird warping sounds on top.

It’s not all like that, though. Many Elseq tracks are quite beautiful; the entirely beatless “foldfree casual” sounds like some of the more pastoral bits of Vangelis’s Blade Runner soundtrack, until it begins to disintegrate in its second half, and “spaces how V” pulls a similar trick but is possibly a little more alien-sounding, like deep space transmissions pulled through Pro Tools. Interestingly, the next piece, “freulaeux,” is as close as Autechre has ever gotten to Basic Channel-style dub techno.

When it came out, the duo gave a long interview to Resident Advisor; Booth told writer Joe Muggs, “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… 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.”

In this 2024 interview, Autechre claim that they’re done making studio albums; SIGN and PLUS are their last two concise, self-contained works. Their focus is now on live performance, and releasing what they consider to be their best shows as digital downloads. I’ve never had the slightest interest in “seeing” (they perform in total darkness) Autechre live, even though many of their releases — LP5, EP7, Confield, Elseq, NTS Sessions, SIGN and PLUS — are among my favorite music ever. So this announcement is disappointing, but understandable. What’s more disappointing, and less understandable given the object fetishism of the Autechre fan base, is that Elseq has never been given a physical release. If they ever do make it into the 5CD set it deserves to be, I’ll buy one the moment it’s announced.

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And speaking of CDs… the latest releases from our label are officially out on Friday, but we have copies ready to ship to you right now!

Ava Mendoza’s Alive Alone, Alive Together is a rip-roaring live album featuring Hamid Drake on four of its eight tracks. Buy it here, and play it loud. (And if you’ve never heard her 2025 release Mama Killa, with violinist gabby fluke-mogul and drummer Carolina Pérez, you can get both titles bundled for a special price!)

Joel Futterman & William Parker’s Transcendent Universe is a piano-bass studio session that’ll wallop you right through the wall, but in a heart-meltingly romantic/rapturous sort of way. Buy it here, and let it have its way with you.