Autechre - Untilted

Released on Warp in April 2005, Untilted is Autechre's eighth studio album and one of the clearest documents of the duo's move away from conventional beat programming towards generative, algorithm-assisted composition. Sean Booth and Rob Brown had spent the previous decade pushing IDM's technical ceiling ever higher; here they largely abandoned the idea of a beat you could nod along to, in favour of shifting, unpredictable rhythmic structures that feel closer to weather patterns than music production. At eight tracks and over an hour long, it demanded more from listeners than almost anything in electronic music at the time, and its influence is audible in a generation of producers who've since made difficulty itself a compositional tool.

Autechre is Sean Booth and Rob Brown, two Rochdale-raised producers who met through the Manchester hip-hop and breakdance scene before turning towards the emerging IDM movement in the early 1990s. Signed to Warp since their debut, they've spent three decades pushing steadily away from anything resembling a dancefloor, building custom software to generate and manipulate their own rhythms rather than relying on conventional production tools. Fiercely private and rarely interviewed, they've become one of electronic music's most respected and most uncompromising acts — a duo whose catalogue rewards obsessive attention and offers almost nothing in the way of easy entry points.