Are you telling me this is AE: SIGN? (Autechre LP 14)

lol i've got to go out shortly

It's starting!

Yay, going with silence beforehand was a good idea

lol i wondered where the noises in the house were coming from then remembered i'd got the stream running

I love it already.

ohhhhhhhhhhhhh

Those pesky sound designers next door

i am listening on cheap child's headphones because our daughter is being restless and i didn't want to go upstairs and risk waking her, these were all i could find downstairs.

avoid the chat. are those things always like this? gonna periodically check in here instead

love this already btw

damn

imagining myself on a beach tbh

Stuck at a city hall meeting #sadlol

Enjoy people.

That chatroom is so gross and unpleasant and reminds me why I don't look at 99% of things I could look at online

This is lovely music though

lol i never dreamed of looking at the chat, same as i turn it off if i'm watching a football stream

yeah it's gorj so far. leaving the chat tab hidden for sure

The synthetic yet operatic quality of the pads and their lovely, cavernous reverb (which seems to be a different reverb effect they've been using the last 5-6 years) is incredible. Very different vibe immediately

ah here we go on some electro shit

omg whut with this 2nd track already

oversteps feel here. so lush though! almost feels like they're trolling us.

soo...Oversteps 2??? nice

def lush

If this is trolling, keep trolling me daddy

beautiful

SFJ interview with the guys

https://sfj.substack.com/p/autechre-sign

sounds almost progressive / symphonic. they've really developed a lot melodically.

ugh no thanks to having to sift through sfj words xp

i checked in on the stream late and but whatever is happening now is phenomenal

this disembodied marimbas thing is great
and NEW
how are they always new?

haha fair, here are the good bits:

“I hadn’t felt that solid about putting together an album in a while,” Booth said.

“We started building up the rig in the summer of 2018, right after the Australian tour,” Booth said.

“The MIDI keyboard only handles a very limited set of information,” Booth says. “And it’s based on the piano, a very specific instrument from a very specific time. We’re just using MAX to be more compositional in what we do.”

The duo worked on tracks for over a year, finishing in February of 2020, before lockdown.

“We’d get in touch and it would turn out we were doing the same kind of thing, without even talking,” Brown said. “I’m not sure we could do it in the same room now. But we’re often thinking the exact same thing.”

Like what?

“Ah . . . that’s lush—fuck.”

gently burbling programmatic music w mean ole bass

There's some really interesting, subtle delay FX on those marimbas that have been building over the whole track in the background there

and that dry muffled kick I always love

there are a couple more quotes in the article ... for those who DARE

gently burbling programmatic music w mean ole bass

― Give me a Chad Smith-type feel (map), Thursday, October 8, 2020 1:19 PM (fifty-two seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

the core, the heart music

omg jerk my tears why dont u

Oh HELL yeah. Oversteps 2 is exactly what I wanted

this is incredible so far

woot

This is easily the first Ae album fans who departed in 2001 might actually enjoy. Much more so than even Oversteps.

it's very complex in a melodic way. 2-4 have been basically ambient.

beat back tho

the funk

snappin

8-bit chirpin

into it

Sakamoto vibes

the expanding universe

this reminds me of fennesz a little bit!

oh man it's so pretty

most flat out beautiful track they've done in a decade

feeling like i'm trapped in a slow-motion horror film and klaus schulze did the soundtrack

the lack of a physical copy means that despite Ae being one of my favorite musical acts ever I'm barely familiar with elseq relative to the rest of the catalog

xp -- probably mostly the latter for me, plus CD-Rs being more likely to degrade over time than factory-pressed discs (Russian boots in my limited
experience have been factory-pressed)

but lukas is right that it's a ganzfeld on which I hallucinate my soul. I listened to it cranked, a few times in full, during a phase of my life where my emotions were basically unbearable and unprocessable, and it felt like being suspended as a cloud of atoms and was immensely healing to me.

