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

My copy of SIGN, which I preordered, arrived yesterday. God knows when I can expect PLUS.

yeah PLUS just arrived for me

My PLUS and SIGN LPs showed up but the packaging was all mashed. Very annoyed.

having had these albums a few weeks, i'm really starting to get interested in the final few seconds of some of these tracks, just the last few bars after the main bit of the track has finished. there's always been something really interesting about how Ae seem to peel back the layers of a track on the outro of tunes like Garbagemx or Cichli, but here it's often just the last 5 seconds, you barely notice them

They also have an interesting tendency of having a new song movement or a bit of a track's chaos to coalesce into something more accessible right as a track ends.

ecol4 on PLUS is a fantastic example as well as Parhelic Triangle on Confield - the latter exposes a very pretty melody that really only begins surfacing in the last minute and then is laid bare as the beats are faded out.

SIGN and PLUS though seem to really focus on track endings though, more so than past records. Every single track on PLUS has an extended outtro (save ecol4 where the outtro is the beat getting exceptionally funky).

never even noticed that about parhelic triangle before.

pic.twitter.com/tnKBm0C4Lr

— Emily Jeanne (@emilyjeannedb) October 8, 2020

M4 Lema played on radio 3 "New Music Show" on saturday night

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000q39k

I did it!

https://i.imgur.com/Ij7rV5A.jpg

with thanks to map for the idea

omg that shirt

also i got so focused on plus i nearly forgot how good sign is

pretty much every time I listen to either PLUS or SIGN, I afterwards put on the other one. This definitely feels like one double album to me.

haha that is wonderful xp

nice color too

took me a while to pick a colourway but settled on Tri Repetae green. Got it from a website called Red Molotov

At this point, I have a clear preference for SIGN over PLUS, but the front half of SIGN and back half of PLUS could make a nice combo.

Might need to make a custom combo track list and call it PLUS-SIGN but honestly SIGN is so perfect on its own it's much harder for me to do it, which is a first for me since Untilted.

Vote in the poll!

well chuffed : for xmas mk1 got me the 2cd/t-shirt bundle.
(every year he gets me something techno/electronica that he thinks i will like, and he has been spot on - giant swan, jon hopkins, daniel avery, special request etc).
unfortunately the bundle got lost in chaos of the uk postal system, but the replacement has arrived at his g/fs.
thankfully there was a download included, so all is good, other than i cant rock the warp t-shirt just yet.

Nice one! Hope you enjoy it. And happy Christmas to you and your boys Mark E

Cool shirt DL!

Gescom set yesterday - announcement was: https://www.facebook.com/amkslive/posts/354631809319654

+ they uploaded the wav too:
https://autechre.wetransfer.com/downloads/060ed6ed78020802587bcef0306ca13220210102215750/403ba0

Well, I certainly know what I'm listening to during breakfast today.

it's not really breakfast music imho but I hope you enjoy it anyway :-)

Lol

I had fun.

This is very “chopping up classic hip-hop beats for our own distended beat tape” isn’t it? I enjoyed it but it’s definitely not the kind of thing I’d revisit as often as, say, Elseq

yeah, Gescom isn't necessarily = Autechre either, I just put it here

Revisiting this album is so strange. I cant believe it was released just over a year ago

I know they made noises about their frustration of this being seen as their "lockdown album", but there's something so intrinsically wrapped up in this album's sound and the conflicting sense of hyper-connected isolation everyone was feeling at the time. I think this has to be by far their most iconic album, at least since Confield

In retrospect, I think releasing the two albums separately was a mistake. I never really absorbed PLUS the way I've historically devoured a new Ae album because I was still listening (a lot) to SIGN when it finally arrived in the mail. Kind of a Kid A / Amnesiac situation

I'm cool with it although I know it was frustrating for US listeners who had to shell out twice on P&P for vinyl.
I really like PLUS even if it is a more "traditional" Ae album in every sense of the word: It's the album I'd been wanting them to make for a while, in that it's a concise suite of beat-based leftfield techno in the classic era vein. I'd rank at least two of the tracks here in among my all-time fave Ae tracks and there's enough character and diversity on there to make it a strong record on its own. That said, I don't know if as an album it has a unifying, definitive sound or style in the way, say Untilted might

Might have a listen to the Gonkcast about these

I'm cool with it although I know it was frustrating for US listeners who had to shell out twice on P&P for vinyl.

yes, that too!

