Autechre — SIGN | Album Review by Ryley Atkinson
It all ended in 2018. Following the expansive, dense sonic excursions of Exai and Elseq, twin masterpieces that each saw Autechre pushing their sound to more abstract, darker places, the duo released eight hours of material via NTS Radio, across four separate weekly instalments of two hours apiece. Together they formed the duo’s 13th album, which culminated in their most impressive, career-defining achievement to date, the hour-long, rippling, gargantuan “all end”. It tied a bow around the most musically progressive and uncompromising era of their career to date. It was clear to many Autechre fans that this was them clearing the slate for a new variation of their sound, and recent interviews confirm that shortly after NTS the duo completely rehauled their system, and now, in October 2020, we have the first product of that shift.
SIGN is not an ambient album, in the strictest sense, but it strips back the percussive element of their music and to a lesser extent the rhythmic focus altogether. There are still tracks here that pulse and clatter with forward motion, most notably “M4 Lema”, “au14”, and “sch.mefd2”, and others have more muted, simple percussive lines, such as “psin AM”. But for the most part, every other track here is driven entirely by the synth pads and tones themselves, which are as texturally rich, gorgeous, and unique as ever, but more inviting, warm, emotive, where in the past the duo have sought to complicate and subvert their typical effect.
“M4 Lema”, the opening track, is the clearest link to their previous era, glitching and surging through cavernous spaces with violent, clashing tones, in much the same way material on NTS and particularly Elseq was wont to do. For about two minutes it seems Rob and Sean’s MO has really not shifted at all, until, quite gloriously, these gigantic, gorgeous melodic pads ripple into the track, and the frenetic chaos of the opening section reshapes itself into a more focused rhythmic backdrop. It’s a bit of a bait and switch, but it serves as a brilliant and striking transition to the new, more pared back sound they have adopted to begin this era. It has a formless quality to certain familiar sounds that recontextualizes them to a more measured style, linking this new era to the previous one and setting the stage for the album well.
More than anything, what SIGN feels like is a purposeful wiping of the slate, a settling. It does not necessarily feel like the full arrival of a new sound, just as Oversteps didn’t at the beginning of the previous decade, but what it does feel like, as that record did, is a fulsome declaration of purpose and an introduction to an expansive palette that will be used in exciting new ways. It also feels like Rob and Sean attempting to welcome back the audiences who dropped away after their material went more long-form and demanding; it is the duo refusing to be pigeonholed as the makers of ‘difficult, laborious’ music that holds audiences as a distance, while at the same time not feeling like a concession either. This is not Autechre ‘going pop’ in any sense; to me, the greatest attraction to their music, which is the textural richness and sonic density, are both still present here, the former across every track and the latter across the album as a whole, the duo often choosing not to pack individual tracks with dense mixes but allowing the holistic project to serve as a broad, sectioned canvas for varied exercises in painting with sound. The brushstrokes are always the same, but it’s the interaction of new colours and new perspectives that make this truly a significant step forward.
“F7” is like a spiritual sequel to the baroque melodrama of Oversteps’ highlight “known(1)”, that track’s clear and staccato melody here malformed and melted into a series of bleeding tones that almost blur together at points and surge in a frenzy of descending melodic progressions. It’s more minimal only in the strictest of senses; the tones are not necessarily clashing like they would in an earlier Autechre piece as they are brushing together violently, and the feeling that is evoked here, especially through that low, descending melody that serves as the song’s bedrock, is that of panic and disorientation. It’s quite a claustrophobic and even heartbreaking piece that moves me more with each listen.
“si00” sees the duo introducing bubblier, friendlier tones, underlined by a steady, throbbing beat. It’s actually very playful, almost childlike in its sheer brightness, and the way it teases a number of different melodic progressions with each iteration, none ever exactly the same, recalls their early, seminal track “Flutter” from the Anti EP. Then about two and a half minutes in, the tone of the track changes completely with one simple addition: a bass-heavy, stretching tone that arrives suddenly to add a sense of menace and doom to the track; suddenly, that playful melodic bubbling starts to feel like it is trying to evade something. It’s quite brilliant how the duo can use simple changes in the mix to completely shift the emotive centre of the track.
“esc desc” follows on from this by dropping the more tactile core of the previous track and returning to a similar state as “F7”, all brushing melodic pads that collide and wash together like a turbulent oceanic storm. Once again the emotion evoked here is one of ominous dread, and it’s quite affecting for its seeming simplicity. It’s so easy to get swept up in that core melody at the centre of the track and not notice the way in which Rob and Sean also play with dissonance and fragmentation here — the piece is actually constantly shifting, though it seems stable, and this contrast feeds into the sense of paranoia evoked here quite masterfully.