I recently programmed some LED lights to create a visual ganzfeld while in a sauna listening to All End for 20 mins, and this description feels like it matched my experience a bit

my soul sibling

picking this up again after a year and I never realized how symphonic a lot of this album is. you could almost envision an orchestra playing it. guess I missed a lot of that because I'm not used to hearing stuff like that out of Autechre.

Serious question, but how are we supposed to approach a band like Autechre in a post-AI world? Like, a big part of the appeal for me is the feeling that this is partly based on algorithms and the emotion comes from a feeling of "The machines are trying to communicate emotions only they can feel" or something. How does that square with what we know today?

Comes down to the intentionality behind the algorithm and whether the end result is musical, for me.

there are enough moments in their music where you can tell people are at the helm, I think of them like DJs tweaking a bunch of knobs, but they're 4 dimensional knobs for 4 dimensional music

From Iceland — Autechre On Darkness, Spotify, And Fish Sticks https://share.google/3j7oX4tmFyWvTB1zP

I hope this link works, good interview

well, generative music is hardly a new concept. computers are fundamentally for doing repetitive tasks that are too annoying for humans to do (imo) and they way ae are using the tech to take limitless possibilities, narrow things down by playing with inputs, and then finally curating the output further was never really that different from, say, roland kayn.

also, the music sounds cool

xp was hoping for a bit more on spotify and whether they're still happy for their music to be on there.

I like this album but a year or two ago I played it back to back with EP7 and the latter sounded so much richer and more inventive.

Going back to Confield I've fantasized them selling programs or models for song genesis instead of albums.

That would be a neat idea

They said that they didn't sell generative software because they wouldn't own the copyright to the output, IIRC.

Autechre's algorithms are nothing like LLMs. LLMs get fed a bunch of examples and imitate and interpolate. Autechre's algorithms don't do that, they generate sound based on ... well, lots of different things, but I guess the analogy I would make is that Autechre's algorithms are like little robots holding paintbrushes and LLMs are like cameras that take a bunch of photos and print out one Ultimate Average Photograph.

Yeah I remember them addressing that question too, but it would be a sweet medium of expression that would fit their ethos and aesthetic nicely, but alas.

maybe they just want to make music

i hope they go back to "albums" or studio releases. the live stuff is great but tends to be in a certain format. composed stuff is where they really let loose imo. i ended up liking plus more than sign. good time for a revisit.

and yeah i would be surprised if ai had any effect on what they do. it doesn't really seem to fit their aesthetic or their process. but who knows. can't lie i'd be bummed if they started using ai generation tools to create sounds. wouldn't blame them for using ai to code though. are they still using max? i wonder if max has like ai integration now.

xp I would too, but all "signs" point to them performing live and releasing the recordings as their "albums" for the indefinite future, as per their recent interviews.

It's now been the longest gap of time for them between album drops (5 years) if you don't count their recent release of live recordings last year.

oh i know all that. things change, people change. i hope they change their minds. but whatever they do i'll enjoy it i'm sure. and we'll all continue to do galaxy brain posts about it :)

i listened to SIGN on a long, slightly inebriated walk home from a DJ gig.

my thoughts on this one is that in the context of the COVID pandemic and lockdowns it was exactly what I wanted to hear from them: A stripped-down version of their sound exposing the pretty melodies and counterpoints that usually gets buried in a thicket of other sounds. It was a salve to have this music. Easy listening in hard times.

So it surprised me that my walk home was a tense and paranoid one. Maybe the music reminded me too much of those uncertain times, or simply walking home late at night was making me feel on-edge, but I don't remember this album sounding as sinister as it did.

In today's context I feel like SIGN has switched with the NTS Sessions in my estimation. NTS used to feel tough-going and claustro. So much going on. Such long tracks that repeat and repeat. But now I think of NTS as the thing that suits my mindset. I just love zeroing in and in on the little details, whereas SIGN is very surface level really - you just get taken along by the synthy sounds.