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== History ==
== History ==
Much of ''SIGN''<!-- and also PLUS  --> was made using a ported version of their rig in Max for Ableton Live.<ref>{{Cite interview|page=Sean Twitch AMA, June 2022|quote=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.}} </ref><ref>https://metalmagazine.eu/en/post/autechre</ref><ref>{{Cite AAA2 doc|444}}</ref> A lot of Max's MC abilities were also utilised.<ref>{{Cite interview|page=Sean Twitch AMA, July 2022|quote='''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.}}</ref>
''SIGN'' was developed over 18 months between mid-2018 and late-2019.<ref>{{Cite interview|page=Autechre + Sign, October 2020|quote=“We started building up the rig in the summer of 2018, right after the Australian tour,” Booth said.}}</ref><ref name=":0" /><ref name=":1">{{Cite interview|page=Autechre: 30 Jahre Afterhour (Teil 1) & „Mehr Menschen mögen Erdbeeren als Autechre” (Teil 2), Groove, 2021|quote=}}</ref> Much of the record was done using a ported version of their rig into Max for Ableton Live,<ref>{{Cite interview|page=Sean Twitch AMA, June 2022|quote=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.}} </ref><ref>https://metalmagazine.eu/en/post/autechre</ref><ref>{{Cite AAA2 doc|444}}</ref> with Sean noting Max's MC capabilites were utilised across the record.<ref>{{Cite interview|page=Sean Twitch AMA, July 2022|quote='''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.}}</ref> Development was initially independent before meeting up again after a few months and noticing a common overlap between what Sean and Rob were both developing.<ref name=":1" /><ref>{{Cite interview|page=Autechre Worked in Isolation for Decades. Now It’s Unintentionally Timely, October 2020|quote='''How was the album made?'''


After cancelling the initial planned 2019 tour due to COVID-19, Autechre focused instead on the material that would've been prepared after the tour.<ref>{{Cite AAA2 doc|5}}</ref> In March 2020, Sean noted in a Mixlr chat that they had two albums ready for release.<ref>https://ra.co/news/72301</ref>
'''BOOTH''' The actual process was all over the place. We tend to work better with as little direction as possible. It wasn’t probably for a year until we started to share tracks with each other.


''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.<ref>https://ghostarchive.org/archive/LCKaS</ref><ref>https://ghostarchive.org/archive/rqKih</ref>
'''ROB BROWN''' We were perhaps pushing our luck. We could have gone in completely different directions. But on the whole, we ended up strangely parallel. We found a weird, natural common ground.}}</ref>


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." <ref>https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/arts/music/autechre-sign-interview.html</ref>  
In an interview with Groove Magazine, Sean said that the first six to eight months was just programming/porting work. The porting to Ableton was initially done to help remix [[List of Remixes#SOPHIE - BIPP (Autechre Mx)|SOPHIE's track BIPP]], since their rig could not process stems. From there, tracks were slowly composed and built up layer-by-layer in Ableton.<ref name=":1" />
 
After cancelling the initial tour planned for late 2020 due to COVID-19, Autechre focused instead on the material that would've released alongside the tour,<ref name=":0" /><ref>{{Cite AAA2 doc|5}}</ref> with the record being compiled, mastered and finalized across February/March of 2020 alongside ''[[PLUS]]''.<ref name=":0" /><ref name=":1" /><ref>{{Cite interview|page=Autechre + Sign, October 2020|quote=The duo worked on tracks for over a year, finishing in February of 2020, before lockdown.}}</ref><ref>https://ra.co/news/72301</ref>
 
''SIGN'' was first announced on September 2nd, 2020 with digital files, LP, CD, and T-shirts slated for an October 16th release date.<ref>https://ghostarchive.org/archive/zA5l5</ref> ''SIGN'' was then streamed early in full on October 8th to  Autechre’s website after being announced the day prior.<ref>https://ghostarchive.org/archive/igOX1</ref> Then, as per the original announcement, it was released digitally and physically on October 16th.<ref>https://ghostarchive.org/archive/LCKaS</ref><ref>https://ghostarchive.org/archive/rqKih</ref><!-- do any entire writeup for the rollout, including notes about the digital, lp, cd and t-shirts, https://nitter.net/WarpRecords/status/1301196940214898688#m as well as livestream announcement, streaming, and then release, followed by PLUS / bundles stuff -->
 
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." <ref name=":0">{{Cite interview|page=Autechre Worked in Isolation for Decades. Now It’s Unintentionally Timely, October 2020|quote=Autechre recorded the album it releases Friday, “SIGN,” through much of 2018 and 2019, and completed it in February and March, when the coronavirus was only beginning to affect Europe and the United States. As on nearly all of Autechre’s albums, the track titles are deliberately inscrutable: “si00,” “esc desc,” “psin AM.” The capitalized album title, Brown said, is “an initialization, but we don’t want to tell anybody what it stands for.”}}</ref>  


