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

One of the coolest things about Autechre is their obvious aversion to anything remotely saccharine-sounding. Even on Sign--their most melodic, conventionally beautiful album in a decade--the tonality remains in this sort of cold, austere grey zone. Like, I know it's theoretically more complicated than this, but they tend to go with some variation of minor or pentatonic or atonal, but NEVER straight major-key. Maybe Corc from LP5 has the most major-key feel to it, but I think that's still mostly pentatonic. Recury from Chiastic Slide also comes to mind, but that was a long time ago...

i think one of the keys to understanding autechre is that they're working with music as a language, and what they really like to do is tinker with the language in a way that shows both the beauty of it holding together and the overwhelming ecstasy of it exploding or falling apart into unpredictable, unstable shades of meaning. i feel like they focused heavily on rhythm as a language in the 2010s but the last decade has been about melody and harmony as a language that they've been poking holes in and reshaping into something that is their own invention. and this record is like the most graceful statement of that process so far.

err "rhythm as a language in the 2000s"

these are great posts but Whiney is going to have a field day with this thread

autechre are more than a band, they are light itself

i keep replaying "m4 lema" because it really is the perfect bridge from the nts stuff to this record

hm wow I'm halfway through listening to this and it totally rules

I've just got the 675 mb download of this and it's not bad!

i know it's corny but i would buy a

Rob&
Sean&
Max/
MSP

t-shirt

― Give me a Chad Smith-type feel (map), Friday, 9 October 2020 14:59 (seven hours ago) link

For Christmas, for me plsplsplsplspls

I don't like the official SIGN shirt, so yes please.

gr4 is definitely my favourite - like a string quartet!
otm. The second half of gr4 in particular destroys me. You just know they were like "ok this is too beautiful, we can't allow it to go on a moment longer"

What I've always loved about the group is sort of their way of recontextualizing themselves in real time, just by tweaking a rhythm, or introducing a melody when you least expect it, or where you at least expect it. It's partly about language, but also about how that language mutates and changes the more times you translate it. Lost in translation so many times that eventually something is found in translation.

I'm the guy that sees the patterns and I feel like you're reaching here

I'm sure the patterns are there are if you are detail oriented, but I'm not, so I'm happy to luxuriate in being disoriented.

the kind of pompous commentary that really makes me want to listen to more autechre

Pompous?

yall need to chill. maybe listen to some nice beats and interestin melodic ambient tracks. the new autechre album for instance!

I mean, almost from the start one of the things I've loved most about Autechre is that no matter how much I've picked up about how they make their music, they've remained utterly, almost uniquely foreign to me. I don't think that reaction makes me "pompous," it's just me appreciating them in a way I appreciate few other acts.

another thing some of you should probably do is try listening to musique concrete or read up on like pauline oliveros and deep listening, expand your electronic music horizons a bit and challenge yourselves before asserting that autechre are "taking the piss" or being completely foreign/alien or whatever. like maybe do some homework first idk.

make yourself sit and listen to something challenging that doesn't pander to you and do nothing else while you're listening.

Wait, there is other electronic music?!

yes. and other things besides compulsively posting everything that occurs to you on a message board.

somebody got up on the wrong side of the bed

autechre good, beat go squelch and snap

I love this entire record but the final third is everything I wanted from post-NTS Autechre

"gr4" being barely over three minutes almost feels like sadistic trolling though

Not to incur anyone's wrath but I think I feel what Josh is saying upthread on "esc desc," which to me sounds like a very simple and beautiful melody that's been broken into random and different-sized pieces, which forces your ears to try and reassemble them somehow

Where are y'all listening to it at this point?

I think if you ordered the album on the Warp site you got an instant download of the whole album (at least that's what I read upthread)

If you didn't order it (you should) or didn't order it from Warp, a person I know says it can be found on s**ls**k amidst the fakes if you know what you are looking for

I ordered it on the Warp site but the download link didn’t work - I think making it available early was inadvertent.

They've done something similar before.

I ordered my CD from boomkat along with some other stuff - it was a penny cheaper, but no download for me.

Even if your downloads show “0/11 available” or whatever you can try clicking the link, that was the case for me and the FLACs came through immediately. Warp store, 2xLP preorder.

i think one of the keys to understanding autechre is that they're working with music as a language, and what they really like to do is tinker with the language in a way that shows both the beauty of it holding together and the overwhelming ecstasy of it exploding or falling apart into unpredictable, unstable shades of meaning. i feel like they focused heavily on rhythm as a language in the 2000s but the last decade has been about melody and harmony as a language that they've been poking holes in and reshaping into something that is their own invention. and this record is like the most graceful statement of that process so far.

― Give me a Chad Smith-type feel (map)

yeah a deeply insightful post map
There's lots to engage with on SIGN but I'm a little perturbed by the clear callouts to previous work, makes me worry they are planning to hang up their boots. I'm about the same age and feel like I am completely done with my passion for my career, I wonder if it feels fresh for them still.

i'm surprised to read upthread that this is new material and not an assemblage of cuts that just happen to fit together stylistically, which is how I originally read it: Sean and Rob thinking "2020 is hell, let's hit em with some mood music"

pic.twitter.com/s0fLC1mOnm

— Good Steely Dan Takes (@baddantakes) October 10, 2020

^^ @AutechreComment has to be a Whiney account.

What a fantastic album

:) :)

you guys are nice. sorry i was grumpy on saturday.

Your order has been dispatched. 

Loving some sounds & moments on this, it hasn't come together as an album for me yet though. Only listening once a day, chances of getting some blissed out headphones time are slim.

Never thought I'd say something like this but if anyone's missing their harder meaty beaty stuff, the new Rian Treanor album File Under UK Metaplasm is excellent - slightly more dancefloor adjacent than e.g. NTS but by no means four to the floor.

