Machines don’t care. Self-driving cars, data-harvesting algorithms, Boston Dynamics’ hideous quadrupeds—all these things unnerve us in part because we know that they can’t be trusted. They are indifferent to us by design. Autechre have long played to this unease, channeling the unfathomable depth of machine intelligence into forbiddingly complex music that appears to be the product of pure data, intractable and untamed. Using an inscrutable array of home-brewed software and jury-rigged hardware devices that they refer to simply as “the system,” Sean Booth and Rob Brown put the onomatopoeia back into number-crunching.
What is daunting about their work is less the mystery in how it’s made and more the specter of supreme disregard that lurks in the margins of their compositions. Their music can suggest machines running blithely amok, unfazed by the presence of humans, disinclined to kowtow to the human desire for, you know, melody and rhythm. In brief moments of pathos or humor—the apparition of a plaintive synthesizer tone, the momentary outbreak of a groove—the duo’s hands become visible behind the thickets of circuitry. But as their work has grown denser and darker, those moments have become uncommon; it was easy to wonder if Booth and Brown had themselves calcified into silicon. But from the sound of SIGN, something has changed.
It’s not just that their music became gradually more byzantine over the last decade, as though their already fractal beats were further splintering, granulated patterns branching into gardens of forking paths. The dimensions of their work sprawled. They quickly followed 2010’s Oversteps with Move of Ten, a 10-track EP as long as many albums. The 4xLP Exai, in 2013, ran two hours long, a feat doubled by the five-part elseq series in 2016, whose running time doubled again with 2018’s absurd, eight-hour NTS Sessions. SIGN, in contrast, is remarkably compact. Breezing through 11 tracks in just over an hour, it is roughly the same length as the last track on the final volume of the NTS Sessions.
More importantly, SIGN is surprisingly direct: lean, intermittently sedate, frequently quite pretty. The album begins intimidatingly, with a synthetic growl that might be the heptapods in Arrival discovering the ills of gluten. But then, after a minute and a half of rumbling and clanking, what sounds like a submarine crumpling beneath sea pressure, they unleash a single chord that stands among the most beautiful sounds they have created in 29 years. Out of the groaning of twisted metal bursts an explosion of color, like a cloud of powdered pigment hanging briefly in the air before it dissipates, announcing the tonal palette for the entire album. Across the course of the record, this “basic tonal vocabulary,” as Brown called it in a recent interview (possibly borrowing the term from the UK avant-techno legend Surgeon) boils down to a handful of uncannily vivid textures and sensations: sheet metal, soapstone, and pumice; lozenges growing smaller and smaller; renegade foghorns; the taste of copper.
Chaos quickly reasserts itself in the opening track, but that is the only place where the duo’s violent tendencies hold sway; even then, it is as if the beats have been sheared away and sanded down, leaving only the suggestion of great force in the striations left behind. Most of the album is all but beatless. “F7” is a synthesizer etude whose fanfare might not sound out of place in a Michael Mann film, were it not for the perilous detuning and the hollow, buzzing tone, flickering like fluorescent tubes. “si00” chirps and chimes over a muted pulse, like early ’90s ambient techno grown sour; “esc desc” is slow and stately, layered synths slipping between consonance and dissonance like multiple copies of New Order’s “Elegia” being played out of sync. It takes five tracks for Autechre to drop their first real beat, but even here, on “au14,” in which Drexciyan tones bubble to the surface over a rapid-fire 4/4 kick, they seem determined to keep their squirreliest tendencies in check. Every component is perpetually shape-shifting; good luck enumerating all the discrete elements in play, much less tracking their millisecond-by-millisecond mutations. Yet the music flows intuitively. It’s not difficult, simply alive.
Something almost like nostalgia occasionally rears its head, a rarity for this duo. The sullen synths of “psin AM” call back to Boards of Canada’s Hi Scores EP, which is unexpected, if only because the Sandison brothers often seemed like Autechre’s docile younger cousins, out daydreaming in fields while Booth and Brown were soldering shortwave radios in the garage. The serene tones of the album’s many beatless tracks spring from the same well as 2008’s contemplative Quaristice and even 1994’s wistful Amber. “Metaz form8,” the album’s gorgeous ambient centerpiece, might be the first Autechre composition you could conceivably play on piano.
But that outward simplicity is deceptive. Every repeat play of even the most restrained tracks here turns up new details and new shades. The melodies tend to flock in close formation around narrow bands of tones; the whole album feels like a swarm of insects attempting to carry a tune. Even the softest material on SIGN isn’t all that different from the most austere or amelodic material on NTS Sessions; it’s just been smoothed into a form that catches the light differently, emphasizing continuity over disjunction. They have found new ways to make their favorite materials sing.
The album’s shortest track is its most affecting. “gr4” is the most lyrical piece of music Autechre have written in years, with neat contrapuntal motions reminiscent of Baroque music—all buried beneath layers of effects that corrode the orchestral tones into dust. The longer it goes on, the more it feels almost like an actual song. Then, after three minutes, it simply fades away, without ever quite revealing itself. The ending feels sudden and unplanned; you wonder why they chose to cut it here, what happened in the recording of it that they couldn’t have extended it further. But after the last few years’ maximalist bonanza, to be left wanting more is a novel, welcome feeling with Autechre. With SIGN, Autechre have managed to do something that machines can’t do nearly as well as humans: surprise us.
Buy: Rough Trade
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