Electronic pioneers autechre make a rare live appearance at the temple bar music centre on saturday april 8, their first in ireland for six years.

AUTECHRE

Alongside fellow electronic mavericks and Warp Records stable mates Aphex Twin and Boards Of Canada, Autechre stand out like supernovas amid one of music's customarily starless constellations. Not that you'll find the Sheffield-via-Manchester duo of Sean Booth and Rob Brown gracing the pages of Heat magazine any day soon. Shrewd, sphinx-like and fiercely protective of their music, they nonetheless remain tantalizing, even awe-inspiring enigmas.

In truth, the plaudits and reverence with which Autechre have been showered throughout a fourteen year-long career are simply the fruits of creative integrity and consistently fearless experiment. Not to mention an oft-overlooked playfulness and a rarely mentioned musicality.

There are few artists operating in contemporary music whose work could be accurately described as 'pioneering'. Though they'd doubtless balk at the term, Autechre probably have more claim on the label than most. For theirs is music that, on first listen at least, appears to be without influence a rich hermetic sound world that is a law unto itself, adhering only to the constraints of its own internal logic.

But music, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and even 'pioneers' have to draw on precedents. In Autechre's case that means dance music ?more specifically 80s US electro. Indeed, the notoriously contentious appellation 'Intelligent dance music', under whose banner their early albums ?1993's Incunabula in particular - was blithely shunted, is not entirely without relevance here.

Autechre's music may seem, on one level, to be more a product of the laboratory than the dancefloor, but study more closely their trademark moir? of collapsing electronic counterpoints, melting wave forms and ominous digital thrums and you find ghosts prowling the microprocessors. Sly Stone's convulsive drum machine booty shake is there, if you look hard enough, as are imprints of Miles Davis's turn-of-the-70's groove abstractions and, naturally, the terpsichorean thump of vintage electro avatars Mantronix, Cybotron, Grandmaster Flash and their ilk.

The Cape Canaveral from which their wild electronic orbit launched back in 1991, electro still has vestigial impact on Autechre's hyper-processed signature and - though it's often overlooked, so uncompromising and often overwhelming are their sound designs - at the root of the duo's entire output lies a sensual human pulse. In short, Autechre have the funk.

There is beauty in their music too ?a liquid, alien exotica that's as sensual as it is scientific. Lagoons of intoxicating acid ambience shimmer decorously even amid the fury of their classic 1995 Tri Repetae album and beguiling, crystalline melody lines underpin even the most outr? microchip demolition derby on more recent benchmark longplayers like 1998's LP5 or 2001's Confield. All of which sets the scene for their latest epistle,
Untilted.

The follow up to 2003's critically lauded Draft 7.3, Autechre's eighth full album is a dense yet elegantly expansive work that ripples with some of the duo's key signatures: epileptic rhythmic counterpoints, complex, spiralling melodic cells, immense tectonic shifts in the low end, dagger sharp glacial crackles in the upper registers. But it also hits straight between the eyes with a raw, almost live-in-the-room immediacy. 'We're really cranked up and in a totally different gear at the moment'. Sean Booth discloses, in reference to the new album. 'It feels like we're working in a quite radically different way now; not so much in terms of the final output ?I'll let others judge that - but we're getting ideas down a lot quicker now, trying to make the most of what time we've got'.

It's an urgency which manifests on the thudding LCC, or the equally unyielding opening passages of Ipacial Section, a strange bass end warmth cushioning what sounds like dysfunctional kitchen utensils trying to disco dance. Pro Radii, meanwhile, is the album's most thunderous piece?it's harsh reverberations might be something inspired by (or even recorded in) the tumult of an Iraq war fire fight, with blasts of percussive clamour and disturbing shards of human noise spasmodically flashing into frame.

But there are less frenetic moments?both opening tracks cede to more restful extended codas and even the squirming time signature of Augmatic Disport eventually evolves into a dreamily spacious dub pulse. Elsewhere, those electro influences hove firmly into view on the almost jaunty Fermium ('That's just a shout-out, really, to people who know. We can't get away from the fact that we're DJs,' Booth confesses) and while Iera and The Trees forage madly but meticulously on house and techno's furthest shores, Sublimit is nothing short of clipped space funk.

Those song titles, as with all Autechre designations, seem drawn from a vocabulary as rich, particular and abstruse as the music they frame.
'There's definitely a bit of writers like Edward Lear, EE Cummings and Lewis Carroll in there - even some Roald Dahl from when I was a kid', Booth admits. 'My mum used to read me Edward Lear all the time'.

Indeed, there's an undeniably Lear-like charm to all Autechre's work; a sense of the joyfully surreal that is further proof that Booth and Brown are sentient human beings, not robots. In fact, Autechre are one of the few operative musical units who can genuinely claim to be exploiting the synergy between technology and aesthetics, pushing the proverbial envelope principally as artists, not lab-coated technicians. In the process they are making some of the only truly 21st century music yet minted.