Sean Booth and Rob Brown, aka Autechre, are two of the most influential figures in modern electronic music. After modest beginnings in the early eighties knocking up crude electro and hip hop mix tapes, and a brief stint with the UK's early hardcore scene, the duo soon found their own sound, and along with it a spiritual home on Sheffield's seminal Warp Records. Their twenty-track new album, Quaristice, is out now.

"It's the usual collection of diary entries," says Booth, a Rochdale native, now living and working from his home studio in Suffolk. "It happened oddly because we'd been recording bits of the live set and messing it up. Then we just ended up doing loads of other tracks that way. The tracks grew out of that really."

Quaristice will be the pair's ninth album since their 1993 debut Incunabula. Since that time, Autechre's sound has been repeatedly stripped down and redefined, taking on an increasingly deconstructionist aesthetic over the years. While their 2005 album, Untilted, continued in this tradition, it was in other ways seen as somewhat of a departure, hinting at times back to their earlier work, with the occasional familiar-sounding drum machine loops, along with a few almost catchy melodic lines. "Untilted was more about using hardware sequencers to do songs, instead of computers" he explains. "Quaristice is more like live performances done in the studio, and then edited down from hour-long jams into much shorter tracks."

So is the reworking of live performances a way to introduce more spontaneity into their work? "I dunno, I get into a flow either way, it's just a different flow," he says. "Because music's such an instant thing to perceive, it's easy to make unconscious decisions. But I mean, that's how I'm editing a lot of the time anyway - I just blaze through it. Workstations are so fast now it's easy to work in a fluid way."

These days the duo live an hour apart from each other – Brown has settled in the sprawl of central London while Booth prefers the country life – and do the bulk of their work in separate studios. "We swap a lot of files, meet up for three or four day sessions usually and work in between too. It's quite fuzzy as you can imagine," says Booth. And how do the pair resolve creative differences?  "Usually we don't have them - we just agree. We're both quite adaptable."