== Tracks ==
== Tracks ==
===M4 Lema===
===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.<ref>{{Cite interview|page=Autechre_Worked_in_Isolation_for_Decades._Now_It%E2%80%99s_Unintentionally_Timely,_October_2020|quote='''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.}}</ref>
* 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.<ref>{{Cite interview|page=Autechre Worked in Isolation for Decades. Now It’s Unintentionally Timely, October 2020|quote='''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.}}</ref>
* "M4 Lema" consists of "hi res LeMans24hr field recordings".<ref>{{Cite AAA2 doc|50}}</ref>
* "M4 Lema" consists of "hi res LeMans24hr field recordings".<ref>{{Cite AAA2 doc|50}}</ref>


Latest revision as of 22:17, 4 November 2025

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

SIGN was developed over 18 months between mid-2018 and late-2019.[2][3][4] Much of the record was done using a ported version of their rig into Max for Ableton Live,[5][6][7] with Sean noting Max's MC capabilites were utilised across the record.[8] Development was initially independent before meeting up again after a few months and noticing a common overlap between what Sean and Rob were both developing.[4][9]

In an interview with Groove Magazine, Sean said that the first six to eight months was just programming/porting work. The porting to Ableton was initially done to help remix SOPHIE's track BIPP, since their rig could not process stems. From there, tracks were slowly composed and built up layer-by-layer in Ableton.[4]

After cancelling the initial tour planned for late 2020 due to COVID-19, Autechre focused instead on the material that would've released alongside the tour,[3][10] with the record being compiled, mastered and finalized across February/March of 2020 alongside PLUS.[3][4][11][12]

SIGN was first announced on September 2nd, 2020 with digital files, LP, CD, and T-shirts slated for an October 16th release date.[13] SIGN was then streamed early in full on October 8th to Autechre’s website after being announced the day prior.[14] Then, as per the original announcement, it was released digitally and physically on October 16th.[15][16]

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." [3]

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.[17]
  • "M4 Lema" consists of "hi res LeMans24hr field recordings".[18]

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.[19]

Links

Credits

References

  1. ↑ https://bleep.com/release/202853-autechre-sign
  2. ↑ Autechre + Sign, October 2020. "“We started building up the rig in the summer of 2018, right after the Australian tour,” Booth said."
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Autechre Worked in Isolation for Decades. Now It’s Unintentionally Timely, October 2020. "Autechre recorded the album it releases Friday, “SIGN,” through much of 2018 and 2019, and completed it in February and March, when the coronavirus was only beginning to affect Europe and the United States. As on nearly all of Autechre’s albums, the track titles are deliberately inscrutable: “si00,” “esc desc,” “psin AM.” The capitalized album title, Brown said, is “an initialization, but we don’t want to tell anybody what it stands for.”"
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Autechre: 30 Jahre Afterhour (Teil 1) & „Mehr Menschen mögen Erdbeeren als Autechre” (Teil 2), Groove, 2021. 
  5. ↑ 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."
  6. ↑ https://metalmagazine.eu/en/post/autechre
  7. ↑ Q444, Ask Autechre Anything Again, KEYOSC, April 2025
  8. ↑ 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."
  9. ↑ Autechre Worked in Isolation for Decades. Now It’s Unintentionally Timely, October 2020. "How was the album made? BOOTH The actual process was all over the place. We tend to work better with as little direction as possible. It wasn’t probably for a year until we started to share tracks with each other. ROB BROWN We were perhaps pushing our luck. We could have gone in completely different directions. But on the whole, we ended up strangely parallel. We found a weird, natural common ground."
  10. ↑ Q5, Ask Autechre Anything Again, KEYOSC, April 2025
  11. ↑ Autechre + Sign, October 2020. "The duo worked on tracks for over a year, finishing in February of 2020, before lockdown."
  12. ↑ https://ra.co/news/72301
  13. ↑ https://ghostarchive.org/archive/zA5l5
  14. ↑ https://ghostarchive.org/archive/igOX1
  15. ↑ https://ghostarchive.org/archive/LCKaS
  16. ↑ https://ghostarchive.org/archive/rqKih
  17. ↑ 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."
  18. ↑ Q50, Ask Autechre Anything Again, KEYOSC, April 2025
  19. ↑ https://www.discogs.com/release/16065078-Autechre-SIGN/image/SW1hZ2U6NTQ0MTE4ODY=
  20. ↑ https://www.discogs.com/master/1819720-Autechre-SIGN
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