NTS Sessions was a pretty hard act to follow, so I guess it was kind of inevitable that this would be a little underwhelming. Some of their stuff takes a (long) time to click with me, admittedly, even if I always appreciate it on first listen.

I can't remember the last time an Ae album has clicked with me so quickly and top to bottom. Maybe LP5? Everything since has taken either months or years (Confield, Draft, Untilted), or merely parts of it clicked and I basically ignored the rest (Quaristice, Oversteps) or was so damn long I was able to piece together cohesive track listings that essentially mimicked a stellar Ae album experience from top to bottom (Exai, Elseq, NTS).

More interestingly for me, SIGN has a distinctive emotional character I've not really experienced in an Ae album since the 90's, and I feel it's largely due to the very straight forward chord progressions and consonance that is present on nearly the entire record. A couple tracks that sounded a bit thin on first listen (F7, esc desc, th red a) are slowly sounding richer and more layered to me on subsequent plays, especially th red a.

But one thing that is fascinating about these guys - no matter what they do, their fan base is so diverse in their expectations and tastes that any record Ae ever release will have them divided in some way

I agree with your characterization of this record (except that "esc desc" was an immediate favorite for me!). It's probably the most consistent sounding Ae since, hell, I don't even know. Oversteps? Quaristice? The latter is the only Ae album I don't love but I can't deny its thematic consistency. NTS is still and will always likely be my favorite, but this one is already creeping close to the top 4.

this struck me as being plain and true, and it's one of my favorite things that i've read about autechre. i'm enamoured with M4 Lema, but it's taken a while to warm up to the rest of the album. some parts sounded dull and uninspired at first, then certain tracks have opened up on subsequent listens. the AE_LIVE (2015) sets are a late period pinnacle (imo), and the 2018 Melbourne set is fresh in my mind. i didn't know what to expect, and SIGN felt underwhelming (or heavy-handed/simplistic) at first. it's understated, shifting gears or unwinding... i don't know how to feel about it yet.

this is exactly my experience so far. I'm still working out my feelings for this record but the last few rounds of releases all clicked pretty immediately with me. esp the NTS sessions which felt so bottomless and exciting, like being able to dive into this fun sound world and wade around luxuriously. I'm finding it a little hard to shift back to a release that seems a bit less generous on those specific terms. not just in length but not going as far out, getting as abstract. I've only listened three times so far tho, I'm sure this will change with time and without preconceived expectations.

i definitely felt some of that on my first few listens but it has come into its own for me. i think even though it's more tonal and emotionally direct, the instability and complexity are still there. i'm predisposed to like emotionally direct autechre though. just as an aside, 'schmefd 2' is very wrecked/difficult imo, up there with the weirdest stuff on nts. i think there may be a mangled vocal sample buried in there but if i try to identify it i feel like i'm aurally hallucinating.

Gotta admit, was not expecting a Jon Pareles interview in the New York Times.

this hit pretty immediately for me and i wonder if it's because i've been gradually making my way through their catalog and just hit untilted. i am sort of thinking about it in the context of nts (again, the opener and "schmefd 2" are pretty clearly extensions of that stuff) but also not really at all, its beauty and space and its economy are striking to me against the whole of their discography as well

Link for posterity:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/arts/music/autechre-sign-interview.html

this is my submission for whatever whiney poll harvests the most embarrassing posts on this thread but: imo elseq and nts are them rocketing through alien spaces, and this record feels like the return to earth, but earth has changed dramatically in the intervening years. it feels like there is an awful lot of longing and yearning in these tracks; of course that and anything i put on top of it is a projection, but what i get from it is the grief for something long gone xp

I think Brad is on to something, or at least brings something up that's useful to me. I think of this new album (which was sounding pretty good on another listen tonight) in the context of their catalog as a whole: following the epic NTS Sessions, or a sparer, slightly more melodic return to an earlier style, or even just album number x in a long line of albums I've loved or liked or appreciated. But I wonder what I would think if this was the first album I heard, or if I did listen to it, like Brad, after progressing through all of their stuff chronologically. One of the greatest tricks Autechre (or any challenging music, really) plays is making music that reveals itself over time, whether the duration of a track, or over the course of an album, or even years later after several other albums have been released. That is to say, I've got my favorite Autechre tracks, albums and moments, but in some ways when I listen to them it's always like hearing them for the first time, depending on my mood, or whatever else I've been listening to, or thinking back, as I listen, to music they have made before. I don't know, maybe that's not unique to Autechre, probably not, but it really does feel like one long evolution. Weren't there people tin-hatting that "All End" would be the last thing they ever did, because it felt like some sort of abstract apotheosis? In some ways it might have felt that way because it came at the end of a particularly long release which itself came at the end of a long, winding, fascinating catalog. Certainly the new album in the context of that specific track feels like a fresh branch, and NTS Sessions (or "All End") some sort of breaking point or culmination, with the new one a subtly fresh start from a familiar root.

> I think Brad is on to something

Nah, that's just the plot of Planet of the Apes.

This quote from the NYT article seems to be a common theme with some here:

How do you feel about the album when you listen to it now?

SEAN BOOTH It’s strangely jarring. It’s sort of too real. All this Covid stuff has put me in a really different place from where I was when we were just compiling it. Back then we were saying, “This is totally right.” But now I’m wondering if it’s too right. And I’m really feeling a bit self-conscious if I’m being totally honest. It’s difficult to listen to because it’s too emotionally resonant. I was going for making something pure and new and sort of surprising, and now I’ve ended up with something that’s almost predictable. So I’m reluctant to play it too much because I feel like that place it puts me in is perhaps a little bit too cathartic.