Confield, when a system writes the rhythm

In 1994, asked by a Future Music writer how the two of them worked, Sean Booth answered with a rule of conduct rather than a list of machines.

“We’ve found that whenever we buy a bit of gear we try and lay off it for six months, until we’ve got used to using it,” he said. “It’s only then that we start doing things that are actually worth using; if we start using something immediately, we just do the corniest stuff with it.”

Seven years later Confield came out, and the thing they had laid off was a piece of software.

Before: a drum machine that also sequences

The 1994 portrait is of two people who trust only what they have taken apart.

They list the early gear themselves: a Roland R-8 drum machine, a Juno 106, a Tascam 244 Portastudio, a Phonic MRT60 DJ mixer used as a sub-mixer.

The R-8 was not just a drum machine. In their pre-computer days it acted as the MIDI sequencer for the Juno and, through its tape sync, as the master clock for the other boxes.

When they got to computers they tried Pro 24 for a week, Cubase for a couple, and settled on Creator. Booth’s reason is a statement of poetics dressed up as a technical preference.

Cubase is a song man’s program, and we’re not song people at all.

Creator worked in loops, like a drum machine. Using the R-8 as a sequencer, Booth says, had given them their first lesson in how to use it.

Then: a program that is not an instrument

Max is neither a sequencer nor a synth: it is the environment where you build either one by wiring blocks together.

“When I first encountered Max, I thought it was totally head-exploding,” Booth told Sound on Sound in 2004. “It was almost exactly what we needed. We initially got it for making MIDI applications, and it was a way for us to make sequences in which we could manipulate and generate data on the fly.”

The words that matter are “on the fly”. The process does not hand you a file to fix later: it produces material while you listen.

“When we do generative stuff we work with real-time manipulation of MIDI faders that determines what the rhythms sound like,” he says. And: “A sequencer is spitting out stuff and we’re using our ears and the faders to make the music.”

Put that way it sounds like giving up control. It is the opposite: you write the rules, and then you stand there with your hands on them.

Nine tracks, sixty-eight minutes

Confield came out on 30 April 2001 on Warp. It is the duo’s sixth album, after Incunabula (1993), Amber (1994), Tri Repetae (1995), Chiastic Slide (1997) and LP5 (1998).

Nine tracks, and the running times matter, because none of the nine is a sketch.

The record opens with six minutes and fifty-six seconds that Booth, four years later, describes as built entirely on a process written in Max.

We passed it around for weeks trying to tap the beat with a hand, and none of us kept it to the end.

Listen while you read

The fourth track, Sim Gishel, is the longest in the first half of the record: seven minutes and fourteen seconds.

The misreading Booth keeps coming back to

The way the record was written about at the time was that Autechre had let the computer get on with it.

Booth does not accept that, and the line he uses to take it apart is the most useful sentence in the 2004 interview: “It seems that for a lot of people, if they hear something that doesn’t sound regular, they assume it’s random.”

On the album itself he is drier still. “There’s a lot of maths and generated beats on Confield, but we never considered that album very difficult.”

And on why those tracks sound the way they do: “Most of Confield came out of experiments with Max that weren’t really applicable in a club environment.”

That is not an abstract manifesto. It is a description of where the record gets listened to, which is a room and not a dancefloor.

What is left

The difference between Confield and the records before it is not the amount of strangeness: it is where the work sits.

On Incunabula the work is in the beat. Here it is in the contraption that makes the beat, and the beat is whatever comes out once you switch it on and put your hands on it.

The rest is done by the ears of two people who, seven years earlier, would leave a new machine in a corner for six months before condescending to use it. The rule was not a pose: it was the method.