This is the last album before the fractals bloom and break everything apart, before our boys become the kings in the North. Amber is sort of an implicit response to SAW 85-92, not that this was ever stated, but it’s the other great “kind of ambient” of the time, and Amber is my favorite by a hair. Because Sean Booth and Rob Brown went into a zone where they made it common practice to shave time signatures and individual drum hits down into parmesan, it is very easy to think they did not have time for melody or harmony. If you tuned in to something new-ish like Sign, you will know that is not true. Amber is the last genuinely delicate Autechre record, and for a ten-year stretch, they didn’t touch anything like this at all. You can also hear quite clearly, and to be fair you usually can, that Autechre came out of hip-hop rather than house. In some very sideways manner, this is very pretty instrumental hip-hop. Kind of.