“au14” has the hardest beat of the album, an absolutely hammering, insistent, and unrelenting pulse that in its tactile rawness recalls Confield’s “Cfern”. Additionally, there are these inconsistent washes of colourful noise that hang overtop the track that also sound identical to another Confield track, “Sim Gishel”, and as such the track itself seems to serve as a modernized, comparatively more minimal and driving tribute to that record. The melody in this track is more buried, but the effect of the track is stronger for it, as your ears search for that sound to focus on to but in the process get absolutely battered by everything on top of it. It feels like your brain getting a workout.
“Metaz form8” is one of the most emotionally devastating pieces Rob and Sean have released to date. It sounds cold, defeated, and alone, where previous tracks sounded warm, frightened, and desperate. There is a resigned quality to it that shakes me to the core and taps into something deep in my brain, a repressed feeling of hopelessness that I don’t like to confront but to some extent is simmering every single day of my life. That the boys can evoke that purely through the collisions of beatless pads is truly the mark of their practiced, professional artistry; the decades of work and refinement that have made them such a singular and attractive musical voice.
The second half of the record is less immediately rewarding than the first, and is where much of the most transformative experiences I’ve had with this record since I first heard it have been centered. “sch.mefd2” is immediately more elusive and amelodic than anything on the first half of the record, more of a textural exercise with the focal point of the track either buried or just constantly shifting. The one consistent element is the beat, which is fairly straightforward, and if anything, I would have liked for this percussive element to be a little less regular and incorporating more shifts and variations, to match the rest of the track. As it stands, it basically sounds like beautiful collisions of sound set to a squelching metronome, which is still very good, but not at the level of everything else preceding it.
However, “gr4”, the shortest track here, is an absolute masterclass. It basically does a similar thing to the previous track, collisions of varied and disparate tones, but removes the percussive element altogether, allowing for a purer, more swirling and enveloping experience. You get absolutely lost in the fuzzy waves of beautiful sound here, which retain those shining and buzzing surfaces to them that give them such a tactile, unusual, rich feel. That synth tactility, ultimately, is SIGN’s greatest individual element, the dominant characteristic of the palette and production here that truly adds a lot of the character and emotion to the record.
“th red a” is one of the most minimal tracks here, and in many ways a more deconstructive execution of a track like “gr4” or “F7”. Here the duo utilize silence and space to highlight an individual synth tone and repeated melody, and derive emotion not just from the progression of the melody itself, but from the way they vary and manipulate the textural surface of the tones. Note that the tones themselves never shift or disappear, but the way they feel does; in fact, it shifts constantly. Like on “si00” where the central bubbling melody constantly changed ever slightly in its progression, calling back to “Flutter”, here the duo do the same thing with texture instead of melody, and the shifts are far more subtle. They really necessitate good headphones or a good sound system to fully appreciate, but this is one of the most rewarding tracks on the album in the sense that initially it seems perhaps too simple, too unchanging, but once you really try to pin down the details of it, you realize this motherfucker is a beast of detail. And then once you get lost in the detail you come back to the melody, and realize how affecting it is, how fragile. The fulsome heaviness of the tones perhaps overwhelms that fragility, but it’s there, and it’s quite beautiful.
“psin AM” most clearly evokes the early Boards of Canada track “Everything You Do Is a Balloon”, and is perhaps the least effective piece here, though I do like it quite a bit. It lingers in repetitive minimalism for a very long time and sounds gorgeous, once again evoking that isolating, lonesome quality that hangs across a lot of this record. It’s a track that is merely quite good on a great album, so while I am certainly not mad at it, I don’t have a lot to say for it.
Closer “r cazt”, however, is easily the best thing here, and one of their greatest tracks ever. Here, the pads ripple, as they have throughout the album, but they have a distorted, longing quality that makes them feel like they are fighting to exist. They emerge from a deep, bassy bedrock like they are thrashing for air in the mix, and they continue to do so throughout the track, and the lack of conventional development from that template is what makes it so affecting. They never quite seem to reach a point of comfort, a point of stasis, a point of calm. You get these absolutely fucking gorgeous twinkling countermelodies as well which almost seem to be commiserating with those synths in their struggle, and when I close my eyes and listen to them it’s like I’m drifting at sea in the night, looking up at the stars. It’s that purely imagistic quality that all the best Autechre stuff has.
Another cool detail at the end of the track is the gentle intrusion of the beeps of a traffic crossing, that sound they make when you’re waiting to cross. As those static bleeps signifying ‘stop’ intrude against an endless horizon of sound, I’m struck by the thought that that clash has to mean something. It seems to symbolize a conflict between stasis and progression, perhaps you could even infer a meta-element to it and say that it’s Rob and Sean commenting on their own feelings about where they are at at this new juncture of their career, waiting to cross to a new side fully but being swept up in an ocean pulling them back to the past. Once again it calls back to opening track “M4 Lema”, which itself seemed to be the sound of a new era wrangling itself free from the shackles of the past. So perhaps this is just transitional, perhaps wherever Autechre are going is still miles away, or perhaps they will never get there, but they are certainly not stopping yet. The movement is as constant as the destination is distant, and this is just a sign of things to come.