Autechre

Autechre are Sean Booth and Rob Brown, who met as teenagers in the Manchester area through electro and early hip-hop culture before turning that shared record collection into music of their own. Their early records for Warp — Incunabula (1993), Amber (1994) — were melodic and relatively accessible by the duo's later standards, closer to the electro and ambient techno their contemporaries were also making at the time.

Tri Repetae (1995) marked a turn toward something harder and more mechanical, industrial textures and off-kilter rhythm programming replacing the earlier records' warmth. From there the duo pushed steadily further into abstraction, eventually building custom software to generate and manipulate rhythm in ways a human programmer working by hand couldn't easily replicate. Booth and Brown have said relatively little publicly about their methods over three decades of records, letting the increasingly difficult, algorithmic music speak for a project that resists easy summary. The duo have also maintained a long-running residency on the radio station NTS, another outlet for the same exploratory, largely unannounced approach to releasing music that defines their studio albums.