4 out of 5

Label: Warp

Produced by: Rob Brown and Sean Booth

The louder, more emotional cousin to the mute and discreet Pulse, Sign is kind of what I want from Autechre: as somewhat the more cerebral of the big IDM names, Rob Brown and Sean Booth have poked around over the years at sounds that sometimes seem purposefully avoidant of comparison, which has rendered a good chunk of their work relatively inaccessible to me; Sign is still in a glitchy, swooning, league of its own, but the duo are so comfortable in their music-making skins, here, that we’re allowed to actually revel in beats and feelings.

With tracks rarely dipping below a 5-minute mark, the tone here is mostly ambient: downtempo beats with glossy synths hazing to and fro, and a patient application of chirps and clicks spiced throughout. At key points, Sign will drop the beats and just dig deep into the synths, letting the sound grow in a much more emotive way than I expect from the band.

There’s also a nice journey to the disc: a kind of hopeful, curious clip in it first half, with the songs infused with a sense of discovery, stumbling into new iterations on sounds; pausing to examine and then getting excited with another new discovery. Then about midway through, Metaz form8 goes very cold, and minimal – a drone-like stretch of fuzzy synths. The latter half of the album is allowed to be a bit more impenetrable, and favors more of these sound washes, but – save getting a little one-note when pairing similar tracks closely together- this works thanks to the warmth that was built up from the expressive opening, allowing us to wind down with some danky club jams (psin AM) and another sound-wash deep dive on closer r cazt.

Perhaps this is “accessible” experimental, as Sign gives me some beats and structure I can sit with, but I think the album has plenty of depth to satisfy longtime fans, and skillfully applies a unique and unified sound across an immersive hour of music.