SIGN

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SIGN

SIGN.jpg

Artist Autechre
Released 16 October 2020
Label Warp Records (WARP329)
AE_LIVE 2016/2018
(2020) 		SIGN PLUS
(2020)

SIGN is the fourteenth studio album by Autechre released on Warp Records. It originally released on October 16th, 2020,[1] with the companion record PLUS releasing a few days later.

History

Much of SIGN was made using a ported version of their rig in Max for Ableton Live.[2][3] A lot of Max's MC abilities were also utilised.[4]

In March of 2020, Sean noted during a Mixlr chat that they had two albums ready for release.[5]

SIGN was first announced on September 2nd, 2020. On October 8th, it was livestreamed via Autechre’s website in full, and made available for download on October 16th.[6][7]

In an interview with the New York Times, Rob mentioned that the title SIGN is "an initialization, but we don't want to tell anybody what it stands for." [8]

Tracks

M4 Lema

  • The track was developed over 3 months. Sean notes that it started out with more intense percussion, but Rob kept sending multiple revisions until it lead to the album version which reduced it to minimal beats.[9]

F7

si00

esc desc

au14

  • The title could be an abbreviation for "autechre 14", in accordance to the 14th album motif.

Metaz form8

sch.mefd 2

gr4

th red a

psin AM

  • In the 15 December 2022 max demo, the synthesizer in channel 9 is called "psinAMbq.MC", likely indicating that module was the origin for the title of "psin AM".

r cazt

n Cur

Tracklist

# Title Length
1 M4 Lema 8:50
2 F7 5:57
3 si00 5:51
4 esc desc 4:56
5 au14 5:04
6 Metaz form8 6:00
7 sch.mefd 2 5:26
8 gr4 3:21
9 th red a 6:36
10 psin AM 6:20
11 r cazt 7:12
1:05:32
12 n Cur [Japanese CD exclusive] 6:15
Total 1:11:47

Trivia

  • One theory is that the catalogue numbers were chosen such that each digit adds up to 14 (3+2+9) to match SIGN being the 14th album.
  • It should be noted that, in a first for Autechre, the CD versions for both SIGN and PLUS use different artworks. In SIGN's case, the dark grey background has been replaced with a solid black one.[10]

Links

Credits

References

  1. ↑ https://bleep.com/release/202853-autechre-sign
  2. ↑ Sean Twitch AMA, June 2022. "And then there's a version that’s ported to [Max for Ableton] Live before we did SIGN and PLUS and all that was very different because there's not as much recursion in it. It's a kind of top-down, kind of, control hierarchy and I'd say both of them are good systems, but they're very different the way that the rig works in Max, when we're running it in Max is that everything's real-time. So, everything's informing everything else and there's a lot more cross-communication. So, there is no hierarchy as such, it's more of a web of interactions, whereas the Ableton stuff is very hierarchical. It's, there's a kind of top layer of control information and then everything else responds to that, and that's how SIGN was done, and I'm, I got a bit bored with it, if I'm being honest. It was like, it's good, but I prefer the web to the tree."
  3. ↑ https://metalmagazine.eu/en/post/autechre
  4. ↑ Sean Twitch AMA, July 2022. "Have you used MC Max much? Yeah. Quite a lot. It's really flexible and amazing basically, I really rate it. I think MC's like, yeah, just amazing, and it's kind of weird because I've been doing like massively polyphonic kind of stuff and then suddenly MC popped up and it was like, oh okay! It just gave me a whole new way of looking at it, so. Used it quite a bit on SIGN actually, which you might be able to hear."
  5. ↑ https://ra.co/news/72301
  6. ↑ https://twitter.com/WarpRecords/status/1301159486447669248
  7. ↑ https://twitter.com/WarpRecords/status/1313841530524884992
  8. ↑ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/arts/music/autechre-sign-interview.html
  9. ↑ Autechre_Worked_in_Isolation_for_Decades._Now_It’s_Unintentionally_Timely,_October_2020. "The album’s opening track is “M4 Lema.” It starts out feeling less like music than like a rush of pure motion, and a lot of silences. BOOTH That started out quite different. The beats were louder and it was more slamming. It went through various stages and Rob kept sending it to me slightly modified, and then eventually the beats were almost not there. It’s definitely a kind of slow builder. I think it probably took about three months to finish it in total. Sometimes I’ll just write bits of software, send them to Rob and then he’ll send to me these weird tracks. I don’t even know how he does half of them. Even though we’re the only people who use our software, he still manages to find an unorthodox way of using it."
  10. ↑ https://www.discogs.com/release/16065078-Autechre-SIGN/image/SW1hZ2U6NTQ0MTE4ODY=
  11. ↑ https://www.discogs.com/master/1819720-Autechre-SIGN
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