In 2007, I finished a Masters (Research) thesis analysing and attempting to recreate what I considered to be key features in selected Autechre tracks ranging from their albums/EPs between 1998 and 2005. The thesis itself was a sneaky way to motivate myself to learn how to use Max and other music software. I used to be reluctant to share it (and still don’t have it up for public download), because a) I didn’t think it did justice to Autechre’s work, and b) Sean Booth had said in a few interviews that he disliked people reading ‘meaning’ into their work, or proffering how they did stuff (see interview with Alex Reynolds). I was quite ‘green’ when I wrote this — learning as I went along — and it was focusing on a relatively narrow period of their work, which is likely to be largely different to how they might work creatively today. I was trying to draw out recurring characteristics in Autechre’s music from this time and theorise how certain things might have been done, or could be replicated. A selection of audio tracks that resulted from this research can be found here:
In 2018, I completed a PhD on Hanna-Barbera’s television cartoon soundtracks of the 1960s and 1970s.
Publications
See Résumé.