🎵 SIGN (Autechre)

I have always struggled to find the words to describe Autechre. The usual discussion of form and structure never seems to apply. In Tom Breihan’s review of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, he talks about ‘submitting’ to the music. I think of Autechre in the same way. What stands out about this album are subtleties.

Marginalia

Phil Freeman in Stereogum:

SIGN sounds like they’ve reached the end of this particular journey — they’ve traveled as far out as they can and are now coming back, to rejoin humanity

Philip Sherburne in Pitchfork:

SIGN is surprisingly direct: lean, intermittently sedate, frequently quite pretty.

Andy Beta on Bandcamp:

Paring back the beats to let their melting ice cap melodic sensibilities take center stage, the effect feels desolate and elegiac at once.

Sasha Frere-Jones in S/FJ:

Sign is trim and rich and has something like a face. It wants to be an album. It reacts well to being played over and over. The difference isn’t obscure—it’s the presence of melody and harmony, variables the duo hasn’t paid attention to in ages. Almost every track on Sign works around some relationship between pitches and an audible line of progression. It feels as if they are pulling us back into their orbit just as they are pulled back into it. Sign flirts with disintegration but only lightly, throwing its weight into a smooth ravine lined with translucent panels and reflective tape, a river of light running below the wind of turbines.