If you know 'em, maybe you love 'em. They're Autechre, folks-- Sean Booth and Rob Brown. Since 1993, these guys have been inventing, tweaking, twiddling, programming and creating the strangest sounds on this Planet Earth. A good reason to love them, but not good enough. See, to truly love a band, they've gotta actually stimulate you. They gotta activate your mind. Lucky for them, they do that, too. Otherwise, they'd be... I don't know, nameless bedroom losers emulating the Chemical Brothers or something.

But Autechre don't emulate. And if they did, I'm sure they'd find someone better to copy than the Chemical Brothers. Instead, they do their own thing-- a thing of beauty. Is it hard to describe? You bet your ass, and thanks for asking. But allow me to give it a shot. Imagine what it'd sound like if Donkey Kong got his arm caught in a massive salad shooter. Or how it might sound if a drum machine attacked a Pokemon. Yeah, now you're getting somewhere.

But here's the deal with electronic music: you've got emulators, inventors and the inbetween. And on a scale of one to ten-- ten being the most inventious of inventors-- Autechre rack up about a nine. When you hear them, you'll know why. Purchase, ye! I encourage thee. Go and discover! Seek! Find!

As for all y'all who're already Autechre fans, mark these words: this is not your average Peel Session. Sure, it's about 30 minutes long, but that's where the comparisons between this and, say, That Petrol Emotion's Peel Sessions end. What you get is some serious-ass Autechre improv, brand new songs composed on the spot. Remarkably, they don't sound dramatically different from the songs on last year's LP5 (also referred to simply as Autechre 'cause it didn't acutally have a title). On "Milk DX" and "Inhake 2," the beats jump and twitch like some b-movie zombie OD'ing on coke, and the shimmery, computer tones glisten in pools of warm liquid goo. But on "Drone," Peel Sessions' third and final track, the band experiments with a rhythm that sounds more like an old- school lawn sprinkler than a computer hard drive, and a sci-fi doom orchestra that crescendos and gradually builds before becoming a distorted vortex opening into Dimension X.

So, the low-down is, "Milk DX" and "Inhake 2" are your typical Autechre, with the band doing things their own way, yet with a good deal of predictibility. "Drone" is Autechre at their most amazing, creating psychedelic freakouts and other- worldly soundscapes that attack the senses as much as they massage them. Beautiful Autechre. Dreamy Autechre. So Peely before mine ears.

-Ryan Schreiber