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

does anyone get excited when psin AM comes on? it's like the honeydew melon of this delicious fruit salad of an album.

it sounds like something off of Black Dog's Bytes, and I mean that in the best possible way obv

I went back to Oversteps and it's tight, you all are right that the tones have more in common with the new one that I remembered, and it's got that lush reverb too. There are moments of 'Treale' that could genuinely be sampled & looped for a rap track too.

Thinking about how their drum sounds & patterns are what usually keeps ae sequestered in their own experimental/IDM zone. Taking out or de-emphasizing the beats on SIGN instantly put it in the same world as other ambient & soundtrack-y music, for better and/or worse.

I wouldn't say it's solely their drum sounds & patterns - they have quite a distinct style of sound design and sound creation, e.g. the amazing robot gargling on pendulu hv moda or the darwinian tangled bank of elyc6 onset. That's still present here, though less so in some tracks.

Came today, picked it up on way in at 8, listening to it at just past midnight. Probably not ideal.

not gonna say it's a grower, cuz i liked it immediately. but i still like it, and differently than when i first heard it. will unquestionably dig this out in ten years when i'm looking for "that 2020 feeling".

yeah the mood of this album hasn't lost its hold on me, i still listen to it a lot. it helps that even though it's more subdued and melodic, it still feels like everything could fall apart at any moment.

this is v nice. I was almost suspicious at first by how easy it went down but there's still a lot to hear on repeat listens

the other day my dad showed up during one of the quieter passages & dismissed it as massage parlour music. he didn't know why I found that hilarious

giving this a wee break and then coming back to it is very rewarding. Much like I find with Boards of Canada, the quality of these chord progressions start taking on an almost ancient quality, like they've always been there in the back of my head. When those big chords finally sound out during the intro to Metaz form8, it's like the door to a pyramid suddenly scrpaing away

I don't know why I buy these albums on vinyl: most of the experience comes from listening on decent headphones which I can't do with records on my set-up.

realised this when 'r cazt' clicked with me last night just as I was falling asleep with the headphones still on. thought it was a bit of a dirge, but there are these wonderful higher notes that come in and punctuate the deeper chords later on and fill it with a jazzy human-ness

that said, the record arrived today and is sounding lovely.

said it already but X4 has to rate as one of the best Ae tunes in years. Just so much going on in it, and I love the Arabic-style scale that flitters in and out during the middle section

I need to check if it's sitting in my mailbox

if you've got the vinyl version of this, try listening to it at 45 RPM. it's way more chaotic, like the Autechre you're used to

Never really dug into Autechre before now, but I'm loving SIGN so much. PLUS should get here tomorrow.

My CD of PLUS was in my PO box this morning.

still waiting on my LPs, hoping they show up today

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