Autechre

It’s one thing to fashion your own style, but Autechre's abstract take on electronic music is the equivalent of inventing your own musical language: a bewildering array of digital sounds that rain down like a screenful of code, as beautiful as they are mercurial.

The Sheffield, UK duo began simply enough: In the early ’90s, Sean Booth and Rob Brown were just a couple of B-boys emulating their favorite electro tunes on a drum machine and sampler.

Their debut album, 1993’s Incunabula, found common cause with the skittering beats and mournful synth melodies of the nascent IDM scene, and successive releases pushed the sound forward by adding further kinks to the rhythms, additional crinkles to the synthetic textures.