I'd rank at least two of the tracks here in among my all-time fave Ae tracks

Which two?? I ask as someone eager to revisit this album soon

lol every Autechre album is their "lockdown" album.

I agree I didn't give either of these albums, but particularly the second one, the attention they deserved, not just because there were two of them and the second distracted from the release of the first, but also because "NTS Sessions 1–4" sort of ... burnt me out. Not that I'm burnt out on Autechre, those recordings just took so much energy and time on my part, and was so rewarding, and felt like such a defining statement, that "Sign" and "Plus" sounded to me almost like reunion albums.

feel like there's a misprint on my memory because I do not remember PLUS coming out only two weeks after SIGN. I thought it was like, 3 months!

on RYM, PLUS has less than half the ratings of SIGN. I wonder if that would have happened had they just been released at the same time.

anyway, I agree with DL's take - PLUS is more what I was hoping for after they truly went off the deep end, but I think SIGN is probably more special, and in retrospect was really the album I was waiting for them to make

It's weird how I still think of SIGN and PLUS as second tier autechre albums, but I listen to them constantly. I just put them on late at night when doing the dishes or cleaning or whatever and it just sets this nice mellow vibe. Been listening to them a lot lately in particular since they are such great fall/early winter albums.

SIGN/PLUS are just okay, but in fairness I should spend more time with them.

Elseq and NTS Sessions were both home runs for me.

plus ended up being the one i connected with the most. sign is gorgeous but i need to be in a specific mood to enjoy its combination of sedateness and restlessness. plus is classic weird rugged autechre i.e. the heart music.

I love SIGN but the whiplash effect of alternating between ambient track and beat-based track for most of the album has always felt a bit disconcerting to me. I think it would have been cool if they had fully committed to a percussionless sonic palette, but I can pretty much assemble that album by playlisting the beatless tracks from SIGN and PLUS

I agree I didn't give either of these albums, but particularly the second one, the attention they deserved, not just because there were two of them and the second distracted from the release of the first, but also because "NTS Sessions 1–4" sort of ... burnt me out. Not that I'm burnt out on Autechre, those recordings just took so much energy and time on my part, and was so rewarding, and felt like such a defining statement, that "Sign" and "Plus" sounded to me almost like reunion albums.

― Josh in Chicago, Tuesday, November 16, 2021 9:08 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

could not have put this better myself. Exactly my experience, and not just because I view NTS Sessions as their absolute pinnacle. I got way too obsessed with that box when it came out. It's one of my favorite albums (if you could even call it that) of all time.

That said, I really do love SIGN

J. Sam OTM

yea Autechre really answered the question "is it possible for an artist to put out too *much* great music at once?" it was just overwhelming. Underworld did it too the following year but Autechre's music hits way more of a niche spot

idk how even to compare these two to NTS & elseq. obviously the latter albums contain more "good stuff" and have some insane highs but if I just wanna pop some Ae on both SIGN and PLUS hit the spot

in fact SIGN strikes me as the kind of album that would be getting a lot of excited buzz if a new artist had done it. not to say Autechre is overlooked but I do wonder how it would be received if it was just made by some guy on Orange Milk Records

Heck, I could still listen to "All End" on repeat and be happy.

Nothing against the NTS Sessions, they're great and they contain some lovely stuff, but yeah they're not exactly the most immediate of accessible things Ae have released by any stretch, and that's in terms of sonics and sheer volume of material. SIGN/PLUS you can just put on and vibe out to without it having to be an epic intense listening session.

Or basically what frogbs said. I wouldn't say NTS is all gold at all

I wouldn't claim to love every individual track on NTS but, when I view it holistically, it's clearly a masterpiece. I guess you could say its more than the sum of its parts, but that's not quite right, either, since a lot of those parts represent some of the most astonishing music I have ever heard

when I view it holistically, it's clearly a masterpiece

I think 4 really helps it out here, it seems like as a whole it has an order to it that I don't get from Elseq, which to me is just a big grab bag of long (and really good) Ae tracks

NTS is one of the few Ae releases where I know every track by name and can recall how it sounds when I read the title. It felt like the apex of their achievement and I would have been fine with it as a "last word". I've probably listened to SIGN/PLUS least of all their releases in the year following, every now and then I remember it and put it on, but after NTS most of the tracks just feel like the start of something. I say this as an Ae obsessive since about 1997.

It felt like the apex of their achievement and I would have been fine with it as a "last word".

yeah